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In a Hungarian study, 75% of people, who explicitly reported a strong growth mindset, also stated to be at least sometimes judgmental of themselves and to ruminate about setbacks (Orosz, et al., under review). The aim of our study is to explore whether there is an automatic layer that activates during “on the spot” situations – for instance when receiving criticism or facing a challenge. People might state to view such a situation as an improvement opportunity, while reacting differently in reality. In certain situations - like socially-sensitive ones (Forscher, Lai, et al., 2019), explicit (self-report) measures might not be the most appropriate to use due to social desirability. It may also be a questionable practice in personally sensitive situations, as we do not want to admit something that is threatening to our self-esteem (Farnham, Greenwald, & Banaji, 1999) and some elements may also be unclear for the individual to self-report (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Thus, we developed an implicit association measure to explore whether there is a difference between people’s implicit and explicit attitudes towards criticism and challenge. The measure is a Go/No-Go Implicit Association Task, where the target category is criticism and the attribute categories are positive and negative words, while the distractor category includes school-related words. The aim of our study is to explore the relation between explicit and implicit criticism attitudes and whether they predict mastery behaviors on a recent behavioral task (challenge-seeking, effort, persistence and resilience - PERC task, Porter, 2020). We expect that more positive implicit criticism and challenge attitudes will predict higher PERC scores. Based on a pilot study (n=193), we expect that deliberation and intuition will moderate our results.

The aim of the present study is to investigate how the relationship between growth mindset and mindfulness intervention can facilitate coping with the adverse motivational effects of negative feedback. A student’s mindset beliefs about him or herself can powerfully influence to which degree they learn and advance in school. A student with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence (IQ) is stable and unchangeable, while a student with a growth mindset believe that intelligence can develop and improve with training. The present study combines this belief change with mindfulness based on the notion that mindfulness leads to stress reduction and better cognitive performance under academic pressure. The goal of this project is to investigate the effect of mindfulness intervention on motivation in different mindsets. Formerly, short online mindset interventions were effective in terms of better long-term grades and motivations. We hypothesize that mindfulness might play a key role in learning from failures through the reduction of self-judgmental thoughts and feelings.