Progress-focused

People are not black or white, nor are they red, yellow, green or blue? People have many things in common, but of course there are also countless individual differences between people. Two ways we can think about these individual differences are dimensional thinking and categorical thinking. The dimensional way means that you look at a number of dimensions in which people can differ and then look at individual how they score on each of those dimensions. The categorical way means that you define a number of categories and then look at each individual to determine to which category they belong. 

A new paper by Di Domenico & Ryan (2017) describes how a neuroscience of intrinsic motivation is emerging. Intrinsic motivation is the total of our spontaneous tendencies to be curious and interested, to seek challenges, and practice to develop our skills and knowledge even in the absence of separate rewards. Research within the framework of self-determination theory has shown that intrinsic motivation is a motivation which is present throughout the life span and which is associated with various positive effects such as learning, performing, creativity, and well-being. But intrinsic motivation is dependent on the perception of one's own competence and autonomy. If these two basic needs are thwarted, we tend to be less intrinsically motivated.