What moves people, and what it feels like.
10 topics · 18 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
What Is an Emotion?
William James · 1884
Argues, against common sense, that the bodily response to a stimulus comes first and the felt emotion is the perception of that bodily change - we…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Effects of Externally Mediated Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation
Edward L. Deci · 1971
Reports that paying people for a task they already found interesting reduced how much time they later spent on it voluntarily, the original…
+9 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Happiness Is Everything, or Is It? Explorations on the Meaning of Psychological Well-Being
Carol D. Ryff · 1989
Argues psychological wellbeing is not simply subjective happiness but six distinct dimensions - autonomy, mastery, growth, purpose, relationships and…
+4 more at this level
12 of 18 works
William James
Argues, against common sense, that the bodily response to a stimulus comes first and the felt emotion is the perception of that bodily change - we feel afraid because we tremble, not the reverse.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hans Selye
The original brief report proposing that a wide range of unrelated harmful agents provoke the same non-specific bodily response, founding the concept of biological stress and the general adaptation syndrome.
Ed Diener, Robert A. Emmons, Randy J. Larsen & Sharon Griffin
Introduces a short, five-item scale for global life satisfaction and argues that judging one's life against self-chosen standards is a distinct and measurable component of wellbeing, separate from momentary positive or negative mood.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward L. Deci
Reports that paying people for a task they already found interesting reduced how much time they later spent on it voluntarily, the original experimental evidence that external rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Christina Maslach & Susan E. Jackson
Introduces the Maslach Burnout Inventory and argues burnout among people in caring professions has three distinct components - emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment - rather than being one undifferentiated state.
Sheldon Cohen, Tom Kamarck & Robin Mermelstein
Introduces the Perceived Stress Scale, arguing that how overloaded and unable to cope a person feels predicts illness better than simply counting the stressful events that have happened to them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Judith LeFevre
Using experience-sampling of workers through the day, finds people report more of the subjective markers of flow at work than during leisure, even though they say they would rather be doing something else.
Susan A. Jackson & Herbert W. Marsh
Develops and validates the Flow State Scale, operationalising Csikszentmihalyi's nine-dimension account of flow as a measurable psychometric instrument rather than a purely descriptive concept.
James J. Gross
Distinguishes strategies that change emotion before it fully develops, such as reappraisal, from strategies that manage it after the fact, such as suppression, and shows the two have very different costs for memory and physiology.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Richard M. Ryan & Edward L. Deci
People are intrinsically motivated to the extent an activity satisfies three basic psychological needs - autonomy, competence and relatedness - and external rewards can undermine motivation that already meets them.
11 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Edwin A. Locke & Gary P. Latham
Summarising decades of studies, argues that specific, difficult goals reliably produce higher performance than vague or easy ones, provided the person is committed to the goal and gets feedback on progress toward it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky & Max H. Bazerman
Argues that specific, difficult goals - the same prescription found to boost performance - also reliably produce narrow focus, unethical shortcuts, excessive risk-taking and eroded intrinsic motivation, side effects the goal-setting literature had systematically failed to report.