Chapter 1

Abstract

In achievement-related contexts, self-produced outcomes lead to self-evaluative reactions and to emotional experiences (Jucknat, 1938; Atkinson, 1957; Weiner, 1974, 1980; Heckhausen, 1977). Self-evaluations can basically be thought of as judgments, in that they involve the comparison of a perceptual input to some criterion. Classic research on the judgment of physical stimuli (e.g. Guilford, 1954) distinguishes between the internal or subjective representation of a set of stimuli (perceptual continuum) and the modality in terms of which the internal representation is expressed when a judgment is given (response continuum). This gives rise to the question of how the response continuum is ‘anchored’, that is, how different categories on the response scale come to be treated as equivalent to different stimulus values.