Not self-aware? Psychological antecedents and consequences of alienating from one’s actual motives,emotions,and goals

Awareness of implicit motives

A motive is a tendency to proceed towards a specific group of stimuli, such as achievement, affiliation, or power, or to avoid a specific group of threats, such as failure, rejection, or oppression (Thrash et al., 2012). Over the past 70 years, motivational researchers in the McClelland–Atkinson tradition (Atkinson, 1957; McClelland et al., 1989) differentiated between explicit and implicit motives according to the taxonomy of big three motives: power (the need to dominate and influence), achievement (the need to improve one’s skills and abilities and be better than others), and affiliation (the need to establish warm and mutually rewarding relationships with other people).

Whereas explicit motives are reflective preferences and can be measured by self-report questionnaires, implicit motives are automatic representations of motivational dispositions that lead to affective satisfaction and could be measured by picture-based tests. According to Schultheiss’s (2001, 2008) information processing model, the implicit motivation system responds to nonverbal, pictorial stimuli and not to verbal stimuli. Accordingly, the instruments designed to assess implicit motives, the so-called picture story exercise (PSE; Schultheiss & Pang, 2007) and its precursor, the thematic apperception test (TAT; Murray, 1943), provide pictorial stimuli as situational cues to arouse a respondent’s implicit motives. Respondents are instructed to generate imaginative stories, which are then content analyzed (Winter, 1994) for motive strength (Lang et al., 2012). In addition to the PSE, there are other measures such as the operant motive test (OMT), and the multimotive grid (MMG), which establish in the same concept as PSE but have been modified and extended in several aspects (see Schüler et al., 2015, for a review).

According to research (e.g., Köllner & Schultheiss, 2014), there seems to be no significant association between implicit and explicit motives, indicating that implicit and explicit motives represent two distinct domains of behavioral regulation in line with McClelland’s point of view (McClelland, 1980; McClelland et al., 1989; Weinberger & McClelland, 1990). Consequently, behavior is supposed to be regulated by two independent systems, leading to either a state of harmony or consistency or a state of conflict or discrepancy between explicit and implicit motives (Brunstein, 2010; Kehr, 2004b; Schultheiss, 2008).

Past research has shown that a discrepancy between implicit and explicit motives may have deleterious consequences. Among those are unhealthy eating behaviors (Job et al., 2010), job burnout (Rawolle et al., 2016), increases in psychosomatic syndromes, and decreases in well-being (Baumann, Kaschel, & Kuhl, 2005). Kehr (2004a) found in a longitudinal field study amongst managers that volition depletion to compensate for implicit and explicit motive discrepancies resulted in an impaired subjective well-being. On the other hand, consistency between these implicit and explicit motives is associated with benefits such as achievement of identity (committing to an identity when actively having searched for it; Hofer & Busch, 2017), the flow experience (an optimal state in which one is completely immersed in an activity, while enjoying it; Rheinberg, 2020), and higher levels of well-being (Thrash et al., 2012).

However, these two systems can be in harmony due to one’s awareness of implicit motive. Individuals can learn about their implicit motives by applying metamotivational strategies (see Kehr & von Rosenstiel, 2006) to reduce implicit–explicit motive discrepancies. Moreover, self-awareness, which may be attained by instructing people to focus on their internal states or representations (e.g., affect or goals), reduces the implicit–explicit motives discrepancy (Schultheiss, 2021, p. 313). For instance, Strick and Papies (2017) have documented the benefits of mindfulness in alleviating implicit–explicit affiliation motives. Yet, the implicit and explicit motives for power did not yield the same results in their study.

In a similar vein, Job and Brandstätter (2009) found in three experiments that participants’ implicit motives matched their explicit motives significantly better when they envisaged the subsequent affects to the goal pursuit versus when they imagined the goal pursuit alone. Awareness can increase by different techniques that encourage focusing on internal states, decreasing the discrepancy and subsequent repercussions of self-unawareness. However, awareness of internal states is not restricted to implicit motives and has more general implications.

Awareness of implicit emotions

Emotions provide evaluative information about situations, and thus play an important role in judgment and decision-making. According to appraisal theories (e.g., Arnold, 1960; Ellsworth, 2013; Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991; Ortony et al., 1988; Roseman, 2013; Scherer, 2009), emotions are adaptative processes that reflect appraisals of features of the environment that are important for the survival of the organism (Moors, 2013), as one of their purposes is revealing whether our goals may be thwarted or attained (Montag & Panksepp, 2017).

