June 8th 2015.
David Sze, Research Editor at the Huffington Post has featured self-determination theory in his latest article on the science of well-being.
Sze writes, “As far as psychology theories go, University of Rochester’s Richard Ryan and Edward Deci’s Self-Determination Theory is one of the biggest out there. The theory has been used to analysis situations as diverse as the happiness of lawyers1, classroom environments2, and the training of sales-people.”
To read the full article:
In May 2015, Richard Ryan, SDT Co-Founder, traveled to Helsinki, Finland to give a Keynote Address at the Leading Passion seminar at Aalto University.
He was approached for a charming quick interview by a very young researcher!
Click here to watch the interview and hear Richard Ryan answer the following questions:
May 13th 2015.
The New York Times cites self-determination theory in their article, Lawyers with Lowest Pay Report More Happiness.
“Law students are famous for busting their buns to make high grades, sometimes at the expense of health and relationships, thinking, ‘Later I’ll be happy, because the American dream will be mine,’ ” said Lawrence S. Krieger, a law professor at Florida State University and an author of the study. “Nice, except it doesn’t work.”
The problem with the more prestigious jobs, said Mr. Krieger, is that they do not provide feelings of competence, autonomy or connection to others — three pillars of self-determination theory, the psychological model of human happiness on which the study was based. Public-service jobs do.
Read more at:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/lawyers-with-lowest-pay-report-more-happiness/
April 25th 2015.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, columnist David Brooks references the work of SDT scholars Avi Assor, Guy Roth and Ed Deci in a post regarding child-rearing.
“Studies by Avi Assor, Guy Roth and Edward L. Deci suggest that children who receive conditional love often do better in the short run. They can be model students. But they suffer in the long run. They come to resent their parents. They are so influenced by fear that they become risk averse. They lose a sense of agency.”
Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/opinion/david-brooks-love-and-merit.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
“
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An authoritative handbook, this volume offers both a comprehensive review of the current science of mindfulness and a guide to its ongoing evolution. Leading scholars explore mindfulness in the context of contemporary psychological theories of attention, perceptual processing, motivation, and behavior, as well as within a rich cross-disciplinary dialogue with the contemplative traditions. After surveying basic research from neurobiological, cognitive, emotion/affective, and interpersonal perspectives, the book delves into applications of mindfulness practice in healthy and clinical populations, reviewing a growing evidence base. Examined are interventions for behavioral and emotion dysregulation disorders, depression, anxiety, and addictions, and for physical health conditions.
Find full information about this title online: www.guilford.com/p/brown12
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March 5th 2015.
Website, Business 2 Community offers twenty 20 non-monetary ways to reward and motivate employees in modern workplaces. The blog utilizes a 1999 study by Self-Determination Theory scholars, Ed Deci, Richard Koestner, and Rich Ryan, which looks at extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivators.
“Deci’s experiment showed that money actually decreased intrinsic motivation because such external rewards thwart our “three psychological needs — to feel autonomous, to feel competent and to feel related to others.”
how money affects intrinsic motivation
In a meta-analysis by Edward Deci and colleagues, they looked at how money affects intrinsic motivation. Their results showed that there is a consistent negative effect of using incentives on intrinsic motivation. These effects were particularly strong when the tasks were interesting or enjoyable rather than boring or meaningless.”
Read more at:
March 15th 2015.
Positive Computing: A new partnership between psychology, social sciences and technologists
Psychology of Well-Being [www.psywb.com] is inviting submissions for a special issue of the journal that will be dedicated to the topic of Positive Computing.
The decades between 1970 and 1990 saw the creation and blossoming of a partnership between many disciplines around what was called cognitive science. Artificial Intelligence was one of the outcomes; another was a set of new engineering practices that helped optimize technologies so they would be safer to use and would maximize productivity.
Today we need a new partnership between psychologists, social scientists, designers and engineers so that future technologies have a wider design brief and take into account the impact they have on well-being. This is an area we call positive computing.
Psychology of Well-Being is a SpringerOpen journal which promotes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of well-being. The ultimate aim of the journal is to translate this scientific knowledge into practical and effective methods of enhancing well-being for individuals, groups and communities from a variety of contexts.
This special issue of Psychology of Well-Being aims to contribute to this new partnership and bring together interdisciplinary perspectives and experiences from psychologists, social scientists, designers and software engineers working together towards improving well-being and human flourishing.
Following on the journal’s scope we are seeking papers that examine how technologies are designed to influence behavioural, cognitive and emotional processes and how these designs impact well-being. Technology designs could include:
Submission of Papers
If you have a paper that fits one of the aforementioned descriptions, you are invited to submit a full length manuscript of no more than 7,500 words. Submitted papers should report new and original results that are unpublished elsewhere. Please prepare your manuscript with the template file and guidelines found at www.psywb.com/authors/instructions. Manuscripts should be sent through the online system at www.psywb.com/manuscript. Authors should choose “special issue on positive computing” as the Journal Section when submitting papers. All submitted manuscripts will undergo a full peer review process consistent with usual rigorous editorial criteria for Psychology of Well-Being.
Note that the usual author publication fee will be waived[1]as this is a special issue.
More information and updates at http://positivecomputing.org
Schedule
Full Paper Due: September 1, 2015
Notification of Acceptance: mid October
Final Version of Paper Due: 1 December, 2015
Special Issue Publication Date: February 2016
Special Issue Editors
Rafael A. Calvo
University of Sydney
Rafael.Calvo@sydney.edu.au
Dianne Vella-Brodrick
University of Melbourne
Dianne.Vella-Brodrick@unimelb.edu.au
Pieter Desmet
Delft University of Technology
P.M.A.Desmet@tudelft.nl
Richard M. Ryan
Australian Catholic University
February 28th 2015.
Edward Deci and Kenneth Sheldon, two SDT faculty members, were honored at The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference on February 27th in Long Beach, CA for their scientific work and achievements in the field of social and personality psychology.
At this event, Edward Deci, Professor of Psychology and Helen F. & Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Social Science at the University of Rochester, was awarded the “2014 Distinguished Scholar Award.” This award, given to only one scholar each year, recognizes the “broad scope and potentially integrative nature of scholarship in personality and social psychology. It honors a scholar who has made distinctively valuable research contributions across his or her career in areas that expand the core of social and personality research and/or integrates different topics in the discipline in significant ways. The award was established to recognize the breadth of personality and social psychology and ensure that SPSP recognizes distinguished scholarly contributions beyond the prototypic topic areas.”
Kenneth Sheldon, Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, was awarded The Carol and Ed Diener Award in Personality Psychology. This award is designed to recognize a scholar (approximately 15-25 years from their first tenure-track appointment) whose work has added substantially to the body of knowledge to the personality field and/or brings together personality psychology and social psychology.
