OUGD501 / Reading of 'What is Satisfying about Satisfying Events?' / Tone & Interesting Things to Note

This essay from Kennon Sheldon, Andrew Elliot, Youngmee Kim and Tim Kasser gets to the bottom of some of the base desires I was trying to explain in my first draft essay. 

Main points to explore further:

• The American Dream. 'Happiness results when individuals acquire popularity influence and money luxuries'.
• Epstein's model on pleasurable stimulation relates to hedonism.
• 'A Dark Side of the American Dream - Correlates of Financial Success as a Central Life Aspiration' Kasser & Ryan 
• Are they ineluctable motive forces, pushing out from the person, or are they required experiential inputs, coming into the person?
• As a foundation we used Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory of motivation (1985, in press), which specifies that people want to feel effective in their activities (competence), to feel that their activities are self-chosen and self-endorsed (autonomy), and to feel a sense of closeness with some others (relatedness). 
• We also drew from Maslow's theory of personality (1954) and its set of five fundamental needs: physical health, security, selfesteem, love-belongingness, and self-actualization. In brief, Maslow proposed that people need to feel that the biological requirements of their physical organism are satisfied, a sense of order and predictability within their lives, a sense of personal worthiness and importance, a sense of love and affection with important others, and that they are moving toward an ideal world or version of themselves.
• It is interesting that if one were to pick a single need that is most important to satisfy in the United States, the current data suggest it would be self-esteem. 
• Psychological needs are evolved desires that can be found within every member of the human species (Deci & Ryan, in press). These inborn yearnings carry little information about exactly what behaviors to engage in, a fact that allows for considerable behavioral plasticity. Instead, the needs tend to pull people toward the same general experiences and incentives within almost any behavioral domain. 
• When a person behaves successfully within a particular life domain, then beneficial adaptive consequences and rewarding experiences ensue. These experiences help reinforce the particular behavior, causing the individual to seek further challenges and satisfactions within that domain.