Studying against your will: Motivational interference in action

Motivational interference refers to affective, cognitive, and behavioral' impairments during a focal activity due to conflicting action tendencies. In the present study, we focused on antecedents and domain-specific consequences of motivational interference during everyday study activities using an experience sampling approach. Fifty-eight university students provided real-time reports on their daily studying activities (N = 672) over the course of one week. They reported on their momentary affect, whether they experienced motivational conflict during their study activities, and, if so, indicated when this feeling emerged. After the experience sampling period, they reported on their academic and social adaptation as well as their study satisfaction, and rated their relative performance. Compared with non-conflicted studying activities, we found considerably lower positive affect during conflicted studying. Conflicts that existed before the initiation of the study activity, and conflicts that emerged during studying, yielded affective impairments. As expected, aggregated conflict experiences negatively predicted measures of academic functioning, but not students' social adaptation. The discussion focuses on motivational antecedents of interference effects during self-regulated learning. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.