[MUSIC] In the previous session we discussed some of the ingredients that are needed for a facilitating environment, how support for autonomy, competence, and relatedness can really lead to greater internalization. And more full engagement of people and the activities that they're undertaking. In this session I want to show you three concrete examples of research on this topic. One of them's going to come from the education domain, from schools. One's going to come from the healthcare domain and people engaging in health-related behaviors. And a third one's going to come from elite musicians and the issue of practice for their music. And the first idea I want to talk about is one that I did in cooperation with Valery Chirkov, and it was a cross-cultural study between Russian and American high school students. In this study we're really interested in the perception of students of the autonomy support that their parents and their teachers provided, and it's impact on their internalization and self regulation for educational activities. Now of course our reasoning is that in general more parent autonomy support, more teacher autonomy support should promote greater internalization, less external regulation, less interjection, more identification, more intrinsic motivation. But of course countries differ quite a bit. Valery Chirkov, my colleague in this who had been a professor in Russia for some long period of time, assured me both on ethnographic studies and his understanding of cultures that Russian culture would be more controlling than American culture. Typically Russian teachers and Russian parents might use autonomy supportive techniques. Indeed, we did find that there was a mean level of difference where the American parents and teachers being more autonomy supportive. But our interest was not in that mean level difference, it's really in both countries does more autonomy support produce better outcomes? And we found that it does. In this first table that show you, you can see that in both US and Russia, a parental autonomy support is negatively related to external regulation, and teach autonomies support is negatively related to external regulation. But when you look at identified regulation, really valuing schoolwork, you see that both parent and teacher autonomy score in both countries, is associated with greater identified regulation. Particularly interesting to us was that only teacher autonomy support predicted intrinsic motivation. But, of course, that makes sense because teachers are the ones who are in control of whether the material in the classrooms Interesting or not. Most interesting here too is that you see the parallel relations, the same sets of correlations are really occurring in both countries. When we looked at the well-being of these high school students, we similarly found in both countries that the more autonomy support students were experiencing from their parents and their teachers, the better their life satisfaction, the better their sense of self-actualization. And when parents were supporting autonomy in both countries, the higher the self esteem of the students. So we can see that in this school related setting, some support for basic psychological needs, in particular autonomy support, was associated with greater internalization, and better both motivation and wellness outcomes. So let me move now to another example, and this is going to be in a completely different domain, it's the domain of health care. and of course in health care we also know that behavior is really important when people are for instance given an order by their doctor or a prescription by their doctor, it's important to their health that they carry it out, but to do so they have to be motivated to act. Surprisingly, people are not very compliant with their physicians or their medical professionals when they do get advice or prescriptions. For instance, even for something very simple, like taking an oral medication that your physician might prescribe, evidence shows in the United States that less than 50% of the time people are actually compliant. They either don't take the medication in a right amount or for long enough, or in the order that physician might have asked them to do. So compliance is very low, and there are huge health related and medical related costs to this absence of compliance. So, in our early work in the area of health motivation, oral medication studies for something that we want to take a look at. And the study I'm going to show you this lead by Jeff Williams, Gail Rodin, Wendy Grobick and others. We were looking at people's motivation for taking a medication that was pretty simple to take over a period of time. What we did is we had recruited some people who had a chronic disease, or about 100 people who had this chronic disease, and they met with their physician and they were prescribed in oral medication that they either had to take once or twice a day. And after they finished the meeting with a physician we had them rate the physician in terms of autonomy support and controlling style. And then we did some interesting behavioral follow up. Two days after they got their prescription we called them on the telephone and we said to them, we want to make sure you have the right number of pills could you bring the pill bottle to the phone and just let us know how many pills are left in the bottle. And we compare that with how many should be there after two days of properly taking that prescription. We did the same thing to them two weeks into the study, again we call them on the phone and ask them to come to the phone with a bottle and do a pill count to match it up with how accurate the number of pills left was compared to how many should be there. And we also got their self report of their compliance. And in the table that I show you here you can see how strongly it is that the relative autonomy they had for taking this medication predicts their actually taking it or not. When people are more internalized or identified with the taking their medication, they were much more likely to take it. And this was also influenced by the style of their physician. More autonomy supportive physicians had people who experienced more autonomy for taking medications, and this led to greater adherence. In fact, the path diagram shows that autonomy-supportive practitioners led to more autonomous motivation for taking these oral medications. And that accounted for more than 50%t of the variants in the medication adherence. This is a very simple example of healthcare compliance. When we get into things that are more complicated like diabetes regulation or smoking cessation or weight loss, we can see just how important motivation is. And how important autonomy support is going to be in promoting the internalization that actually helps people attain health related goals. So I want to go to just one third practical example of this, and this is looking at university students who are studying music. Now those of you who know anything about music at the advanced level know they can be pretty arduous, although music can be intrinsically motivated. To be an elite musician you have to practice a lot, you have to be completely skilled and disciplined on what you do. And this requires not only in terms of motivation but also internalization. This is a study from Paul Evans and Bonneville-Roussy where they look at students who are in elite schools in Australia and New Zealand. And what they show in their research is that those students who are in a music school where they feel like they are being supported in their basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, are more autonomously motivated for practicing their music. And this shows up pretty reliably and strongly. And then interestingly the more internalized they are for their practice at music and the more frequently they practice, a higher quality of their practices but their own ratings, and then more likely they are to chose harder rather than easier pieces to play in practice. They challenge themselves more. So now these ways we can see why internalization produces a higher quality set of practices, and likely greater performance in the long run. So in these three examples, again one from education, one from health care, and one from music. We just try and show some diverse studies where we can see that, when you provide the facilitating condition that help support people's basic psychological needs, they're more internalized in their motivation for what they're doing. And this leads to higher quality motivation, more persistence, and more enjoyment of the activity as they're undertaking it. [MUSIC]
