Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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This movie has concepts from Chapters 6.

Next, write your comment. Your comment does not need to provide an overview of the movie (we have all seen it). Your comment should be an in-depth analysis of one or more principles from your text. You should use scenes and characters to provide examples of textbook concepts. Your comment should reflect that you are in an upper division, university level Motivation and Emotion course and clearly link elements from the movie to the textbook.  This is a comprehensive assignment (linking course lectures, textbook, and the movie) and you cannot do that in just a few short paragraphs. 500 words.

BE SPECIFIC. At the bottom of your comment, please put a list of the ME terms you used. 

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The movie focuses on Oskar and his life after losing his father. He befriends an old man and begins a journey to find out where the lock is to the key his father left behind. On this journey, one is able to analyze what level Oskar is at in relation to all three psychological needs.
The first psychological need I will address is relatedness. Relatedness focuses on the relationships people form with others and if those relationships foster a strong connection or not. Prior to losing his father, Oskar and him were very close. In the movie, you saw them spending lots of time together and you were able to assume they had quite a close relationship. Losing him probably affected Oskar’s level of relatedness for some time because he had ended up losing one of his strongest relationships. When it comes to Oskar and his mother’s relationship you are able to infer that they are not as connected but Oskar does care about her well-being and feelings. He exhibits this when he chooses to hide the answering machine from her to save her from having to listen to the final words from his father before dying in the 9/11 attack. Another relationship he develops throughout the movie is with the old man who is renting a room from his grandmother. At first he believes the old man is scary but soon they begin to form a relationship. At first you think this relationship will help Oskar quite a bit because the man resembles his father quite a bit and he is helping him on his journey, but then the man abruptly leaves and I believe that takes a toll on the relationship quite a bit. Overall, I would say Oskar is at a medium level as far as relatedness goes.
Next, I will talk about autonomy in relation to Oskar. Autonomy refers to the need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior. In other words, a person wants to be able to decide what they are doing, when they’re doing it, how they’re doing it, and if they will stop doing it. For Oskar this had to be high otherwise he struggled incredibly. Oskar fully committed to his choice to find out which Black the key belonged to and why his father had it. Although many times Oskar was told that he should just give up the search because it was pointless he made the choice not to because it was something he wanted to do. Even though his mother was worried about him she did not try to constrain him and prevent him from doing what he wanted. Since Oskar has this high level of autonomy he was able to reach his goal of finding out where the key belonged. The issue was that when he did reach the end of the journey it was hard for him because he had not made the decision to stop. When he reached the end and found out that the key in fact had nothing to do with his father he really struggled with this because he was not ready to let his father go. Eventually though he was able to make the decision to let his father go and autonomy was restored.
The final need is competence; which focuses on one’s need to be effective in interactions with the environment. I feel as though Oskar has this need met much more than he does the other two. He enjoys being challenged which is exhibited several times throughout the movie. In the beginning, his dad sends him on the mission of finding the 6th borough, and even though he never discoveries he still enjoys the thrill. The whole movie is based on a challenge of Oskar’s skills. He faces the task of hunting down which Black the key belongs to and even though it seems as though he will never complete it he uses the skills his father taught him to continue searching. An important factor of competence is receiving feedback. In a way, Oskar receives this from his mother in the end of the movie. She reassures him that his father would have been proud and is in awe about how organized he was when going about the search.

