Work Preference Inventory

Work Preference Inventory

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To complete this assignment you will have to download the chart, .

To determine your Intrinsic Motivation score, first reverse your scores for items 9 and 14 (that means that if you selected 1, you’ll switch it to a 4, 2=3, 3=2, 4=1). Next, add the numbers in response to items 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, 27, and 28. For your Extrinsic Motivation score, reverse your scores (1=4, 2=3, 3=2, 4=1) for items 1, 16, and 22, and then add the numbers in response to items 1, 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, and 29.

When researching this topic, some questions to consider in your response may include: Do these scores correspond to your preconceived notions about whether you are more intrinsically or extrinsically motivated? What personality characteristics do you think might go along with motivation orientation (be sure to include supporting evidence from the text and other sources for traits that coincide with motivation)? Also, is motivation something that can be taught/learned or is this innate and non-changing throughout one’s life? What are some of the preconceptions regarding intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (how are they viewed by others)?

1. Your Daily Mood

To assess the content of a person’s emotional life, researchers have sometimes asked volunteers to keep a record of their daily experiences over weeks or even months. You can keep a record of your daily mood for three days, and analyze the findings. To complete this assignment you will have to download the chart, .

Each day of your tracking, complete the following survey:

Consider the balance between positive and negative affect (emotion) for each day that you tracked. To do this, compute an average positive affect score by finding the average of your ratings on “happy,” “joyful,” “pleased,” and “enjoyment.” That means that you should add up all of the scores that you listed for each of these four adjectives on each of the days that you kept track.

Next, compute an average negative affect score by finding your average on “depressed,” “unhappy,” “frustrated,” “angry,” and “worried.”

Now, subtract your negative affect score from your positive affect score, which will produce your global daily mood score. If this score is greater than zero, then that means that you reported more positive than negative affect on that day. If this score is less than zero, then you reported more negative than positive affect on that day.

To compute a frequency of positive affect score, divide the number of positive days by the total number of days that you tracked your mood; this will represent the proportion of days that were more positive than negative.

When researching this topic, some questions to consider in your response may include: Did this exercise help you to see a pattern in your moods that you were not previously aware of? Which kinds of personality traits do you think tend to go along with a generally positive mood, and which ones go along with a generally negative mood? Does keeping track of your mood alter the results? Would your results be the same if someone else were tracking his or her observation of your mood?

1. Monitoring Anger

Monitor your anger for three days. Record not only how frequently you feel angry, but also what precipitated the feeling. When researching this topic, some questions to consider in your response may include: Do your results parallel those of James Averill (see textbook), who found that most people become at least mildly angry several times a week, and sometimes several times a day? Is the anger usually directed at individual people, most often friends or relatives? Was the anger constructive or destructive? What effect did self observation have on your feelings of anger? Be sure to compare your findings to the information in the text that supports your results.