Imagining future success can sometimes enhance people's motivation to achieve it. This article examines a phenomenological aspect of positive mental imagery--the visual perspective adopted--that may moderate its motivational impact. The authors hypothesize that people feel more motivated to succeed on a future task when they visualize its successful completion from a third-person rather than a first-person perspective. Actions viewed from the third-person perspective are generally construed at a relatively high level of abstraction--in a manner that highlights their larger meaning and significance--which should heighten their motivational impact. Three studies in the domain of academic motivation support this reasoning. Students experience a greater increase in achievement motivation when they imagine their successful task completion from a third-rather than a first-person perspective. Moreover, mediational analyses reveal that third-person imagery boosts motivation by prompting students to construe their success abstractly and to perceive it as important.

After a mortality salience manipulation, participants completed measures of either ideological zeal (Study 1) or personal project zeal (Study 3). Mortality salience increased both kinds of zeal but only among participants with high self-esteem. High self-esteem was positively correlated with dispositional tendencies toward promotion focus, action orientation, and behavioral activation; it was negatively correlated with behavioral inhibition and rumination (Study 2). These findings clarify the role of dispositional self-esteem in mortality salience research and confirm that, as has been found with various other threats, zealous reactions to mortality salience are most pronounced among participants with high self-esteem. Results support a regulatory focus perspective on zealous reactions to threat. Ideological and personal zeal reflect motivated promotion focus reactions that are rewarding because they decrease the motivational relevance, regulatory fit, and subjective salience of threats.

This research examines the mediating role of victims’ embarrassment in explaining why apologies from transgressors sometimes affect victims’ reported forgiveness, but not actual forgiveness toward transgressors. Victims sometimes insincerely communicate forgiveness following a transgressor’s apology because they feel put on the spot and embarrassed and try to escape the awkwardness of such situations. The results of an online experiment supported our hypothesis by showing that victim embarrassment mediated the relation between a transgressor’s apology and victims’ reported forgiveness but not between a transgressor’s apology and victims’ experienced forgiveness.

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