Motivation and Action

Jutta Heckhausen is Distinguished Professor at the Department of Psychological Science, University of California Irvine. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, with a dissertation on natural instruction in mother-infant dyads. Her habiliation as the Free University of Berlin addressed agency and developmental regulation in adulthood. From 1985 to 2000, she worked first as a postdoc, and then senior researcher and leader of a research group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She joined the faculty at UC Irvine in 2001. Her research addresses the role of individual agents and their motivation in life-span development, particularly in response to regulatory challenges during life-course transitions, radical societal change, or when experiencing substantial losses or gains. A major topic of her work is the potential and limits of individual influence on social mobility under given institutional and social-structural constraints in different societies. Recently, she has focused on the motivational self-regulation in the context of the transition to adulthood, particularly in educational contexts and for groups differing in social and cultural access to mainstream higher education. Jutta Heckhausen’s research is published in the top international and North-American journals in developmental psychology, gerontology, and motivational psychology. She has received several awards for her work, among them the Baltes Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association and the Distinguished Career Contribution to Gerontology Award from the Gerontological Society of America.