Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

You will register automatically for this course if you register for one of the following courses:
Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major Psych. (Hong Zhang),
Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 2 for Major Psych. (Yuqi Ye),
Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major UWI (Hinweis: keine Überschneidung mit Chemie-Laborübungen A2 und A3) (Ronja Gerdes),
Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 2 for Major UWI (Ulf Hahnel),
Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 3 for Major UWI (Esther Meyer),
Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 2 for Major GESS (Jonathan Ulrich),
Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major GESS (Steijn Bakker),
Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 3 for Major GESS (Steijn Bakker),
Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 3 for Major Psych. (Yuqi Ye)

Motivation Science is a course that provides students with general knowledge of motivational processes, their origins, and their significant role in human decision processes and behaviors. In this course, you will explore the major factors underlying human actions. What motivates people to perform certain behaviors over others? What gives people the energy and direction to move forward? What keeps people going in the face of challenges and difficulties? This course is about “why” and “how.” Why do people behave the way they do? Why do people regularly fail at their goals? How can people make better plans to increase their chances of success? How do people experience emotions? How do emotions steer people’s motivation and behavior? The course will cover the major theoretical perspectives and methodologies related to the study of motivation. It starts with reflecting on the nature of motivation and attempting to track its evolutionary origins. These themes will be followed by a review of the core human motives of autonomy, competence, and belonging. Further, the course devotes four sessions to the goal attainment process, including discussions on goal setting, goal planning, and goal striving, which highlights the central role of goals in the field of motivation. Students will also be provided with an overview of the emerging work on automatic, unconscious motivation. Subsequently, the issue of emotion will be introduced, followed by a discussion of the effects of individual differences and social situations on motivation. The final lecture will introduce the interdisciplinary nature of motivation science by covering insights made in sustainability psychology.

This course features a format that mixes traditional class meetings with autonomous out-of-class learning. Class meetings will include a combination of lectures, activities (e.g., self-scoring the Self-Control Scale by Tangney et al., 2004), and discussions (e.g., peer-to-peer discussion among students). Specifically, class meetings will be used to teach students about a variety of theories, frameworks, and models that explain motivation, to explore extensions and applications of concepts and ideas, and to cover important or intriguing topics that are not addressed in the handbook. Note that reading and preparing are not included in class meetings. These activities are expected of students above and beyond the required meeting times.

Upon the completion of this course, students should be able to:
• understand major classic and contemporary theoretical perspectives within the field of motivation
• critically assess empirical psychological research on motivation
• examine motivation from an empirically based, scientific perspective, rather than from an intuitive perspective based on personal experience
• recognize the various ways in which motivational processes take place in their life, and evaluate situations relevant to motivation and predict motivated behavior
• apply theories and empirical findings on motivation across various real-world contexts (e.g., pro-environmental behavior, health behavior)

Further information on teaching evaluation: https://www.leuphana.de/en/teaching/quality-management/evaluation/course-evaluation.html