Robert Vallerand’s study of the psychology of motivation was sparked by basketball.
“I was a basketball player on the Quebec provincial team and on a scholarship to play basketball at university,” he explains. “I really was very passionate about basketball.” And he wanted to know more about that kind of passion.
That was decades ago, and he could find no research on the psychology of motivation. His work since then has had a major role in shaping this field of study.
The $100,000 Tang Prize was awarded to Dr. Vallerand, a professor of social psychology at the Université du Québec á Montréal, for his important contributions to the psychology of motivational processes.
“I started to study the philosophers. There were these two sides of passion, the Greek philosophers who would say, ‘you know, passions are bad for you, because they control you.’ And then the Romantics later on, around the 1600s, 1700s, they were saying, ‘life is not worth living without passion.’
“So I realized that basically there are two types of passion, obsessive and harmonious. There is the positive side and of negative side of passion.” Our initial research ended up empirically supporting this hypothesis, thereby opening up a new field of research on the psychology of passion.
That lead to a career studying people who are “optimally functioning,” not only in their work but in their overall happiness and wellbeing. He sought to understand “what makes them tick” and what we can learn from them.
“What we find is that they have a harmonious passion for a lot of stuff in their life, including their work, or what they study or their leisure. He uses the example of Olympic athletes. “They have harmonious passion for what they do, they train hard, but most of them have actually a long career and they’re also passionate about other stuff in their life.
“Just like for me, for instance, I’ve been doing research for over 40 years, but I also have passion for basketball and playing guitar,” he says. “What you try to do is have little pockets of passion here and there and everywhere, in different areas of your life.”
Those who don’t have that balance in the passion in their lives, who have only one area of passion, tend “to be more obsessive in nature,” he says. “That obsessive passion will allow you to reach high level of performance because you spend a lot of time on it. The problem is that you’ll get anxious as you think about it, ruminate about it. And at some point, you may have a downside to your psychological wellbeing.” This is not the case with harmonious passion because it allows you to reach high levels of performance while enjoying the rest of your life as well.
Dr. Vallerand holds a Canada Research Chair in Motivational Processes and Optimal Functioning.