Also, emotions are derived from the combination of core affect (e.g., valence and arousal) and linguistic processes that transfer affect to take the shape of a particular emotional state (e.g., anger, surprise; Barrett, 2006). Thus, affect is a broader term and is not as specific as emotion. Specifically, a view of affect as information describes affect as embodied information about value (i.e., goodness and badness) and importance (i.e., high vs. low arousal; Clore et al., 2001). The valence dimension of affect provides evaluative information about the stimuli, which plays a role in decision-making, where positive affect often promotes, and negative affect inhibits accessible responses. Thus, due to the complexity of emotions, investigating affect as the core of the emotional experience represents a fruitful approach in emotional science; therefore, both constructs have been extensively explored.

In addition, efforts have been directed to assess these constructs in an automatic (i.e., implicit) way, mainly because people do not always report their affects accurately (Quirin & Bode, 2014). These inaccurate reports of affect indicate several biasing factors such as repression (Derakshan et al., 2007), limitations in introspection (Lane et al., 1996), or self-deception (Paulhus & Vazire, 2007). For example, one way that empirical psychology has tried to assess emotions objectively or indirectly is by investigating their physiological correlates. However, according to Cacioppo et al. (1993), the relationship between emotions and physiological reactions is ambiguous and highly context-dependent (Bradley & Lang, 2007; see also Mauss et al., 2005). According to Evers et al. (2014), theories of affect and its different components can shed light on this lack of coherence. Specifically, he argues that it can be due to weaknesses of response consistency across the multiple affect components, which might depend on the degree to which the responses take place prereflectively (i.e., automatically) or involve reflective cognitive processes. Thus, automatic (i.e., implicit) assessment of affect and emotions could clarify the connection between health and different emotional experiences.

Implicit affects are conceptualized as the automatically activated cognitive representations of affective experiences (Leventhal & Scherer, 1987; Quirin, Kazén, & Kuhl, 2009; Quirin et al., 2021). This automatic activation of representations is a function of the implicit system proposed in dual-process models, and of the higher level intuitive mode proposed in PSI theory. By contrast, explicit affect can function as the reflective (deliberate, conceptual) processing system (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). Because automatically activated representations of affective experiences can be processed consciously, implicit affect is not necessarily unconscious. However, there could be occasions wherein a person is not and cannot be aware of their affect (Fazio & Olson, 2003). In an empirical sense, this unawareness of affects could be detected by the discrepancy between indirect affect measures (e.g., electrodermal activity) and direct affect measures (e.g., self-report).

One such indirect measure based on an efficient procedure is the implicit positive and negative affect test (IPANAT; Quirin, Kazén, & Kuhl, 2009). The test aims to assess the automatic activation of cognitive representations of affect and draws on the principle of affect infusion (Forgas, 1995). The affect infusion principle posits that affects influence judgments of objects that are irrelevant to the affective experience at hand. In this measure, participants are confronted with an artificial (nonsense) word and are asked to rate on a Likert scale how much each artificial word sounds like a mood adjective (e.g., “happy” or “helpless”).

The test rationale is that judgments of ambiguous objects (such as artificial words) require a constructive cognitive process that capitalizes on the amount of currently accessible information (Forgas, 1995). The less predefined meaning the stimulus has for an individual, the smaller the amount of available information directly related to the stimulus, leaving more space for affective states to automatically influence its judgments (Bower, 1981). Accordingly, when judging an artificial word, a specific ongoing affective state should differentially trigger conceptually related mood adjectives. Thus, individuals should rate artificial words higher on activated than on nonactivated semantic representations, thereby automatically revealing their affective state, which is relatively independent of what they explicitly report.

Using a principal component analysis, Quirin, Kazén, and Kuhl (2009) showed positive versus negative adjective scores of the original IPANAT version load on two orthogonal components, which can be interpreted as positive versus negative affect. The good psychometric properties of the IPANAT have been replicated in more than 10 different languages across different continents (e.g., Hernandez, Rovira, et al., 2020; Quirin et al., 2016; Shimoda et al., 2014). Thus, the IPANAT appears to be a suitable candidate for capturing automatic emotional processes that might underlie any influence of emotional primes (supraliminal or subliminal) on judgment and behavior.

Even if this is a new field, the use of the IPANAT has already uncovered some implications of dissociations between implicit and explicit affect in psychological health. Congruency between implicit and explicit affect may play an important role on the effectiveness of psychological interventions. Suslow et al. (2019) found that, as expected, after 7 weeks of therapy, depressive patients displayed an increase in explicit and implicit positive affect, however, a discrepancy on the effects of the treatment was detected on negative affect, since a reduction was detected only for explicit trait negative affect. The authors argued that in the state of acute depression, the interplay between the automatic and reflective systems could be increased for negative affectivity. According to Remmers et al. (2018), the reduction of incongruencies between implicit and explicit emotional responses is useful in treating major depression. Thus, initial evidence suggests that a reduction of discrepancies between implicit and explicit affect can lead to psychological health.

