The Activation And Pursuit Of The Unconscious Achievement Goal

With the development of the unconscious motivation, such as the unconscious goal, more and more researches have demonstrated that goal could be activated outside of the awareness and the activated goal could motivate the people to pursue the goal as the way of the conscious goal.In the past, the achievement goal always had been activated by the supraliminal stimulus. Researchers designed the goal activation and goal pursuit as two unrelated tasks, and asked the subject to make a self-report (i.e., whether realized the goal activation) after completing the two tasks. However, this design caused much controversy. First, it couldn’t make certain that the self-report was true. Second, many studies also showed that the individual introspection capacity was limited. So, in order to gain "the real unconsciousness", in experiment1, we assumed that the achievement goal could be activated by the subliminal stimulus, and used ERP technique to explore the neural mechanism of the activation of the achievement goal. Meanwhile, we used a color-detection task to make sure the subject focus on the subliminal stimulus. In addition, many studies indicated that the subjects made the goal related words and positive emotional words co-activated when they judged the value of the goal. However, in their studies, the words (excellent, good, etc.) were incentive, and it seemed that the higher task performance in the pursuit task was not caused by the subliminal goal-related words, but was motivated by the positive emotional words directly. To explore the potential effects of the positive emotional words on the unconscious achievement goal pursuit, in experiment2, every participant was assigned to all the four experimental conditions:achievement goal (priming, no-priming) crossed with color word type (positive, neutral),In experiment1, by using the ERP, this study investigated the different neural correlations of subliminal achievement-related and achievement-unrelated words. ERP data found that the subliminally presented achievement-related words elicited one more negative-going ERP deflections (N2) than achievement-unrelated words during180-220ms. The N2appeared to be related to the allocation of unconscious attention resource to subliminal achievement-related words, which might reflect the executive control and the updating of working memory during the unconscious achievement goals activation. In experiment2, by using the color-detection task, this study aimed to investigate the effects of achievement goal and positive affect on the unconscious goal pursuit. In the priming task, participants were given a color-detection task which required them to focus on the computer screen while positive and neutral words appeared on the screen unbeknownst to them, and in this task they were subliminally presented with words related to the achievement goal or not. In the performance task, participants solved mathematical problem, which was an equation of two double-digits adding up to a sum, or two double-digits subtraction. The result showed that (1) in the goal priming, positive words caused a longer speed in the color-detection task, which indicated that people could make a judgment on the value of the goal;(2) in the goal pursuit, achievement-goal priming could enhance the accuracy, meanwhile achievement goal and positive affect had an interaction on the speed.Based on the results above, we considered that (1) in experiment1, the subliminal achievement-related words elicited one more negative-going ERP deflections (N2), which might reflect the executive control during the unconscious achievement goal activation;(2) in experiment2, both the achievement goal and positive affect had effects on the use of the task strategy during the unconscious achievement goal pursuit.