Post 7: Self-Conscious Emotional

Emotions help individuals to deal with life situations whether it is a joyful or unpleasant event. It is completely healthy to express our emotions. Different researchers identified basic emotions as joy, anger, sadness, disgust, shame, and fear. Self-conscious emotions are basically about self and forms in the process of self-evaluation and self-reflection. Therefore, self-conscious emotions entail reference to self in terms of various emotions such as pride, shame, guilt, remorse, jealousy, and embarrassment, and so on. 

Individuals develop self-conscious emotions depending on how they understand the rules, standards, norms, and values of the social environment. Self-conscious emotions are influenced and shaped by how we view ourselves and how we believe others perceive us. Understanding this interconnectedness can be complex. Now let’s try to understand Sheldon’s self-conscious emotional experiences.

I previously described Sheldon’s emotional orientation to some degree when making a point of his arrogance and enjoyment when it comes to physics. It is not fair to generalize one’s self-conscious emotions to every situation although it might be often consistent. So, I will look at one vignette when Sheldon was invited to collaborate with one of his colloquies, Bert, on a science project in Geology.

We know so far that Sheldon does not respect any other fields other than physics. Moreover, his hubristic personality does not let him respect other physicists as well. Sheldon keeps his collaboration with Bert secret as he feels ashamed of working with him who is in the geology field. He is ashamed of working with Bert because his ego thinks that he is not “smart.” We understand this when Sheldon caught up by his friend colloquies when Bert brought Sheldon’s jacket and saying, “you forgot your jacket in my office” while Sheldon’s friends were around. Sheldon expressed embarrassment due to his pride. Accordingly, Bert decides at that moment that he does not want to work with Sheldon anymore.

Sheldon goes to Bert’s office to ask to work again by promising that he will be less mean to him even though he does not believe this idea internally. Sheldon does not even apologize to Bert for the inappropriate behavior. His excessive pride keeps him away from apologizing to someone who is not important according to his values. The reason he goes was only Sheldon’s desire to do that physics work rather than wanting to work with Bert. Then, Sheldon just finds out his friend, Leonard and Bert start a collaboration to do the work Sheldon wants to do. Sheldon becomes surprised and betrayed when he sees their collaboration. Even though it is hard to figure out the reasons for Sheldon’s jealousy and remorse. I can tell that Sheldon still focuses on what “his ego” wants rather than the social awkwardness that he caused. He still does not apologize while trying to convince Bert to work with him. Consequently, Bert denies his offer for help. Sheldon left with his anger as a result of his pride and shame he expressed earlier. 

Post 6: Sheldon's competence: Internal, uncontrollable, and stable

    The Attribution Theory aims to explain people’s reasons of motivations and emotional outcomes. Depending on the outcomes being positive or negative, certain types of accompanying emotions arise as a result of life events. That is, if the life event is related to happiness, the following emotions could be pride, gratitude, hope, which were positive in nature. In contrast, if the life event has sadness and frustration in it, the emotional outcomes could be in the spectrum of anger, pity, guilt, and shame, which are regarded as negative. 
    

    Weiner’s attribution theory categorizes the reasons whether they are external or internal (locus of control), controllable or uncontrollable, and stable or unstable. Although the theory is somewhat outdated today in capturing more mixed emotions, it is still powerful in explaining basic human behavior and considered as seminal in the psychological research. Depending on contextual factors, the attributions can vary in between of these components. 

    Although it is fair to categorize Sheldon’s motivation and emotion into certain type of descriptive attributions, he seems to follow similar patterns in his life circumstances. If we were to look at his beliefs on his perceived-competence, it is stable, internal, and uncontrollable. 

It is stable because Sheldon has this belief that his competence is given to him and it is an innate talent that he has. Thus, it is not controllable and comes from inside. Accordingly, his perceived-competence is internal. This is a bit interesting in a sense that when most people think that they are talented and smart, they might tend to believe that they do not have to put so much effort in achieving tasks because it is within them rather than developing entity. But even though Sheldon seems to be firmly believing that his skills are inborn, God-given just like his mother believes, he spends most of his time in doing physics. evidently, starting from his childhood. His career choice is also aligned with his so-called "given" skills. Because he loves physics and his one of the biggest desires is to be the best physicist in the planet, he hold strong and intense emotions toward success and failures outcomes related to physics.