As with motives, self-awareness promotes the congruency between implicit and explicit emotions. As research has shown, mindfulness increases the likelihood of processing different aspects of emotions (Hill & Updegraff, 2012), which may decrease the dissociation between implicit and explicit affect. Moreover, self-awareness attainable with mindfulness training is positively associated with emotional awareness. Emotional awareness is defined as the conscious (cognitive) processing of emotional aspects (e.g., physiology), which by definition designates the congruency between implicit and explicit affects. Therefore, emotional self-awareness reduces the mentioned discrepancy and improves psychophysiological health and subjective well-being (see Lane & Smith, 2021; Smith et al., 2018). However, the relationship between self-awareness and health goes beyond motives and affect to include subconsciously neglecting one’s preferences and self-selected goals.

Awareness of implicit goals

According to Elliot and Fryer (2008, p. 244), goals can be defined as cognitive representations of future experiences, characteristics, or events that an individual either avoids or approaches. Besides the functional role of goals to regulate behavior through positive- and negative-feedback loops, goals are an important connector between the individual and their social world (Schultheiss, 2021). They allow individuals to regulate their behavior such that it fits in with their social environment, making them reliable members of their peer group (Jaynes, 1990; Mischel & Ayduk, 2004; Vygotsky, 1986). But this also implies that goals do not primarily reflect a representation of an individual’s personal preferences (Emmons, 2004; Kehr, 2004b). Living in a social environment entails an inherent conflict between an individual’s own preferences and those of others. In finding a healthy balance between personal choice and external control, people run the risk of overly indulging in either neglecting or pleasing others—both supposedly harmful for one’s personal and social life. However, the latter case is of special importance because a strong orientation towards the needs of others while neglecting one’s own preferences may result in alienated goal pursuit (Kuhl et al., 2020), which is characterized by a sense of internal or external pressure to act that, in turn, has been shown to compromise motivation and well-being (Ryan & Deci, 2000a, 2017).

According to self-determination theory (SDT; La Guardia, 2009; Ryan & Deci, 2000a, 2000b, 2017), a leading theory in human motivation, the degree to which a goal is heteronomous (or externally controlled) or autonomous (or internally controlled) depends on the level of internalization that can be arranged on a relative continuum along which external goals and values can become stepwise internalized and, in the end, may become fully integrated within the self. The newly internalized goals can then make close and broad connections with already integrated self-representations, thus contributing to the growth of an integrated self-structure (Kuhl et al., 2015).

A specific level of internalization, that is, introjection, is of particular interest because it may address the question of self-awareness. Introjection refers to a level of internalization on which the individual experiences a goal as an obligation, as an external expectation rather than a self-selection, and as being of relatively low valence to one’s self-structure (cf. ought self; Higgins, 1987, 1996; or Freud’s superego). This level needs to be distinguished from a more autonomous level, that is, identification, where a goal is experienced as being self-selected, of positive valence, and thus worth being pursued (cf. ideal self; Higgins, 1987, 1996; or Freud’s ego-ideal).

However, individuals often do not consciously recognize that a goal is introjected. This nonconscious form of introjection has been coined self-infiltration, as an individual’s self is unconsciously infiltrated by an imposed goal that is discrepant with underlying, implicit preferences. That is, a self-infiltrated goal might appear favorable and consistent on an explicit level while it may in fact be aversive and discrepant with implicit preferences the individual is currently not aware of (Kuhl & Kazén, 1994). In addition to awareness of motives and emotions, self-infiltration can therefore be seen as another example for an explicit–implicit conflict due to the discrepancy between what an individual “wants” (i.e., explicit choice to conform and take on an imposed goal) and what an individual “needs” (i.e., relative unawareness of the discrepancy between an imposed goal and implicit preferences). Interestingly, a number of studies have demonstrated that negative affect or individual impairments in its regulation (i.e., state orientation or rumination) intensify an individual’s proneness to self-infiltration (Baumann & Kuhl, 2003; Kazén et al., 2003; Kuhl & Kazén, 1994; Quirin, Koole, et al., 2009).

The nonconscious status of self-infiltrated goals thwarts their investigation via direct self-report questionnaires and warrants a nonreactive, objective assessment like implicit motives (see Baumann et al., 2018, for a recent overview). In Kuhl and Kazén’s (1994) self-discrimination task, self-infiltration is assessed by the degree to which imposed activities are misremembered as self-chosen in the context of a working day of an office worker simulated at the computer. Specifically, in their experiments, participants chose relatively unpleasant activities (e.g., “sharpening pencils” or “sorting letters”) for later enactment while other activities were assigned by a supervisor. Some activities remained neither chosen nor assigned. In a later phase of the experiments, participants performed an unexpected memory test for the original source of the activities. A tendency to falsely ascribe more originally assigned than remaining activities as self-chosen was used as a measure of self-infiltration. Individual differences in memory performance were controlled by comparing these two different sources of error (i.e., false self-ascription of assigned vs. remaining activities). Hence, this self–other goal discrimination procedure measures the degree to which individuals can differentiate between self-chosen and imposed goals.

