The Influence Of Vocal Expression Of Emotion On Implicit Achievement Motivation And Task Performance In Children From Primary School

The implicit achievement motivation is a nonconscious and recurrent need for affectively rewarding experiences followed by the improvement of performance. It drives people to perform effectively at the task by energizing the behaviors that help them to confront difficulties and challenges. The implicit motivation is influenced by nonverbal information such as the emotional message. For children in the elementary school, the vocal expression of emotions from parents and teachers are the major criterion for their performance. This study investigates the influence of vocal expression of emotion on children’s implicit achievement motivation and their task performance.The subject of this study comes from the grade four students from an elementary school in Shanghai. We test children’s implicit achievement motivation and explicit achievement motivation by using picture story exercise and Children Achievement Motivation scale respectively. Then, we investigate the influence of vocal expression of emotion on children’s implicit achievement motivation and their task performance on attentional task and pair association task in two experiments. We covariate out subjects’baseline performance in the analysis through hierarchical regression analysis. And below are the results:1. When the vocal feedbacks are primarily expressed through an angry tone, the subjects’hope of success score predicts their performances in the experiment one, and their fear of failure score could predict their performances in the experiment two. When the vocal feedbacks are primarily expressed through a neutral tone, subjects’implicit achievement scores can not predict their performance.2. The hope of success score predicts not only the outcome, but also the strategic behavior in the task that facilitates the outcome. And the children motivated by the fear of failure does not averse to failure outcome more than the children motivated by the hope of success. The two approaches are similar in that they all promote better performance in the task.3. The explicit achievement score can not predict any behavioral outcome in this study.