If he successfully completes a task about physics, he has so much pride. On the contrary, when he experiences a failure (recalling the competition that he lost) he has anger and shame. This is due to the firm belief that his competence was given, and the failure outcome almost does not make sense considering his high competence. More specially, because Sheldon attributes this negative outcome to an internal and uncontrollable cause. Consequently, he always tries to protect his identity with pride along with his high achievements in his career. His huge ego cannot take any failure for that matter and thus organically reveals the emotional side of Sheldon: Angry and more angry! We shall see if Sheldon would be able to change his fixed mindset on his perceived-competence and find a way to mitigate his emotional reactions in more productive directions.

Post 5: Sheldon's Fear of Failure

    Goal complexes could be explained through multiple approaches. One of the most common approach is the hope for success and the fear of failure. That is, people tend to hope that they will always succeed their determined tasks. Accordingly, they either work harder to reach their success goals or sometimes lower benchmarks to keep their perception on their success stable. People who work harder and believe in themselves fall in the scale of optimistic and overstrivers. Optimistic have higher confidence in their competence and are positive toward achieving more cognitively demanding tasks. Overstrivers fear from failure and put excessive effort to keep their confidence balanced with their perception of success. On the other hand, people who lower their benchmarks or even deciding not to set any tasks for themselves due to the fear of failure fall into the spectrum of failure avoiding or failure accepting. Failure avoiding behavior encompasses fear and low self-competence that lead people to lower the expectations for themselves. Failure accepting people tend to not try and usually are with a lower confidence.

    When looking at Sheldon Cooper, his primary goal was to be successful in physics: his beloved discipline. He always expected to do well and never endure any failure. In one of the episodes, Sheldon and his wife Amy came up with a discovery and started to develop ideas to publish a paper on the Asymmetry Theory. They both believed that this discovery was outstanding and could change the direction in physics significantly. Sheldon and Amy put lots of effort and energy to develop and conceptualize this theory and even stay up late to complete the work. Those behaviors showed that Sheldon and Amy were intrinsically motivated and set their goal toward accomplishing this task. Sheldon was already confident that this was a genius idea and was proud that he was the one who came up with it. 

    Yet, Sheldon’s best friends, Leonard and Howard, found out that some Russian physicist were already published a paper in Russian, where they discovered the Asymmetry Theory. Leonard were too hesitant to share the devastating news with Sheldon as they anticipated how Sheldon would react to that after all investments on the idea. And the conclusion was exactly how Leonard was expected: Sheldon was shocked and upset that somebody else explored the theory long before than him. Sheldon was apparently too much set to achieve his goal and this circumstance devastated him for a while. 

    This scene could be evidence that he was an overstriver almost all the time and what happened to him was unacceptable in his system of thinking. Interestingly though Sheldon as acting overstriver revealed how much Sheldon afraid of losing in life especially when it comes to physics. Sheldon’s one of the fears could be about his decreasing confidence as he strongly connected his physics confidence to his outstanding accomplishments. He might have taken this failure as a de-validation of his competence. Because he values looking competent all the time in physics, this incident seemed to be impacted his emotions strongly.

    This vignette demonstrates how emotional he could become when he encounter a failure in physics despite the fact that this was not connected to his competence. His fear of failure manifested itself when he screamed and smashed his white board. Sheldon acted as a fixed mindset person considering some of the failures in his job as commensurable to his actual competence. Sheldon often times forgot the fact that even great minds can make mistakes. The important thing is to orient ourselves to learn from our mistakes.

Post 4: Sheldon and the Value of Physics

Values play an important role in motivation. One’s motivation can be explained number of personal reasons that is structured internally or externally. In fact, understanding the values are a bit difficult to capture without asking certain questions to the protagonist.

Considering Sheldon Cooper’s motivation to study physics and to become a great one can be explained his value of competence. Reflecting back, desire for autonomy, competence, and relatedness emerge organically in one’s actions. Even though it is a bit challenging to examine one’s value structures, some of the elements altogether might give some idea regarding how Sheldon valued physics and related activities. 

