Are mastery - avoidance achievement goals always detrimental ? An adult development perspective

Achievement goal research consistently reveals that mastery-avoidance goals (i.e., striving to avoid losses) are maladaptive, especially in comparison to mastery-approach goals (i.e., striving for gains). Nearly all of it has been done with children or young adults, however. Lifespan theories of motivation posit that people in late adulthood are more likely than young adults to strive toward maintenance and lossprevention rather than gains, and also that they sometimes profit from pursuing those goals. Integrating the two approaches, this experiment compared young and older adults’ experience and performance on a laboratory task when pursuing either mastery-approach or mastery-avoidance goals. Results show that young adults perceived the mastery-approach goal to be more attainable and therefore felt less pressure, enjoyed the task more, and performed better with it, whereas older adults showed this pattern with the mastery-avoidance goal. This matching effect replicates recent research on adult development and has broader implications for achievement goal theory and avoidance motivation in general. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-015-9474-1 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-110042 Accepted Version Originally published at: Senko, Corwin; Freund, Alexandra M (2015). Are mastery-avoidance achievement goals always detrimental? An adult development perspective. Motivation Emotion, 39(4):477-488. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-015-9474-1 Running head: MASTERY-AVOIDANCE ACHIEVEMENT GOALS 1 Are Mastery-Avoidance Achievement Goals Always Detrimental? An Adult Development Perspective Corwin Senko State University of New York – New Paltz Alexandra M. Freund University of Zurich Revised & Resubmitted to Motivation & Emotion, November 2014