The Temperamental Basis And Individual Differences Of Mastery Motivation And Its Relation With Achievement Performances

With the development of Humanism and Positive Psychology, Growth Motivation has generally become a main theme in the research of motivation. Mastery Motivation, which was proposed by Harter, Yarrow and others in the 1970s, focuses specifically on the internal tendency of young children in mastering environment and developing competence in challenging activities. Through the clarification between social and object-related mastery motivation, traditional researchers' neglect of motivational reactions in social environment has been modified. Also, the abstraction of instrumental and expressive mastery motivation has offered rather complete description of children's internal mastery and growing tendency on behavioral and emotional levels (Morgan et al, 1995). Although common aspects have been found between children's mastery motivation and temperament, it is still controversial whether the relation between them is overlapping, attributive or covarying. With the recent development of temperament conception, it is necessary to rethink about the relation between these two close-related constructs in describing the psychological and behavioral characteristics in early childhood. Besides, although sexual differences in behavioral preference, direction and intensity have been noted in many research and social-cultural areas; such difference in mastery motivation - in which social and non-social interactions have been distinguished - has not been deeply explored yet, leaving large room for investigation. As for the predictive effect of motivation on achievement, no consensus has been reached on the clarification of motivational types, the control of challenging levels and things alike. More research evidence is still in need.In this study, 64 toddlers (29 boys and 35 girls) aged between 24 to 59 months (M=37.64, SD=9.37) were recruited. Through Dimensions of Mastery Motivation Questionnaire (DMQ) and Early Childhood Behavioral Questionnaire (ECBQ), maternal report about children's mastery motivation and temperamental dimensions was obtained. Meanwhile, children's task persistence was observed and coded temporally with tasks of different challenging levels in laboratory settings. Thus the temperamental basis, sexual differences of mastery motivation as well as the achievement behaviors of children with different mastery motivation priorities were investigated. Aimed at the unipolarization tendency from DMQ maternal report that children generally have much higher social mastery motivation, a cognitive experiment on time perception was further adopted to testify whether mothers have potential bias between children's social and non-social persistence.It was discovered that children's instrumental and expressive mastery motivation each had salient correlation with the temperamental dimensions ( correlation coefficients ranged from 0.29 to 0.62) ; sex differences existed in the priority of children's object mastery motivation to social mastery motivation that it was more salient among girls rather than boys(t=-2.075, P=0.042) although most children did possess such priority; and children with different types of mastery motivation priorities had significant different achievement performance in challenging tasks that children with priority in non-social mastery motivation had better persistence than children with priority in social mastery motivation (t=2.049, P=0.048) ; and mothers had higher expectation for girls' task persistence than for boys' (F=4.516, P=0.037) while the effect of such expectation was also found persistent cross-task.This study revealed the close correlation between the mastery motivation components and temperamental dimensions; with most children's comparative priority in social mastery motivation, such priority was much more salient in girls; mothers had higher expectancy for girls' persistence than boys' through different tasks; and in challenging tasks, children with non-social mastery priority had better performance than children with social mastery priority.The study has lent support to the temperamental basis of mastery motivation, offered new evidence for the sexual differences in behavioral preference and performance in social and non-social situations; brought up the issue concerning different requirements that society and culture endued to different genders; and provided new perspective in analyzing individual differences and testifying challenging levels, based on the different types of mastery motivation priorities.