Harmonious and Obsessive Passion

Harmonious and Obsessive Passion

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

Robert Vallerand's dualistic model says passion is not one thing with a volume dial. Two people equally devoted to the same activity can be devoted in structurally different ways, and the difference is who is in charge. Harmonious passion is freely chosen and sits alongside the rest of a life. Obsessive passion has taken control of the person and pushes everything else out. The cleanest formulation is that harmonious passion controls the activity and obsessive passion is controlled by it. The model is well supported, and most of the evidence is correlational.

What it is

Vallerand defines passion, in Canadian Psychology in 2008, as a strong inclination toward an activity that people like, find important, and invest time and energy in. Activities become passionate when they satisfy needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness.

That last clause is self-determination theory, and Edward Deci and Richard Ryan are not named in the chapter this page draws on. The identification is this publication's, and it is one of two places in that book where the theory is used without its originators.

Harmonious passion arises from autonomous internalisation. The activity is freely accepted and done with volition. It becomes a significant but not overpowering part of identity, and it stays in harmony with the rest of life.

Obsessive passion is driven by contingencies such as self-esteem, excitement or self-acceptance, which come to control the person rather than being controlled by them. It is addictive in structure because the activity may be the person's only source of important psychological rewards, so stopping costs everything at once.

One relabelling should not be carried forward. The secondary source calls them healthy harmonious and unhealthy obsessive. Vallerand's own labels are neutral, and the evaluative gloss is the later author's addition.

In effect

The picture is easy to draw. Two people put in the same eighty-hour fortnight on the same project. One finishes it, goes to their child's thing on Saturday, and comes back on Monday. The other cancels the Saturday, because the project is the only place their sense of being a worthwhile person currently lives. From outside, the hours are identical. The model predicts they will diverge on vitality, on burnout and on whether they are still doing this in three years, and the mechanism is not effort but what the activity has been made to carry.

The measurement paper is Vallerand and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2003, which introduced a two-dimension scale. One correction belongs here: the original scale had seven items per subscale, later refined to six per subscale, and the secondary source's five harmonious and seven obsessive items match neither version and should not be reproduced as the scale.

On outcomes, harmonious passion predicts deliberate practice and performance, raises vitality over time, and relates to job satisfaction. Obsessive passion does the reverse: it resembles workaholism and predicts conflict and burnout. The supporting work is Thomas Curran, Andrew Hill, Paul Appleton, Vallerand and Martyn Standage's meta-analysis in Motivation and Emotion in 2015, which sits in that chapter's bibliography and is never cited in its prose. The identification is this publication's, and anyone publishing the outcome claims should open that paper.

Most of that evidence is cross-sectional or short-panel, so the findings should be framed as associations rather than as effects.

One claim in the chapter cannot be checked at all. It describes a neat path analytic study with no researcher named, no sample and no coefficients. That is unusable as it stands.

What it does not say

It does not say passion is good or bad. The two forms are structurally different, not morally ranked, and the evaluative labels sometimes attached are somebody's gloss rather than the construct's own language.

It does not establish causation. The outcome literature is largely cross-sectional or short-panel, and the honest verb is associated.

It has not been screened against its neighbours here. Whether harmonious passion is distinct from intrinsic motivation, and obsessive passion from workaholism, is exactly the jingle-jangle question, and this page does not claim it has been answered.

It does not supply a usable scale from the secondary source. The item counts printed there match neither the original nor the refined version.

Sources

  1. Vallerand, R. J., et al. (2003). "Les passions de l'âme: On obsessive and harmonious passion." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(4), 756-767. The scale. Original version seven items per subscale, later refined to six per subscale.
  2. Vallerand, R. J. (2008). Canadian Psychology, 49(1), 1-13. The definition of passion.
  3. Curran, T., Hill, A. P., Appleton, P. R., Vallerand, R. J., & Standage, M. (2015). "The psychology of passion: A meta-analytical review of a decade of research on intrapersonal outcomes." Motivation and Emotion, 39, 631-655. In the bibliography of the chapter used here and uncited in its prose; this publication's identification.
  4. Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Self-determination theory, which supplies the mechanism and is not named in that chapter.
  5. Furnham, A. The New Psychology, ch. 36. Six references, two cited in the prose, and they match. The "neat path analytic study" it describes has no author, no sample and no coefficients and is not used here. The reference list carries a standalone entry duplicating the 2003 paper under a co-author's name.