autotelic

comparative more autotelic · superlative most autotelic

1. process; person or personality; process; person or personalityhuman sciencesContaining its own meaning or purpose; deriving meaning and purpose from within.

   Chess itself, however – the playing of the game – is most frequently engaged in, as we say, for its own sake, as an autotelic activity rather than as a teleological one. The majority of utterances of a language are teleological, aiming at informing […]

   2012, J.F. Rosenberg, Linguistic Representation, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 6

   2 more examples

   1988, Antonella Della Fave, Fausto Massimini, 12: Modernization and the changing contexts in work and leisure, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi (editors), Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness, Cambridge University Press, 1992, Paperback, page 208, It is possible that these three people have jobs that are more autotelic than those of the rest of this group; that they have more responsibility, more initiative and challenge at their workplace than is usual for employees of their type.

   Non-autotelics' intrinsic motivation tends to increase if they devote time and give concentration, attention and energy to EFL tasks; some non-autotelic students become more autotelic if they perceive the activities interesting and important for their future goals; if some of the non-autotelics devote some time and focus their attention on an activity, that activity becomes more autotelic.

   2015, Beata Telążka, “A Selective Study on Subjective Attitudes and Objective Achievement of Autotelic and Non-autotelic Students of English as a Foreign Language”, in Ewa Piechurska-Kuciel, Magdalena Szyszka, editors, The Ecosystem of the Foreign Language Learner: Selected Issues, Springer, page 66

2. Of or pertaining to the quality of (a thing's) being autotelic.

   1 more example

   1988, Kevin Rathunde, Optimal experience and the family context, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi (editors), Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness, 1992, Paperback, Cambridge University Press, page 251, The autotelic score was negatively correlated with the anxiety/ambiguity score r = −.57 and negatively correlated with the boredom/rigidity score r = −.36.

3. artNot motivated by anything beyond itself; thematically self-contained.

   “Running Water Music II” represents a contemporary version of the autotelic poem, freer than its modernist predecessors to assert connections, celebrate openly, declare connections between self and world, but bound by semantic and imagistic frames that derive from a single source.

   1989, Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century, Cambridge University Press, published 1991, →ISBN, page 112

plural autotelics

1. An autotelic person, a person with an autotelic personality.

   2 more examples

   Measuring autotelic personality similarly with young adults, Hektner (1996) confirmed that autotelics were least happy and motivated in apathy (low-challenge, low-skill) situations, whereas nonautotelics (those least motivated in high-challenge, high-skill situations) did not find the apathy condition aversive.

   2014, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Springer, page 254

   First of all, it can be inferred that both autotelics and non-autotelics designated the following English activities when their concentration, interest and attention were the highest: communicating in English, also with native speakers, watching English films and programmes, reading authentic materials, sight-seeing, listening to music and translating lyrics.

   2015, Beata Telążka, “A Selective Study on Subjective Attitudes and Objective Achievement of Autotelic and Non-autotelic Students of English as a Foreign Language”, in Ewa Piechurska-Kuciel, Magdalena Szyszka, editors, The Ecosystem of the Foreign Language Learner: Selected Issues, Springer, page 66