Human Motivation and Cognitive Development Across the Lifespan

Introduction: Self-Awareness and Psychological Development

One of the most important aspects of a child's psychological growth is the development of self-awareness. According to Thompson, the developmental pathway of the self incorporates several dimensions, including the child's growing complexity and ongoing transformation of personal self-narratives (Dacey, Travers & Lisa, 2009, p. 260). He stated that these different aspects of the self continue to grow as social awareness and cognitive maturity contribute to a child's psychological development through self-concept and self-esteem. The psychological development of a child has been the subject of several studies that have focused on examining the development of humans across the lifespan.

Article Review One: Age, Acceptance, and Negative Affect

The first article under review was by Amanda Shallcross, Victoria Floerke, Brett Ford, and Iris Mauss, and was published by the American Psychological Association. This article was published in 2013 following research conducted in 2012 on getting better with age. The authors examined the research topic by analyzing the relationship between age, acceptance, and negative affect. After formulating their research hypothesis, the authors carried out the research on a community sample of people between the ages of 21 and 73 years. The hypothesis was evaluated by measuring acceptance and several indices of negative affect using a discrete emotions approach in which sadness, anger, and anxiety were examined at each time point.

The community sample was recruited from the Denver, Colorado metro area as part of a wider research project in which participants received $135. The researchers recruited participants who had undergone a recent stressful life event in order to increase variation in the negative emotions being examined. They defined a stressful life event to prospective participants as an event that had significant negative effects on their lives and a discrete starting point within the previous three months. Since every participant had experienced a recent stressful life event with significant negative impacts, the relative effect of the event varied across participants, resulting in a broad distribution of perceived stress across the sample.

While all procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Board, data collection was carried out at four time periods. Time 1 involved participants completing demographics, trait activation, trait acceptance, and trait negative affect measures. Time 2 was a laboratory session during which negative and physiological reactivity were evaluated. Time 3 involved the provision of daily affect reports over two weeks through daily diaries. Time 4 was the completion of a follow-up Internet survey that examined trait negative affect. The assessment of acceptance was carried out using the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills, an acceptance subscale that measures the extent to which individuals non-judgmentally engage with emotional experiences (Shallcross et al., 2013, p. 737).

The purpose of the research was to determine the link between age and general negative affect versus distinct negative emotions. Moreover, the authors sought to identify the commonly misunderstood pathway linking age to lower negative affect. The researchers recognized that aging involves physical and cognitive declines, yet it is associated with enhanced emotional well-being, particularly lower negative affect. The researchers also tested whether the link between age and lower negative affect would be statistically mediated by acceptance.

The researchers found that age was positively correlated with acceptance, while acceptance was negatively linked to every measure of negative affect and affective reactivity, though different results emerged for sadness reactivity. Statistical mediation was not evident for sadness because age and sadness were not linked to each other across time points and measurement techniques. The researchers also discovered that acceptance statistically mediates age-related declines in negative affect. Regarding age and activation, the authors found that older adults were not merely less likely to experience every high-activation emotional state; they were specifically less likely to experience anger and anxiety.

The authors discussed several limitations, including the inability to rule out cohort effects and the inability to conduct advanced modeling of change over time across all variables due to the nature of the study design. Additional limitations included restriction of the age range to 21–73 years, the lack of evaluation of positive affect as an outcome, modest effect sizes, and the absence of measurement of state acceptance in the daily diary component.

Conclusion: Implications for Human Motivation Research

The research articles are informative for understanding human development and motivation because they examine these topics in relation to age, acceptance, mood, and negative affect. These articles provide important insights into human development and motivation in light of the cognitive effects of daily life and routines. Together, they seek to demonstrate the impact of cognitive factors — especially an individual's mood — on a person's daily growth and motivation.

As a result, the studies show how various settings in everyday life can affect a person's cognitive development and, in turn, have significant impacts on motivation and development. The connection between these studies and the real-world lives of everyday people lies in how daily routines affect cognitive development and human motivation. Future research into human motivation should examine these concepts through well-controlled experiments that move beyond the correlational nature of the designs used here. Such studies should employ experimental methods to avoid restricted conclusions and to yield more generalizable findings.