Dominant Motivation in Schoolchildren: Age Trends and Conditions of Development

The paper addresses the issue of the development of dominant motivation, or motivation of over-situational level, regarded as the general vector that defines basic patterns of behavior of an individual in various situa¬tions and activities. Dominant motivation represents the attitude towards the world (towards other people and work) and oneself and underpins personality orientation on the ontogenetic stage of personality stabilization. The paper describes data of an empirical study carried out on a sample of 403 children and adolescents using an inventory developed by the author. The data provide an insight into the population dynamics of motivation development in school-age children and teenagers. As it was revealed, moral motivation actively develops in early school age, whereas egocentric and hedonistic motivation develops in adolescence. The paper provides characteristics both of motivational profiles that promote socialization in adolescents and of the ones that do not. It concludes that moral motivation dominates in favorable educational and upbringing conditions (in teenagers with normal intellectual development studying at ordinary schools and in gifted children and teenagers with high levels of intellectual development studying at gymnasiums), while hedonistic motivation dominates in children who are brought up in children's homes; homeless adolescents display no differentiation of motives at all.

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