Motivational Concerns in Childhood and Adolescence

This brief report explores developmental changes in motivation by adapting, for a sample of children spanning the ages of 4 to 17, measures of well-established motivational concerns, such as regulatory mode and regulatory focus concerns. The paper leverages a recently proposed developmental model of shared reality to interpret our results (Higgins, 2016). We established that assessment concerns increase throughout childhood until age 13, which is theorized to be the end of childhood according to the theory of shared reality development. Furthermore, we found that children after age 13, but not before that pivotal age, are similar to adults in how they differentiate between regulatory mode and regulatory focus concerns. Adopting the theory of shared reality development allowed us to highlight the importance of motivational concerns in development beyond the cognitive changes that are often utilized.