Bulletin Personality and Social Psychology Time Pressure Undermines Performance More under Avoidance than Approach Motivation on Behalf Of: Society for Personality and Social Psychology Time Pressure Undermines Performance More under Avoidance than Approach Motivation Time Pressure and Cognitive Per

Article Striving to avoid failure (avoidance motivation), as opposed to striving for success (approach motivation), has been associated with a variety of detrimental consequences. In the long run, avoidance motivation evokes anxiety and threat appraisals, lowers intrinsic motivation, reduces subjective well-being, and depletes self-regulatory resources (With regard to short-term cognitive performance, however, the consequences of avoidance motivation are less straightforward. Compared with approach motivation, avoidance motivation prompts vigilance , and a more focused and systematic way of thinking. This enhances performance on tasks that require careful The long-and short-term effects of avoidance motivation, considered together, suggest that avoidance motivation is associated with a focused, highly controlled type of information processing that requires cognitive resources and taxes energy. Approach motivation, in contrast, is associated with a more heuristic and flexible processing style that relies less on top-down executive control If this is true, we should see that endogenous and exogenous variables that tax cognitive resources undermine performance among avoidance-motivated individuals more than approach-motivated individuals. Put differently, if indeed performance under avoidance motivation relies more strongly on cognitive resources, performance under avoidance motivation should be relatively fragile and more easily undermined by cognitive overload than performance under approach motivation. In the current research, we tested this possibility by studying avoidance-and approach-motivated individuals performing different types of tasks under various levels of time pressure. Because time pressure taxes cognitive resources and undermines bottom-up, piecemeal information processing (De Abstract Four experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that performance is particularly undermined by time pressure when people are avoidance motivated. The results supported this hypothesis across three different types of tasks, including those well suited and those ill suited to the type of information processing evoked by avoidance motivation. We did not find evidence that stress-related emotions were responsible for the observed effect. Avoidance motivation is certainly necessary and valuable in the self-regulation of everyday behavior. However, our results suggest that given its nature and implications, it seems best that avoidance motivation is avoided in situations that involve (time) pressure. , we predicted that performance would be particularly undermined by high time pressure when individuals were avoidance motivated. High time pressure impairs performance on a variety of tasks, such as arithmetic tasks, the Stroop task, chess games, and speaking one's second language Two primary reasons for the detrimental effects of time pressure on cognitive performance have been identified. First, the experience of time pressure elicits …