Values can stem from various aspects. First, Sheldon’s values for doing physics is about proving his competence, which Atkinson explain this as achievement motivation. He is always arrogant and humiliating when it comes to demonstrating his competence in general but also particularly at physics. He has this huge desire for achievement. Next, Sheldon also values physics starting from his childhood. Even though it might be difficult to make sense of how Sheldon had began valuing physics, his interest might have been an explanation for his value. If Sheldon would have valued physics just for getting good grade, he would not be able to become a physicist when grade lost its meaning. That is, becoming a physicist neither involves a high-pay nor appraisal from faculty as there are numerous people in his department who are also successful. So, external rewards were not part of his motivation and values for studying physics.

From this perspective, Sheldon seems to be valuing physics itself as a discipline rather than its perks although reputation might be also part of his expectations. These desires seem to be intertwined and impossible to separate for analytical purposes. Competence and enjoyment along with appraisals might be all part of Sheldon’s value structures to become a physicist. 

Sheldon has never ending enjoyment and interest toward physics itself, which has almost never been influenced by external factors. Even failures! Once, Sheldon attended in a physics bowl (a physics competition) against his three colleagues within the same university, Caltech. He lost this competition since he could not give an answer to the final question. Yet, this failure did not push Sheldon away from doing more physics. In contrast, he became even more persistent to do better in his work. He is stubborn when it comes to becoming highly competent in physics. Sheldon gives the impression that he created all the physics and nobody else can understand as much as Sheldon can. This piece demonstrates his academic confidence as a physicist and his ownership on physics knowledge. Seeing how nothing can discourage Sheldon to be a physicist might be evidence that his values are intrinsic and independent from other people’s success or discouragements. In fact, his values help Sheldon to always stay motivated for working harder in spite of challenges.

Post 3: Where did Sheldon's efficacy go?

Expectancy-Value Theory explains motivation through an individual’s self-efficacy beliefs. Self-efficacy is one’s beliefs on their capacity to perform a course of action successfully. Self-efficacy beliefs develop depending on different components of life experiences. These experiences are a personal history of success or failure, social messages, role models (vicarious learning), and personal feelings and reflections. It is important to note that self-efficacy is context-dependent and the level of self-efficacy can change across situations. According to the Expectancy-Value Theory, people put more effort into tasks if they believe and almost certain that they are capable of accomplishing it. Otherwise, they tend to doubt their competence and thus tend to not put much effort into it. 

Turning to Sheldon, it seems that his self-efficacy was quite stable on physics overtime. Considering Sheldon’s good relationship with physics throughout his school journey, his self-efficacy was fed by his prior accomplishment along with his interest in science. We cannot make sure if Sheldon had a role model, but Einstein, the physicists, might have inspired him to become one. Sheldon's enjoyment and satisfaction in physics-related problems might be considered as physiological feedback that boosts his self-efficacy beliefs.

We see Sheldon’s avoidance of social activities. This might prove the fact that he did not believe his self-efficiency in social relationships. Accordingly, he avoided starting close relationships although he had overcome this obstacle by putting effort into improving his interpersonal skills. Later in the TV show, Sheldon started a new hobby, becoming a YouTuber through his channel called “Fun with flags” to contribute his social skills. But he was not able to become popular, which added so much fun to the TV show. This might be a great example to ungeneralizable nature of self-efficacy. His orientations to master different skills might be an indication that he generally feels self-efficacious. Yet, his less of competence in becoming a decent YouTuber proves the point that he was not self-efficient in becoming a good one! Yet, his self-efficacy on physics led him to reach his goal on becoming a respected physicist, which had come true in the end! 

Post 2: Self Determined and Cognitively Conscious

Human motivation can be explained through self-determination theory in relation to two major aspects; intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation can be thought as in a continuum regarding to what extent people willingly motivated to engage in a given task and life experiences. Extrinsically motivated people depend on external factors in completing tasks. In contrast, intrinsically motivated individuals perform an activity because they have sets of values, enjoyments, and interest that arise internally within person.

Bearing in mind the aspects of self-determination theory, I will analyze Sheldon’s character. Since his childhood, Sheldon had developed a strong scientific attitude toward physics. Sheldon’s strong desire to become a scientist despite his ill-educated parents shed light on his intrinsically motivated characteristics toward science. In some of the episodes, Sheldon was isolated from his social environment to solve a complicated physics problem. His desire to solve this problem was not external pressure such as high-pay or getting published, but just was about satisfaction for his competence.