Terms:
Psychological needs
Autonomy
Relatedness
Competence
Feedback

Jon Lutz - section 01

The character Oskar in Extremely Loud and Incredibly close displays a clear imbalance in psychological needs. Throughout the course of the movie he enjoys nearly limitless autonomy and impressive level of competence. Though his perception of his goal is for competence, the actual source of his drive is a deficiency in relatedness, the void left by deceased father.
Oskar’s father instills an obsession for competence. An elaborate treasure hunt of the “6th burrow” is created for Oskar, which his father carefully constructs as an optimal challenge. If Tom Hanks fails at any of the three supporting characteristics of competence it would be “clear goals and guidance.” The clues he leaves Oskar are incredibly vague and appeared excessively difficult for a child of Oskar’s age. When Oskar asks for help his father just shrugs. Luckily, Oskar views the coy taunts as positive feedback only increasing his motivation. Oskar rarely shows anxiety, boredom, or indifference (emotions associated with skill/challenge imbalance) while pursuing the 6th burrow. His eyes are furrowed with concentration. His time is mostly spent hard at work, from which we can infer he probably enjoys the puzzle. Oskar appears to be in a flow state, to the extent that he misses the loads of relatedness he is getting from his mother and all the Blacks he meets. The film does show Oskar doing a handful of tasks which he undoubtedly learned from his father. This would entail hours upon hours of guidance from his father, but any evidence of these are shown in quick paced montages. It makes sense for a film to skim these scenes, but it cannot be overlooked when creating a skill/challenge balanced environment.
Oskar’s father dominates feedback and failure allowing context. He knows exactly how to press Oskar’s buttons in a stimulating way. He only shrugs when Oskar asks to general of questions. He leaves encouragement in the form of clues, which Oskar revels in. Most consistently, he never stops being a loving, warm, and encouraging father. Anytime Oskar fails to meet a task, Tom Hanks maintains productive interaction, emphasizing information based language. Oskar demonstrates his ability to recall presented information throughout the film, not just to other characters but even the audience through narration. He even needs you, the viewer, to be aware of his meta level competence.
Oskar’s hyperfocus on competence, and subsequent apathetic observation, explains the frustration of competence’s ability to satisfy his psychological needs. He expends large amounts of time and energy hunting down the people on his list. He views everyone one he meets as an exchange relationship. He is providing them with information so they will provide him with information. Even when presented with warmth, care, and mutual concern (hallmarks of healthy relatedness) he ignores their support. It is not until he perceives the people in his life as related to himself does he satisfy his need. He sees how similar his and his mother’s love is for his father. He sees how much his grandfather is like his father, the person he identified most with. Also he sees how William Black, Tom Hanks, and himself have similarly painful experience with paternity. Finally, the Blacks (all New Yorker’s) suffered a great loss on “the worst day.” Suddenly his relationship are communal, displayed by his sentimental thank-you letter at the end.

Competence
Autonomy
Relatedness
Drive
Optimal challenge
skill/challenge imbalance
Feedback
Failure facilitating context
Information based language
Exchange relationships
Communal relationships

I love that this movie was chosen to correlate with chapter six. As I was originally reading the chapter, I wondered how people on the autism spectrum met their psychological needs. Without going into too much detail, I grew up around people with special needs, and I know how challenging relationships can be for people on the spectrum. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was a perfect example of the challenge that people on the spectrum experience when trying to interact with others, but that it is still possible for them to satisfy their need for relatedness.

From the very beginning, Oskar’s dad was supporting his son’s relatedness by encouraging interactions with others through the quest to find the sixth borough. Relatedness, being a sense of belonging, grows through interaction with others and the perception that one is cared about and liked. The latter cannot be achieved until one has interaction with others. Oskar, being on the spectrum, did not have many interactions with others, let alone quality interactions. This started to change when his dad created the quest to find the sixth borough, but it intensified after his dad tragically died on 9/11.

A year after his dad’s death, Oskar built up the courage to go in his dad’s closet. By accident he found a key that he thought was meant for him, perhaps a clue for the quest. The reason he was so motivated to find what the key opened was because he thought it would bring him closer to his dad, the person he had the highest quality relationship. By trying to solve the mystery of the key, Oskar was trying to fulfill his need for relatedness. Although it wasn’t satisfied in the way he expected, it was met in so many ways.
Along Oskar’s search, he realized, “People aren’t like numbers; they’re like letters, and letters want to tell stories. Dad says stories need to be told.” At this point, as Oskar shared his story, and others shared their stories with Oskar, he started satisfying his need for relatedness. Plus, the strangers were getting some fulfillment of their need of relatedness.

Once Oskar met “The Renter,” he said he felt like he had someone to talk to for the first time since his dad died. Again, he was making a quality connection with someone; he felt like someone cared about him and liked him. This was confirmed when Oskar told his grandpa, “Come with me from now on.” Additionally, just like the strangers, Oskar’s grandpa was getting his need for relatedness satisfied too.

Another connection from chapter six to the movie is related to competence. At the beginning of the movie, Oskar questioned his dad, “If you don’t tell me (if I’m on the right track), how can I ever be right?” His dad’s response was, “How can you ever be wrong?” This outlines the concepts of optimal challenge and flow. His dad wanted to challenge Oskar enough that it pushed him to the limits of his skill set, especially in the area of communicating with others, yet still wanted him to succeed. Optimal challenge is when there’s a fifty percent chance of failure and a fifty percent chance of success, which is why tolerance of failure is important to achieving a high level of competence.

This importance of failure came full circle near the end of the movie. Oskar’s goal to find out why his dad left him the key was unsuccessful. In fact, it was impossible because his dad didn’t leave Oskar the key. Near the end of his search, Oskar threw a fit because his challenge was too high and was “giving way to the reality of being overwhelmed,” as described in the text. When he wrote all the people he had met, he explained that he was “glad to have disappointment because it was better than nothing.” This concurs with the idea that we can learn more from failure than success. I’d like to think Oskar learned the importance of relationships.

