Striving and Feeling: Interactions Among Goals, Affect, and Self-Regulation

Leonard L. Martin and Abraham Tesser (Editors) (1995). Striving and Feeling: Interactions Among Goals, Affect, and Self-Regulation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

ISBN 0-8058-2039-6 (pb), $36.00.

Goals are essential to achievement. High achievers set high level goals, monitor their progress towards those goals, and develop strategies for coping with setbacks. Striving and Feeling, as its title implies, is about the relationship between goals and affect. It was written by researchers in the fields of personality and social psychology to integrate two recent lines of research-one exploring the effects of goals on feelings and moods; the other exploring the role of goals in moderating the influence of affect on thoughts and behaviors. The volume grew out of a conference organized by the authors and sponsored by Dr. William Prokasy, the Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Georgia. This is a book written by researchers for researchers. Most of the chapters describe actual studies, usually studies in research programs sponsored by the authors. Striving and Feeling is fascinating reading and suggests many possible directions for future research in our field.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I describes research on the affective and behavioral consequences of goals. "Goals" are broadly defined by these researchers to include both the types of goal orientations that figure so prominently in motivational research in education (e.g. performance vs. mastery goals) and broader conceptualizations like life tasks, personal strivings, and possible selves that are grounded in personality and social psychology research. Chapters in this section cover topics such as the ways goals and affect relate to each other in feedback loops, conditions under which goal nonattainment does and does not lead to negative affect, and the "what the hell effect!" Part II...