In comparison with awareness of motives and emotions, Kuhl and Kazén’s (1994) way to operationalize and assess self-infiltration via the self-discrimination task can be seen as a purely objective measure of awareness of goals (Baumann et al., 2018). That is, while discrepancies in motives and emotions rely on the correlation of normatively defined differences between explicit and implicit measurement scores, self-infiltration relies on memory and objectively defined errors in recalling the objective self–other status of goals. Furthermore, the self-discrimination task is not about personally meaningful goals or emotions experienced simultaneously, as is the case for awareness of motives and emotions. Rather, it measures the dispositional and/or current tendency towards self-infiltration as an indicator of impaired awareness and increased proneness to alienation from goals in general. Despite its reduced ecological validity, self-infiltration has been shown to correlate with personality functioning in daily life.

Supported by a huge body of research, self-infiltration directly and as a nonconscious form of introjection has been shown to have detrimental effects on psychological functioning and well-being. For example, self-infiltration has been directly associated with rumination (Baumann & Kuhl, 2003), reduced ability to experience flow (Baumann & Scheffer, 2011), physiological stress response (Quirin, Koole, et al., 2009), and depression and anxiety (Baumann et al., 2018). As a nonconscious from of introjection, self-infiltration has been associated with heightened susceptibility to persuasion (Kazén et al., 2003; Koestner & Losier, 2002), reduced vitality, life satisfaction, and subjective well-being (Ryan & Deci, 2000a, 2017; Sheldon & Kasser, 1995; Sheldon et al., 2004) as well as increased depressive symptoms in response to major life transitions such as entering college (Koestner et al., 2010). Consequently, self-infiltration can be considered an insidious form of introjection as its unavailability to the individual obscures their understanding of why they may suffer from a lack of motivation or well-being, and thus renders functional goal disengagement unlikely.

Kazén et al. (2003) proposed that self-infiltration underlies a mechanism called self-compatibility checking. According to these authors, the extent to which a goal can be internalized and how deeply it can be integrated into the self depends on a successful evaluation of a goal with important aspects of the integrated self (i.e., values, needs, and personal preferences). Any factor impairing or blocking accessibility to the integrated self-system and its self-representations (e.g., intrusive thoughts) is expected to reduce the quality of this self-compatibility checking process, leaving individuals helpless in resisting external influences (e.g., imposed goals) and making self-congruent decisions in the formation of personal goals. Consequently, a poor self-compatibility checking is supposed to increase an individual’s proneness to self-infiltration.

There is also evidence on the neural correlates of personal goals, imposed goals, and self-infiltrations, and whether they differ from each other. Baumann, Kuhl, and Kazén (2005) asked participants in two experiments to squeeze a stress ball either with their left hand, which activates areas of the right cortex, or with their right hand, which activates the left cortex. Right cortex stimulation via contralateral hand contraction led to lower rates of self-infiltration in the self-discrimination task (see, for example, Kuhl & Kazén, 1994), as measured by the number of low attractive goals assigned by the experimenter but confused in memory as self-selected as compared to a baseline measure. A recent pilot study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) explored potential brain sources of this effect in 17 participants (Quirin et al., 2020). Specifically, applying the same paradigm as Baumann, Kuhl, and Kazén (2005), we found that representations of self-selected goals activated the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFC), whereas representations of imposed goals activated the right ventromedial PFC, and that the amount of activity within the right ventromedial PFC cluster was inversely related to self-infiltration rates, suggesting that the right ventromedial PFC contributes to buffering alienation. Moreover, low emotion regulation abilities (rumination tendencies) were associated with increased introjection rates, which replicated behavioral findings reported above. Importantly, rumination but also low emotional awareness and low self-esteem predicted reduced activity in the right ventromedial PFC cluster.

Not least, self-infiltration trials, that is, where participants misremembered imposed goals as self-selected, activated both the left and the right ventromedial PFC in this study, along with the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Unfortunately, the number of trials in the self-infiltration condition was relatively low such that these latter findings need to be interpreted with caution and additional data are necessary to corroborate these findings and to investigate potential causal dynamics between the activated areas. Still, the present findings suggest that the right ventromedial PFC plays an important role for accessing self-chosen goals and buffering them against the adverse effects of introjection of other individuals’ expectations.