News category: News

September 5, 2016

Sebastian Junger, award-winning journalist and bestselling author, highlights the disconnect and lack of belonging in modern society and its costs on well-being in his latest book: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.

“A person living in a modern city or suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day — or an entire life — mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet deeply, dangerously alone. ”

“Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society — despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology — is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanisation rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it. The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent about what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.”

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August 11, 2016 / By John A. Parkinson /

This fun article talks about how Pokemon Go motivates users to be physically active from a SDT perspective.

Self-determination theory argues that we will work energetically to satisfy three core psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. A person will engage in exercise if they choose to do so (autonomy), feel they are gaining valuable skills or achieving a goal (competence), or enjoying social interactions (relatedness). And that’s where Pokemon Go comes in: it motivates users because it provides a pure form of these core needs. You can choose when to go Pokemon hunting and which Pokemon to hunt. By catching and training Pokemon you gain levels and status, and walking up to 10km can hatch rare Pokemon eggs that you have found. Additionally, you can hunt in packs or with one or two close allies, or share augmented reality snaps over social media.

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June 17, 2016 / By April Dembosky /

SDT article Parental autonomy support and discrepancies between implicit and explicit sexual identities… by SDT faculty Weinstein, Ryan, DeHaan, Przybylski, Legate & Ryan featured in KQED news on Orlando shooting.  Richard Ryan and William Ryan comment.

Ryan was one of the researchers who conducted a series of studies that found empirical evidence that fear, anxiety, or hostility toward gay and lesbian people on behalf of seemingly heterosexual people can grow from their own repressed same-sex desires.

“When people are trying to suppress something in themselves, they can find someone else who is expressing that attitude threatening,” said Richard Ryan, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester. “It’s kind of a transfer of self-loathing to loathing of other people who are expressing what you can’t.”

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June 2016 / By Paul Tough /

Self-Determination Theory acknowledged by The Atlantic as an important perspective in education. Interesting article on children’s resilience and motivation in the classroom around socio-economic factors. Read the full article.

Within the field of psychology, one important body of thought that helps explain this apparent paradox is self-determination theory, which is the life’s work of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, two professors at the University of Rochester. Deci and Ryan came up with the beginnings of their theory in the 1970s, when the field was mostly dominated by behaviorists, who believed that people’s actions are governed solely by their motivation to fulfill basic biological needs and thus are highly responsive to straightforward rewards and punishments.

Deci and Ryan, by contrast, argued that we are mostly motivated not by the material consequences of our actions but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning that those actions bring us, a phenomenon called intrinsic motivation. They identified three key human needs—our need for competence, our need for autonomy, and our need for relatedness, meaning personal connection—and they posited that intrinsic motivation can be sustained only when we feel that those needs are being satisfied.