The Intensity Side of Volition: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview of Effortful Striving

Attaining sports or health goals requires not only a high motivation but also the willpower to translate sport-behavior intentions into successful action. This volitional regulation calls for the mobilization of effort to overcome obstacles in the pursuit of goals. The present article provides a theoretical and empirical overview of motivation intensity theory (Brehm & Self,1989) - a conceptual framework that makes clear and testable predictions about effort mobilization in various contexts. First, we present the guiding principles of this theory and its operationalizations by measures of effort-related cardiovascular reactivity and physical handgrip force. Second, we review a selection of empirical tests of the theory’s basic assumptions and the impact of psychological moderator variables such as affect, fatigue, pain, and personality on effort mobilization. Finally, we discuss important implications of those findings for the sports and health domains and make suggestions for future research

Affective regulation of cognitive-control adjustments in remitted depressive patients after acute tryptophan depletion

Negative affect in healthy populations regulates the appraisal of demanding situations, which tunes subsequent effort mobilization and adjustments in cognitive control. In the present study, we hypothesized that dysphoria in depressed individuals similarly modulates this adaptation, possibly through a neural mechanism involving serotonergic regulation. We tested the effect of dysphoria induced by acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) in remitted depressed patients on conflict adaptation in a Simon task. ATD temporarily lowers the availability of the serotonin precursor L-Tryptophan and is known to increase depressive symptoms in approximately half of remitted depressed participants. We found that depressive symptoms induced by ATD were associated with increased conflict adaptation. Our finding extends recent observations implying an important role of affect in regulating conflict-driven cognitive control

Clarity of task difficulty moderates the impact of the explicit achievement motive on physical effort in hand grip tasks

Stable personality dispositions, like motives, are often assumed to exert a direct, stable impact on behavior. This also applies to the explicit achievement motive, which is supposed to influence the behavior that individuals select and how strongly they engage in it. Drawing on motivational intensity theory, we demonstrated in two studies that explicit achievement motive strength only predicted exerted force in a hand grip task if task difficulty was unclear. If task difficulty was clear, explicit achievement motive strength did not influence exerted force. Our findings suggest that the availability of information about the difficulty of motive satisfaction moderates the impact of the explicit achievement motive on behavior