ABSTRACT
Conceptions of personality and motivational processes in persons with mental retardation prior to the 1960s were only loosely related to theoretical models derived from mainstream psychological thought; and virtually none of the available knowledge was based on any sustained systematic study of the behavior of mentally retarded persons. Researchers were concerned primarily with identifying the cognitive deficits that characterized persons with mental retardation. Personality and motivational processes were deliberately ignored because they were viewed as confounding variables that should be controlled in studies on cognitive and learning processes (Haywood, 1971; Haywood & Switzky, 1986; Hobbs, 1963; Hodapp, Burack, & Zigler, 1990; Lipman, 1963). Over the past 30 years there has been a veritable explosion of research on persons with mental retardation (Balia & Zigler, 1979; Haywood & Switzky, 1986; Merighi, Edison, & Zigler, 1990; Zigler & Hodapp, 1991) that has described the complex interplay of personality and motivational processes with cognitive processes within a developmental perspective (Borkowski, Carr, Rellinger, & Pressley, 1990; Borkowski et al., 1992; Haywood, 1977; Haywood, Brooks, & Burns, 1986; Haywood, Meyers, & Switzky, 1982; Haywood & Switzky, 1992; Switzky & Haywood, 1984; Switzky & Heal, 1990). This new conceptualization of mental retardation is consistent with mainstream psychological thought concerning the development of human beings as active problem solvers (Leeper & Hodell, 1989; McCombs & Marzano, 1990; Paris & Newman, 1990; Sternberg & Berg, 1992; Stipek, 1993; Zimmerman & Schunk, 1989), and reflects the accelerating integration of a psychology of mental retardation and a developmental psychology of human growth for all human beings (Borkowski et al., 1990; Feuerstein & Feuerstein, 1991; Feuerstein, Klein, & Tannenbaum, 1991; Haywood & Tzuriel, 1992; Nicholls, Cheung, Lauer, & Pastashnick, 1989; Pintrich & Schrauben, 1992). This chapter begins with an overview of motivational research in mental retardation over the past 30 years. A second section reviews contemporary theories of personality and self-system processes of relevance to mental retardation. A final section provides a synthesis of available research with a view toward future research.
