The Spillover Effect of Autonomy Frustration on Human Motivation and Its Electrophysiological Representation

Abstract

It is a commonplace that some people may adopt a controlling style, which brings about autonomy frustration to others. Existing studies on autonomy frustration mainly examined its effect in the primary thwarting context, ignoring its potential spillover to subsequent activities. In this study, we examined whether prior autonomy frustration would have a sustaining negative impact on one's motivation in another autonomy-supportive activity that follows. In this electrophysiological study, participants worked on two irrelevant tasks organized by two different experimenters. We adopted a between-group design and manipulated participants' autonomy frustration by providing varied audio instructions during Session 1. In Session 2, all participants were instructed to complete a moderately difficult task that is autonomy-supportive instead, and we observed a less pronounced reward positivity (RewP) difference wave and a smaller P300 in the autonomy-frustration group compared with the control group. These findings suggested that the negative influence of autonomy frustration is longstanding and that it can undermine one's motivation and attention in a following activity that is autonomy-supportive itself. Thus, our findings provided original neutral evidence for the adverse intertemporal effect of autonomy frustration, and suggested important practical implications.

Keywords: autonomous motivation; autonomy frustration; controlling context; event-related potentials; reward positivity (RewP); self-determination theory.

FIGURE 1

Demonstration of the experimental paradigm. (A) The experimental procedure; (B) Tangram puzzle interface; (C) The stopwatch task procedure.

FIGURE 2

Five stopwatch pictures provided in the stopwatch task. They only vary in their appearance, while difficulties of the task are identical.

FIGURE 3

Reward positivity (RewP) results of the chosen electrode cluster (F1, FZ, F2, FC1, FCZ, and FC2) during outcome evaluation. Grand-averaged event-related potentials waveforms of RewP and its win-lose difference wave are shown for group (autonomy-frustration group vs. control group) and outcome (win vs. lose) conditions. Scalp topographic distributions of the difference wave are plotted for both groups, and the bar ranges from –4 to 4 μV.

FIGURE 4

P300 results of the chosen electrode cluster (C1, CZ, C2, CP1, CPZ, and CP2) during outcome evaluation. Grand-averaged P300 are shown for both groups (autonomy-frustration group vs. control group). Scalp topographic distributions of the P300 are plotted for both groups, and the bar ranges between −10 and 10 μV.