Open Question

What makes motivation gather momentum – and what makes it fall away?

What I’m trying to understand

Motivation rarely seems constant. Progress can make a goal feel increasingly possible and worth pursuing; a setback can change that surprisingly quickly. I’m interested in what governs those shifts.

What I can study

Some of that movement can be made observable: when attention leaves a goal, when it returns, how people respond to progress and setbacks, and how expectations change what they do next.

What I don’t know yet

Whether these are separate processes or parts of the same system. Does feeling that things are going well keep attention on a goal? Does attention itself help sustain its value? And when momentum is lost, what determines whether we return?

The current investigation

Dissertation

2026 – present

What determines when attention leaves a goal and when it comes back?

Why it matters. Losing focus and recovering focus are usually treated as two sides of the same thing. They may not be. Spending less time distracted could mean that attention is harder to pull away, or simply that it returns more quickly once it has wandered.

What I’m testing. Whether motivational conditions affect those two transitions differently. Rather than asking only how much time someone spends on or off task, I’m interested in the dynamics underneath that total: what predicts leaving, what predicts returning, and whether those are governed by the same factors.

Where it stands. I’m currently working through the experimental design and the boundary between motivation and attention. One of the central methodological problems is avoiding circularity: poor performance is not necessarily poor attention, and disengagement is not itself evidence of low motivation.

Follow investigation →

  1. Started from goal pursuit and ended up with a more basic question: leaving a goal and returning to it may be different psychological events.

  2. Found an important measurement problem. “More distracted” can mean more frequent departures, slower returns, or both.

  3. Began with a question about how people monitor alternatives while pursuing a goal. The alternatives turned out to be more interesting than the original design.

Other investigations

Developing

2026

Can mood act as a representation of momentum?

Control theories of behaviour have long suggested that affect reflects not simply where we are, but how quickly we seem to be progressing. More recent computational accounts make the idea recursive: recent outcomes alter mood, mood changes expectations about what comes next, and those expectations affect subsequent experience. I’m interested in what happens when that feedback becomes unusually strong.

Reading

2026

What does it actually mean for an approach system to be “dysregulated”?

High motivation is not necessarily dysregulated motivation. A system could respond too strongly, remain activated too long, fluctuate too much, or fail to disengage when circumstances change. These possibilities are often grouped together. I’m interested in whether they describe the same underlying phenomenon at all.

Developing

2026

Why can a small success change what feels possible next?

Progress does more than move us closer to an outcome. It can change confidence, expected success, effort, and even the scale of the goals we are willing to pursue. I’m interested in how those updates become self-reinforcing – and what happens when progress suddenly falls short of expectation.

Complete

2026

Is temperament something you’re handed, or something that gets negotiated?

I went in expecting handed, then shaped a bit. The differential-susceptibility and transactional work has me somewhere less tidy – closer to a thing that keeps getting re-negotiated between a child and an environment that are both reacting to each other. I still don’t know whether that negotiation ever really settles, or whether it’s supposed to keep going.

Complete

2025

Does early life stress leave a mark you can still read in the adult wiring?

The behavioural-neuroscience side points to functional connectivity, and adult reactivity downstream of it. I find the evidence persuasive and I don’t fully trust how persuasive I find it. It’s the kind of story that’s easy to want to be true.

Ideas that stayed

Carver & Scheier

Progress may matter relative to an expected rate, not simply as distance travelled. Affect can therefore carry information about whether pursuit is going better or worse than expected.

Johnson

“Reward sensitivity” may hide importantly different tendencies: how intensely someone invests in difficult goals and how strongly they react when progress accelerates or is thwarted are not necessarily the same thing.

Eldar, Niv & Rutledge

Mood may not simply follow outcomes. If it represents recent momentum and then changes how later outcomes are perceived, affect can become part of a feedback loop rather than merely its endpoint.

Urosevic et al.

The interesting claim in BAS dysregulation is not simply that some people have “more” approach motivation. Regulation could concern how strongly activation changes, how long it persists, what events trigger it, and how readily it returns to baseline.

Edges

Two people can encounter the same setback and lose very different amounts of momentum.

Sometimes progress changes more than confidence in one goal. It changes what else suddenly feels possible.

Staying engaged and returning after disengagement look similar from a distance. They may be different psychological achievements.