Athanasios Mouratidis, TED University
“Supportive Social Contexts, Quality of Motivation, and Human Functioning from A Dynamic Perspective: Who Benefits More and When?”
DATE : Monday, April 1, 2019
TIME : 12.40-13.30
LOCATION : A 130, FEASS
ABSTRACT: Why some students may study harder some days but not some others? Is it a matter of their own mentality or is it because of ever-changing circumstances? And if the latter, why some adolescents may benefit more than their peers when social contexts become more supportive? In this presentation, I am going to talk about the dynamics of human motivation: How the day-to-day or week-to-week fluctuation of human behavior and well-being could be explained by a respective fluctuation in the way people perceive the social environment. Through a series of studies that my colleagues and I have conducted, I am going to present the substantial variation that exists in people’s everyday functioning and the degree to which such variation could be explained by a respective fluctuation of perceived social context. Further, I am going to discuss how time-invariant (e.g., personal) characteristics can explain mean level differences in everyday human functioning and why the intrapersonal (e.g., week-to-week) relation of perceived need supportive context to motivated action and affect may differ from person to person. A common thread behind these studies is that they try to address the question of who benefits more and under what circumstances; that is, the question of person-environment fit, yet, from a more dynamic perspective. I will conclude by discussing how the current findings could inform future intervention studies aiming to help students, parents, or athletes in their everyday life.
BIO: Athanasios Mouratidis is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology at TED University and previously he was working in the respective Department of Hacettepe University. He received his PhD from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. In his research he has been mainly focused on motivation in various achievement settings. He is particularly interested in examining how the social context and personal characteristics determine human motivation. He has been awarded a 1001 TUBITAK-funded grant to study longitudinally adolescents’ academic success and well-being as a function of their quality of motivation and classroom and family environment.