Motivational psychology distinguishes between self-attributed or explicit motives that are part of people’s self-descriptions and implicit motives that are basically unconscious. Implicit motives are shaped first during ontogeny, have far-reaching consequences for feelings and behavior, and are measured by so-called Picture Story Exercises (PSE) in which participants express personal fantasies without any self-reference or restriction to actual life contexts. We will (a) give reasons why implicit measures have incremental value for cross-cultural investigations, (b) document methodological advances in implicit motive research, and (c) include an overview of current developments. We focus on findings documenting the significance of implicit motives for individuals’ behavior and psychological processes from evolutionary, developmental, and cross-cultural perspectives. We conclude that to improve our understanding and predictions of universal and culture-specific aspects of behavior by individuals’ motives within and across cultural groups, we need to supplement our reliance on self-report measures with implicit measures of motives.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss research in motivation, self-regulation, and emotion that includes gender as a variable. Specifically, we propose using an intersectionality perspective and a culturally situated understanding of women’s motivational and emotional experiences, and describe data from our labs in Germany and Singapore in order to illustrate this position. Our findings indicate that women’s motivational experience in achievement domains is tied to avoidant motivation and their lower ability to self-regulate negative emotion in the face of goal difficulties or goal failure. Compared to men, women’s more fearful enactment of the implicit achievement motives is related to their adoption of a lower self-attributed achievement motive, which, in turn, lowers women’s well-being. We discuss how cultural norms and gender socialization lead to a complex interplay of parenting, social-normative, and personality systems and processes that contribute to a different motivational and emotional experience for men versus women.