Can Giving Yourself Compliments Boost Motivation?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the only thing standing between you and endless motivation was saying nice things to yourself?

That was the question I was pondering when I started down the rabbit hole of articles on the science behind praise and compliments.

I searched and searched for research that specifically studied whether or not giving yourself compliments can be beneficial to increasing motivation or performance. I found a lot of intriguing articles dissecting different types of praise, amounts of praise, and giving praise to children versus adults. What I found was pretty interesting, even if everything I read didn't answer my initial question:

Receiving praise (at least, from other people) is great! …Sort of.

In a peer reviewed study titled Social Rewards Enhance Offline Improvements in Motor Skill (you can find the research article here), participants all learned the same finger-tapping sequence, and then were separated into three different groups.

One group received praise for their performance of learning the sequence.

One group witnessed praise of other participants’ performance but did not receive direct praise.

One group did not receive or witness praise.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

At the end of the first day of the study, all participants’ performance on recalling what they learned did not differ between the groups.

The next day, however, they were all invited back and performed a surprise recall test of the tapping sequence from the day before.

The group that received praise performed significantly better on the surprise recall test than the other two groups, regardless of whether participants were male or female.

The researchers thought that perhaps the group that received praise performed better due to increased motivation as a result of praise, so they asked all the participants in all groups to perform a new tapping sequence they hadn’t learned before. There was no significant difference in performance between groups.

While this particular study didn’t find significant differences between groups in terms of "motivation," it does suggest that receiving praise may be linked to performance as is relates to memory consolidation (explaining why participants who received praise didn’t do better right away but did better the next day).

Isn’t it amazing that the words we speak to others can have such an impact on the way their brain works!?

And this isn’t just a vague theory. This is quantitative, measurable data. Furthermore, there’s actually a scientific explanation for why:

The study linked above states, “A recent human neuroimaging study demonstrated that praise activates reward-related areas of the brain, specifically the ventral striatum [26]. Rewards are associated with increased dopaminergic activity in the midbrain and striatum, in which dopamine-dependent long-term potentiation (LTP) [28]–[30] has an important role in memory consolidation. The cortico-striatal system plays a critical role in the automatization of the type of motor sequence learning used in the present study [18], [31], [32]. Synaptic plasticity represented by LTP at cortico-striatal synapses strongly depends on the activation of dopamine circuits [33]. As the ventral striatum is the part of the reward system driven by dopamine [34], rewards are expected to affect motor skill consolidation. Taken together, present findings suggest that praise functions as “social reward” that induces the dopamine transmission in the striatum, resulting in an enhancement of the motor skill consolidation.”

When I read all of this, I immediately started looking for additional research that may correlate with these findings. I wondered, is all praise beneficial? Is there any situation where you could give someone too much praise? Is there such a thing as “too much of a good thing” when it comes to giving praise or compliments?

What I found surprised me. Stay tuned for the next post, where I explain what I found!

If you enjoyed this article, please give it a heart or a tip! Thanks for reading! -Anna Hagley