Nonconscious goals and ‘mysterious moods’

Are you in control of your faculties? When you suddenly are in a bad mood, do you really know why?

Why you can be in a bad mood without knowing why

Carl Gustav Jung, one of the early psychoanalysts, once said that just as we cannot see stars in daytime because it is too bright, dreams never stop when we are awake; we just cannot see them. In the same manner, the core hypothesis of Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic theory was that most mental activity is unconscious. But scientific evidence on this issue has been rather sparse.

Enter Tanya Chartrand, PhD and Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Ohio State University. In an upcoming article, Chartrand shows evidence that “mystery moods” may be the result of how well people achieve goals they did not know they had. If we succeed at an unconscious goal, we may be in a good mood. If we fail, we may suddenly feel down without knowing why.

Chartrand has conducted a variety of studies of what happens when people Non-conscious motivation is an everyday phenomenon fail or achieve nonconscious goals. In one study, she suggested the idea of achievement to a group of students by using words like “strive”, “success” and “achieve”. Next, Chartrand gave half of the students an easy puzzle that all were likely to solve; and half received an impossible puzzle that guaranteed failure. The students then filled out a mood questionnaire.

The results were striking: the students who were primed to think of achievement showed significant mood changes if they succeeded or failed. A control group with no priming showed no mood changes.

On June 15, at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society, Chartrand suggested that nonconscious goals play an important role in everyday life – for students in school or employees at work, to people at parties. We may start consciously wanting to be brilliant and charming at parties, winning friends and lovers. Over time, these goals might be linked in memory with the party environment. The original goals may fade from consciousness, but they may be triggered again by the party environment, so that we unconsciously want to be brilliant and charming every time we attend a party. If reality does not cooperate, we may find ourselves in a negative mood.

What may the function of unconscious goals be? Chartrand speculates that they save us cognitive resources, since we are relieved from constantly making judgements and decisions. If we constantly have to think about our goals we would not be able to do anything else.

These findings could be useful in treating mood disorders, like depression and anxiety. Depressed patients have a bias towards negative thoughts (Weisbrod et al., 1999). Perhaps they cling to unconscious goals that are unrealistic, and have disappointing experiences as a result. Talking about unconscious goals might make it possible for them to change, to avoid too much disappointment.

Copyright © 2002 T.Z. Ramsøy

Further Reading

Prof. Tanya Chartrand homepage 1 and homepage 2

Keywords: Mystery moods, semantic priming, nonconscious goals, automatic processing, social environment

References

Chartrand, T. L. (under review). Mystery moods and perplexing performance: Consequences of succeeding and failing at a nonconscious goal.

Chartrand, T. L. & Bargh, J. A. (in press). Guiding light: Nonconscious goal pursuit. To appear in A. Tesser, D. Stapel, & J. Wood (Eds.), Psychological perspectives on self and identity (vol. 2). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Press.

Bargh, J.A. & Chartrand, T.L. (2000). The mind in the middle: A practical guide to priming and automaticity research. In H. Reis & C. Judd (Eds.), Handbook of Research Methods in Social Psychology (pp. 253-285). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479.

Weisbrod, M. (1999). Emotional priming in depressed patients. German J Psychiatry, 2, 19-47.