Motivation and Action - 4th Edition by Jutta Heckhausen (Hardcover)

From the Back Cover

This fourth edition provides translations of all chapters of the most recent sixth German edition of Motivation and Action, including one entirely new chapter. This volume provides comprehensive coverage of the history of motivation, and introduces up-to-date theories and new research findings. Early sections offer a broad introduction to, and deep understanding of, the field of motivation psychology, mapping out different perspectives and research traditions. Subsequent chapters examine major themes of human motivation, including achievement, affiliation, and power motivation as well as the fundamentals of motivation psychology, such as motivated and goal oriented behaviors, implicit and explicit motives, and the regulation of development. In addition, the book discusses the roles of motivation in three practical fields: school and college, the workplace, and sports.

Topics featured in this text include:

• Dynamic between person and situation in motivating behavior.
• Conscious and unconscious motivators of behavior.
• Drives and incentives in the fields of achievement, intimacy, sociability and power.
• How the biochemistry and structures of our brain shapes motivated behavior.
• How to engage in intentional goal-directed behavior.
• The potential and limits of motivation and self-direction in shaping our lives.

Motivation and Action, Fourth Edition, is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the fields of motivation psychology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology, as well as personality psychology and agency.

About the Author

Jutta Heckhausen is Distinguished Professor at the Department of Psychological Science, University of California Irvine. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, with a dissertation on natural instruction in mother-infant dyads. Her habiliation as the Free University of Berlin addressed agency and developmental regulation in adulthood. From 1985 to 2000, she worked first as a postdoc, and then senior researcher and leader of a research group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She joined the faculty at UC Irvine in 2001. Her research addresses the role of individual agents and their motivation in life-span development, particularly in response to regulatory challenges during life-course transitions, radical societal change, or when experiencing substantial losses or gains. A major topic of her work is the potential and limits of individual influence on social mobility under given institutional and social-structural constraints in different societies. Recently, she has focused on the motivational self-regulation in the context of the transition to adulthood, particularly in educational contexts and for groups differing in social and cultural access to mainstream higher education. Jutta Heckhausen's research is published in the top international and North-American journals in developmental psychology, gerontology, and motivational psychology. She has received several awards for her work, among them the Baltes Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association and the Distinguished Career Contribution to Gerontology Award from the Gerontological Society of America.