Terms: psychological needs, relatedness, competence, optimal challenge, flow

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a film following the unfortunate yet touching journey of a young boy named Oskar. Oskar is diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder (now classified under Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the DSM-5). He ritualistically follows schedules and lacks social/communication skills that most kids his age would be developing. However, he has a solid foundation set with his father, Thomas, who sends him on little scavenger hunts to help him come a bit more out of his shell. However, Thomas tragically dies in the abhorrent events of 9/11, and Oskar’s adventure begins. He finds a mysterious key in a vase labeled with the word “Black” and sets out to finish this final scavenger hunt. On this journey, he grows closer to his mother, his grandmother, and meets and befriends his grandfather. After returning the key to its rightful owner, Oskar creates a book about this grand scavenger hunt, and at the end finds a note from his late father, congratulating him for a journey well-completed.

To begin to analyze this film psychologically, I believe the best way is to analyze what occurs to Oskar after his father’s death. Thomas was essentially Oskar’s all-in-one psychological motivator and need-satisfier (supported Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness), and upon his death, Oskar faced a grand challenge. He had to replace everything his father represented to him with something/someone new. This makes this film a perfect metaphor for the Organismic Approach to Psychological Needs,

First and foremost, the Organismic Approach assumes that there is a person-environment dialectic. That is, the person influences the environment and the environment influences the person in a neat little reciprocal pattern. This dialectic is why you should begin with Thomas’ role, as this shows why the environmental change after his death is so hard for Oskar. It also better displays how Oskar is struggling to adapt, change, and grow in the face of the new changed environment.

Oskar (before his father’s death) lived in an environment that was entirely comfortable for him. His father facilitated his forays into socializing with the outside world and he never had to challenge himself on his own. His father satisfied every single one of Oskar’s psychological needs. His father provided him autonomy, in giving him the choice of when to talk to people. In the scavenger hunts, Oskar was never forced to socialize, he was just heavily incentivized to, and rewarded when he chose to do so. The phrase, “If things were easy to find they wouldn’t be worth finding,” is a highly autonomy-supportive phrase, as it provides so much of the necessary autonomous supports. It is informational, as it informs Oskar that this should not be easy for him. This informs Oskar that his nervousness is not bad, but normal. It also provides an explanatory rationale for Oskar. His father wants him to do this because it is hard, because it will help him grow. This gives Oskar an intrinsic motivator to latch onto and use after his father’s demise. This phrase also acknowledges Oskar’s negative affect towards socialization. Yes, it is indeed a hard thing to do, and Thomas does not shut down Oskar’s apprehension towards socializing as a controlling personality would.

Sans Thomas, Oskar had to find a new autonomous motivator. I believe he utilized his father’s phrase for this autonomy support. He internalized this phrase after years of hearing his father say it to motivate his behavior, and it became a powerful integrated regulatory motivator. Integrated regulation being an extrinsic motivator that fully becomes part of the self. While it is born of an extrinsic, environmental cause, it becomes almost entirely intrinsic because the person being handed the value internalizes and integrates the value so much that it becomes their own. Their thoughts and actions are fully dictated by this value and the person can report feeling these thoughts are their own, though they come from an outside source.

Thomas provided Competence support by constantly providing Oskar with optimal challenge. However, I believe it also may have been a bit of over-challenge, as Oskar never truly experienced the “flow” necessary to truly satisfy competency, that and Oskar seemed highly anxious in social situations (showing that there was High Challenge with Low Skill according to the Flow Model). However, his father constantly challenged Oskar to socialize more and more, providing challenge after challenge for Oskar to overcome. Thomas provided him with feedback, encouraging Oskar towards socializing and comforting him should he fail to do so. His father also provided plenty of clear structure, to complete a scavenger hunt, you must go talk to these people. Most importantly, Thomas provided failure tolerance when Oskar failed to rise to meet his challenge. As a child with ASD, socialization is difficult, but Thomas never punished/reprimanded Oskar for failing to socialize. He would provide necessary comfort and positive feedback to encourage Oskar to rise to meet the next challenge.

After Thomas’ passing, Oskar fills in his competency with the mysterious key. No longer being provided optimal challenges, Oskar must make his own. The key provides the perfect stand-in, as it provides Oskar with his first chance to really challenge himself. This is a huge stepping stone, as now Oskar is taking the responsibility to see if he can successfully challenge and motivate himself to overcome this obstacle. Upon realizing that there are nearly five hundred people with the last name “Black” in the phone book, Oskar is tasked with his biggest challenge yet, and he must face it without Thomas. However, with each Black crossed off the list, progress is made, and Oskar’s competency grows. He sees that he can socialize on his own, and that he is perfectly capable of accomplishing this task on his own. And little did he know that he was not performing this task on his own, but that Linda, his mother, was secretly helping him from the background. She was becoming a secret competency supporter, as she informed every Black Oskar went to visit of his arrival and his purpose, setting up the challenges for Oskar before he arrived to allow Oskar to grow his competency as he thought he was doing this all alone.

