The Motivating Power of Visionary Images: Effects on Motivation, Affect, and Behavior.

OBJECTIVE: Visionary images are identity-relevant, picture-like mental representations of a desirable and attainable future appearing regularly in a person's stream of thought. Prior research indicates that both mental and real images provide access to implicit motives. We therefore proposed that visionary images motivate people by arousing their implicit motives and tested this hypothesis in two experimental studies. METHOD: We used guided visualizations to administer motive-domain-specific visionary images (Study 1: achievement and neutral, Mage = 24.4, 51 participants, 34 women; Study 2: affiliation and power, Mage = 24.01, 51 participants, 28 women) to arouse the respective implicit motive. Motivation was measured via residual changes in affective (i.e., changes in affective arousal), behavioral (i.e., performance on a concentration task, behavioral choices in a prisoner's dilemma), and mental (i.e., motive imagery in the Picture Story Exercise) indicators of motivation. RESULTS: The results largely confirmed our hypothesis. Visionary images increased motivation in the targeted domain. Some effects were moderated by participants' implicit motives. CONCLUSIONS: The findings underscore the role of implicit motives in understanding the motivational effectiveness of visionary images.

Relationships between implicit motives, self-attributed motives, and personal goal commitments.

This research examined the relationships between measures of the implicit and the explicit motivational systems. We analyzed the relationships between picture-story measures of implicit motives, questionnaire measures of self-attributed motives, and ideographically assessed personal goal commitments within the domains achievement, affiliation, and power through a reanalysis of three data sets from the USA and Germany (total N = 309). No significant positive within-domain correlations of implicit motives with self-attributed motives or personal goal commitments were found, and self-attributed motives correlated substantially and positively with personal goals. Results did not systematically differ between data sets.