Prime Theory Of Motivation
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Metacognition appears to feature in some of the newer CBT approaches, I'm assuming the planning, evaulations, and motives components involve regular cognition. But how does metacognition fit in with the model?
15/08/2011
 
That is a very good question. Metacognition is generally thought of as thinking about thinking. It requires self-awareness. PRIME Theory allows for any mental representation to be the subject of evaluations and motives (wants and needs) and for the act of thinking to be the subject of plans. The same principles would be considered to apply as to any other representation of the world. Thus a person might be persuaded that thinking about an issue in a particular way would be beneficial, this may lead them to want or need to do this and so they would form an intention to do it which may or may not lead to this happening depending on what is going on when the appropriate time comes (they might forget, change their mind, be overpowered by competing motives etc.) 
15/08/2011
Does that mean an active 'evaluation' of 'motives' (in a feedback kind of process), which enables the generation of new competing motives. Does this have relevance for the automatic verses controlled processing in cogniitve neuroscience? in that metacognition might moderate the effect of automatic proccesing by strengthening controlled proccessing?
17/08/2011
 
I think you are right. This then raises the question about about and under what conditions one can foster this kind of process. 
20/08/2011
It certainly seems an interesting avenue for developing and testing interventions based in this principle. I've some of the other posts here there has been discussion of evaluations 'pathologising' lower elements in the system, and this to me seems related to the post on thought action fusion. I'm aware that a paper by Hoyer, Hacker, and Lindenmeyer (2007) looked at how alcohol related intrusions are appraised and found replicable factors around 'uncontrolability and thought action fusion' and 'unpleasantness'. This appears to indicate automatic alcohol related intrusions might be evaluated in ways that generate motives for avoiding, ruminating on, or suppressing intrusions which either might either prevent the generation of new motives (in the case of avoiding), or amplify and elaborate those intrusions (in the case of the second two).
24/08/2011
 
Many thanks for those thoughts and the reference to Hoyer et al.  
18/09/2011
could metacognition be interpreted in terms of dispositions?
26/08/2011
 
Yes it could. Dispositions to form particular kinds of mental representations and process information in particular ways. 
18/09/2011
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