Finally, Thomas was truly the only bridge for Oskar’s relatedness. As a sufferer of ASD, Oskar had no friends, was estranged from his own mother, grandmother, and every other family member. His father was the only interaction Oskar truly enjoyed and received regularly, Oskar’s only true communal relationship.

Upon Thomas’ death, Oskar had a very hard time filling in this need. However, the only one to truly fit into this need-satisfying category is his grandfather, the “stranger” who lives with Grandma. As a man with his own checkered past, Oskar’s grandfather is a mute, using his own forms of communication to get his point across. This means he is the only person Oskar has met who really can relate to him. Their limited social skills form a quick bond that leads to Oskar opening up to his grandfather. This formation of a new communal relationship is displayed through Oskar’s trust in his grandfather to listen to Thomas’ phone messages left on 9/11 in the hidden answering machine. Oskar sees himself in his grandfather, a broken man whose parents died in similarly tragic circumstances. With his opening up with his grandfather, Oskar is better able to see the benefits of satisfying the relatedness need and is better able to open up to more people, even strangers like William Black (demonstrated with the confession to Mr. Black that Oskar had not picked up on his father’s final phone call on 9/11).

Terms Used:
Integrated Regulation – Pg. 132
Organismic Approach – Pg. 143
Person-Environment Dialectic – Pg. 144
Autonomy – Pg. 145
Informational Language – Pg. 150
Explanatory Rationale – Pg. 151
Competence – Pg. 154
Optimal Challenge – Pg. 155
Flow – Pg. 155
Flow Model – Pg. 156
Structure – Pg. 159
Failure Tolerance – Pg. 159
Positive Feedback – Pg. 160
Relatedness – Pg. 161
Communal Relationship – Pg. 163

This week’s movie is the 2011 drama, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This film was based off of a novel of the same name and follows Oskar Schell as he attempts to solve his dad’s final riddle. His father, Thomas, would send Oskar on missions to solve different riddles but when Thomas dies on 9/11 there is one riddle left unsolved. Oskar finds an envelope with a key that he believes is a clue to his dad’s final riddle. Throughout the film, Oskar experiences fulfillment of his psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Oskar’s greatest source of autonomy, throughout the film, is his decision to try and solve what he believes his is father’s final riddle. When considering Oskar’s perceived locus of causality, it is clear that there are both internal and environmental sources. For the former, Oskar wants to solve this riddle out of his need for closure after his father’s death. Along with this, he is motivated by environmental factors such as the envelope with the key inside that he believes was from his father. Due to this, and his love for the missions he used to do with his father, Oskar begins this journey of his own volition. Throughout his journey, Oskar experiences both controlling and autonomy-supportive motivating styles. The stranger, who we learn is Oskar’s grandfather, attempts to control his journey by telling him stop searching for the meaning of the clue. On the other hand, Oskar’s mom was supporting his autonomy, without his knowledge, by contacting the people he would meet beforehand so that his journey would be easier and more fruitful. In doing so, she helps Oskar to engage more through social interactions and supports his psychological well-being.

When considering competence in this film, it is clear that Oskar’s ability to solve his dad’s riddles has always been a source of fulfillment for this need. His father’s riddles seem to be of a loose structure which does not deter Oskar but, rather, makes him work harder to find the answer. Oskar’s competence is questioned when he discovers that what he believed was his dad’s final riddle was really just a misunderstanding and really a clue for someone else. Despite this, Oskar does eventually find the ending of one of his father’s riddles and experiences positive feedback because of feeling progress towards a goal.

Lastly, Oskar’s need for relatedness is constantly addressed throughout the film as he interacts with strangers that he believes will lead him to understanding the riddle. This is an especially important need for Oskar because he has Asperger’s syndrome. In the past, his dad’s riddles had been orchestrated so that they required Oskar to interact with different people. Due to this, Oskar has had many exchange relationships and only a handful of communal relationships. Oskar’s relationship with his grandfather is very important communal relationship for him because he finds common ground with him due to his Asperger’s and his grandfather being mute. In the end, the impact of his relationships throughout the movie are made evident by his desire to communicate his thanks for everything they did for him through thank-you letters.

