The role of the parental care system in goal-directed maintenance

• Applicant: Dr. Yael Ecker
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465638666

How do people pursue the routine maintenance tasks of daily life? Tremendous daily investments are needed to ensure that all the valuable things people have—family, friends, households, possessions, health, etc.—will be maintained. Astonishingly, however, theory on goal-directed behavior and motivation has focused almost exclusively on approach and avoidance goals, leaving maintenance goals largely unresearched (Ecker & Gilead, 2018). Consequently, little is known about the motivational mechanisms that subserve people’s efforts to maintain what they have. Addressing this gap in theory on behavior and self-regulation, I hypothesize that the parental care motivational system (Buckels et al., 2015) has a central role in motivating maintenance behavior. Research shows that the innate biological system of parental care may extend beyond the domain of child rearing to promote care for diverse valued objects, and therefore may compose an optimal source of motivation for maintenance. To test this hypothesis, I propose a set of seven studies (+ two replications) that will examine the relation between parental care and maintenance motivation at the trait and state levels. In these studies, I will validate a measure of General Maintenance Orientation (GMO), and test its relation to situational and individual differences in parental care. Additionally, I will test how the GMO and parental care predict maintenance motivation in two crucial life domains – health and pro-environmental behavior. In delineating how maintenance goals relate to known motivational constructs, the proposed project has the potential to add a fundamental element to general theory on motivated behavior. Alongside this theoretical contribution, insights about maintenance goals may guide future interventions in domains of primary concern to individuals and society at large.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Roland Imhoff; Dr. Jens Lange; Professor Dr. Christian Unkelbach