Basic Psychological Needs and the Facilitation of Integrative Processes: A Personality Neuroscience Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research has shown that people's abilities to develop and act from an integrated sense of self are facilitated by fulfillment of the basic psychological needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy. However, few studies have examined the neurophysiological processes that support the integrative functions of need fulfillment. In the present research, I therefore used neuroscience methods to examine the neural correlates of need fulfillment. In the first study, I used event-related potentials to examine the association between need fulfillment and conflict negativity (CN), a measure of conflict during personal decision making. Participants completed a decision-making task in which they made a series of forced choices according to their personal preferences. The degree of decisional conflict was manipulated on the basis of participants' unique preference ratings for the target stimuli. Results indicated that people reporting higher levels of need fulfillment exhibited larger CN amplitudes in high- relative to low-conflict situations; by contrast, people reporting lower levels of need fulfillment exhibited CN amplitudes that poorly discriminated the decision situations. In the second study, I used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to examine the association between need fulfillment and activity within the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), a key region involved in self-referential processing. Young adults were asked to reflect on their personal characteristics in the remembered past, perceived present, and imagined future. Results indicated that people reporting higher levels of need fulfillment exhibited similarly high levels of right-MPFC activity across the three self-reflection conditions; by contrast, people reporting lower levels of need fulfillment exhibited elevated right-MPFC activity only when reflecting upon their current characteristics. Together, these two studies suggest that need fulfillment may promote integrated self-functioning by increasing people's receptivity to and processing of events that challenge their abilities to make efficient, self-congruent choices and by increasing the integration of temporally distant self-representations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".