Self-determination theory have two sub-theories; Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) and Organismic Integration Theory (OIT). Taking major tenets of CET into account might help to explain Sheldon’s intrinsic behavior more in-depth. In order for intrinsic motivation to develop, three basic elements are necessary to be met. These basic human needs are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. If any of these elements are not present in human’s environment then, they may experience lack of motivation to strive for their goals.

Sheldon, a highly competent physicist, was fed from his desires to become the best physicist on earth almost in an arrogant manner. His perceived and actual competence was equally met with the challenges he encountered in his academic life, which led him to the state of flow. Flow involves the highest concentration that one can potentially reach while doing tasks with full of enjoyment (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Sheldon’s intense emotional reflections while he was engaging in challenging physics problems indicates his flow experiences. It was prevalent in his experiences that the physics was part of his life rather than a job to do. Sheldon’s intense feelings such as pleasure, enjoyment and even sometimes frustration when he was stuck in doing physics problems were manifestations of flow.

Sheldon’s high level of interest, alignment, and engagement with physics activities were related to his autonomy. Sheldon had felt free to decide how he wanted to spend his time. Also, he was self-determined in achieving his end goal of obtaining a Nobel Prize to verify his competence in physics. His inherent interest and pleasure in physics were evidence to his intrinsic motivation that were free from external motivation such as family and peer pressure.

Sense of belonging to a community is crucial in achieving determined goals. Relatedness is a vital component of intrinsic motivation. Even though Sheldon seemed that he did not need other people around to attain his goals, once Leonard, his physicist roommate, moved in his girlfriend’s apartment, Sheldon suddenly become depressed. Sheldon, then, realized the need for emotional bonds and attachment to a friend. In later episodes, Sheldon had a girlfriend, Amy, who cared for him, and begun to trust her deeply. 

Despite Sheldon’s incredible resistance to have a friend and a girlfriend in the beginning, he was able to adjust and realize how a community building was essential part of his well-being and success. Acceptance by friends the way he was also had huge impact in Sheldon’s willingness to be part of a community. Sheldon already had confessed the value of his friend’s support in his endeavors during the final episode, where Sheldon finally had received a Nobel Prize for his outstanding achievement in his career. 

All in all, despite the fact that Sheldon was quite self-determined and intrinsically motivated person, his motivation to strive further was contingent on integrals of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. It is challenging to understand one’s actual reasons for motivation to accomplish tasks. Although Sheldon often times believed that his interest and abilities in physics were innate to his personality, there seemed to be other associated factors such as autonomy provided or taken, perceived competence, and relatedness to other members of community. If one of these pieces were not present, Sheldon had experienced an imbalance in his functioning in life, resilience, even psychological difficulties in spite of his conflicting beliefs about these influences on his human being.

Reference
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond boredom and anxiety: The experience of flow in work and play. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Post 1: A Peculiar Character: Sheldon Cooper

Sheldon Cooper was a protagonist character in American TV show called Big Bang Theory. He was a peculiar smart physicist at Caltech. His mother was very authoritarian woman who always directed Sheldon's behavior. His father was a drunk person, who was probably verbally abusing Sheldon's mother. Even though Sheldon was not very friendly, he lived with a roommate who worked at the same university. Later, Sheldon had a girlfriend, Amy, who was also smart scientist just like Sheldon. She worked on Sheldon to help him with his various obsessions.

Sheldon's one of the desires was to win a Nobel Prize in his academic lifetime. He is an intrinsically motivated person. He always saw physic in his everyday life with his extreme abstract thinking capacity. His mom praised Sheldon due to his extraordinary smartness and motivation for physic interest. Thus, he tended to think that he was the smartest person on the planet. This thought of him made him arrogant, which lead him to overlook other people's resources and skills. He was in the range of introvert closer to the extreme point. He was not able to communicate and connect with another human being except his mother and grandmother. Sheldon seemed addicted to live with his roommate (Leonard) and his neighbor across the door (Penny), this seemed more like an obsession rather than a connection or friendship. Sheldon was an obsessive person, which probably made him to persist with challenging physicist tasks for hours. He was also obsessed with keeping his schedule exactly the same everyday including the preciseness of the time. He always wore same type of clothes for years, sat at the same part of the couch, and watched same several movies weekly over and over again.