Two studies examined interactions of implicit power motivation and experimentally varied victory or defeat in a contest on implicit learning of a visuomotor sequence associated with the contest outcome and changes in testosterone and self-reported affect. In men and women, power motivation predicted enhanced learning (sequence-execution accuracy) after a victory and impaired learning after a defeat. In men, power motivation predicted testosterone increases among winners and decreases among losers, and testosterone decreases mediated the negative effect of power motivation on learning in losers. In women, power motivation predicted postcontest testosterone increases, particularly among losers. In both men and women, self-reported affective states were influenced only by contest outcome and were unrelated to participants' testosterone changes or implicit learning.

MARK VILLACORTA received his B.Sc. from McGill University and is currently a graduate student in the department of psychology at the University of Michigan. His primary areas of research interest are motivation, self-regulation, and goal orientation. RICHARD KOESTNER received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He is currently an associate professor in psychology at McGill University. His primary areas of research interest are self-regulation and goal-setting. NATASHA LEKES received her B.A. from McGill University and is currently studying community psychology at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. Her primary areas of research interest are the evaluation of programs and techniques to foster children's motivation, social competence, and moral development.ABSTRACT: A study was conducted to further validate the Motivation Toward the Environment Scale (MTES). Results confirmed both the convergent and discriminant validity of the MTES by showing that peer reports corresponded to self-reports of environmental self-regulation and that environmental self-regulation was relatively distinct from self-regulation in academic and political domains. Results also pointed to some possible sources of autonomous self-regulation. Individuals were more likely to engage in autonomous environmental behaviors if (a) their parents had shown an interest in their developing attitudes about the environment, (b) their peers supported their freedom to make decisions about the environment, and (c) they had already developed life aspirations such as concern for their community. Finally, results 486 AUTHORS' NOTE: This study was funded by grants Downloaded from confirmed the adaptive value of developing an autonomous regulatory style toward environmental activities. Thus, autonomous individuals were shown to report stable proenvironmental attitudes over time, a greater number of environmental behaviors, and higher levels of well-being.

Successful self-regulation is defined as the willingness to exert effort toward one's most important goals, while taking setbacks and failures as opportunities to learn, identify weaknesses and address them, and develop new strategies toward achieving those goals. Contingencies of self-worth can facilitate self-regulation because people are highly motivated to succeed and avoid failure in domains of contingency. However, because boosts in self-esteem are pleasurable and drops in self-esteem are painful, protection, maintenance, and enhancement of self-esteem can become the overriding goal. Several pitfalls for self-regulation can result, especially when tasks are difficult and failure is likely. In this article, we describe a program of research examining these self-regulation pitfalls associated with contingent self-worth and suggest that learning orientations, particularly the willingness to embrace failure for the learning it affords, foster successful self-regulation even in people with highly contingent self-esteem.

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