Throughout the film, Oskar fulfills his psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These needs could be seen in his decision to search for the answer to a riddle, feeling successful when he completes his journey, and interacting with multiple people throughout.

Terms:
Psychological Needs
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness
Perceived Locus of Causality
Internal and External PLOC
Volition
Controlling Motivating Style
Autonomy-Supportive Motivating Style
Engagement
Psychological Well-being
Structure
Feedback
Communal and Exchange Relationships

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is about a boy named Oskar who loses his father in the 9/11 attack. After losing his father, he begins a mission to find the source of a key that his father was in possession of. The person-environment dialectic can be used with this movie to analyze how the environment acts on the individual as well as the individual acting on the environment: a reciprocal relationship. The environment takes Oskar’s father away, and he reacts as finding the key. These reactions also impact the environment in the way that they bring Oskar into new situations. Both the reactions of Oskar and the environment he is in is constantly changing. Regarding the three characteristics of psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness can all be observed at the different levels they are presented as in Oskar’s character.
The first characteristic, the need for autonomy, is clearly shown throughout the movie. Autonomy can be defined as the need for self-direction, and the independence to regulate one’s own behaviors. Oskar is making his own independent decisions to pursue the source of the key that his father had. His search seemed impossible to complete, but his mother never took away his autonomy by forcing him to stop. This is an example of an autonomy-supportive motivating style by the way that his mother allowed him to continue his search even though she was worried about him; she could recognize that this is what he needed to do to gain personal growth from the death of his father. If he was forced to end his search for the owner of the key, he would have experienced a controlling motivating style, which means his autonomy need would not be satisfied due to being pressured to behave a certain way and end his search.
The next characteristic, competence, is clearly shown in Oskar’s skills used to find the source of the key. Competence is the psychological need to be effective in environmental interactions and to exercise one’s capacities and skills in challenges. Oskar has many skills that he uses to eventually find the source of the key that his father was in possession of. He gained these skills through the positive feedback, support of competence, and failure tolerance that his father provided him with when he was alive. His father would create treasure hunts for Oskar to help develop Oskar’s skills, and when Oskar experiences failure, his father responds with a learning opportunity. Not only during these treasure hunts, but also through his search for the owner of the key does Oskar experience flow within his competence need. He enjoys the challenge within the involvement of the activity and his concentration. Oskar uses his competence and skills to overcome the challenge of searching for the key’s owner. This flow is created from more than just a balance of his skills and the challenge, but more of the level of skill and challenge level being moderate/high.
The last characteristic is relatedness, which can be defined as the need to establish close emotional bonds with others and to be connected in warm relationships. This need is shown as satisfied when his father is alive due to their close, warm, supportive bond. After his father’s death, he experiences a deficit in this need. It can be argued that not only is his hunt for the owner of the key that his father had a representation of his competence need being satisfied, but also a representation of his lack of relatedness to his father. The hunt is an activity that he can participate in that brings him a sense of relatedness to his father who is no longer there. During his search, he interacts in a variety of exchange relationships, which are more business aimed. He has a question regarding the key, and once he has the answer he is done with the interaction with no real care as to the wellbeing of the person. By the end of the movie, he does end up with more communal relationships, such as with his mother and grandfather, in which he does feel connected and related.

Terms:
Person-environment dialectic
Psychological needs
Autonomy
Autonomy-supportive motivating style
Controlling motivating style
Competence
Positive feedback
Failure tolerance
Flow
Relatedness
Exchange relationships
Communal relationships

Autonomy, competence, and relatedness play a big part in this movie. Oskar has a perceived locus on causality when his motivation to find out what the key unlocks is caused by his desire to know if it has anything to do with the 6th burrow. Oskar has no volition because there was not an unwillingness to engage in the activity, he was very willing to engage in the search for what the key unlocks. Autonomy is that we desire the choice and decision making flexibility; we want to be the ones who decide what we do. Autonomy is about control over choices. Oskar shows this by overcoming his fears of public transportation, bridges, elevators and tall buildings because he needs answers. A specific scene comes to mind about this, when Oskar and the Renter are in the deli, the renter wants to leave and Oskar wants more time. He wants control over how they search; how often they stop to use the bathroom, when they eat, and when to eat. Towards the end of the movie, Oskar admits to Mr. Black that he was home the last time his father called. Oskar couldn’t answer the phone because he was scared; he even mentioned that he was frozen. He had no control over himself at that moment, and even asked Mr. Black to forgive him for not picking up the phone.
Competence played a big role in this movie because while it was not stated directly, I assumed that Oskar wanted to find the 6th burrow as not to fail his father. After searching for weeks and not coming up with anything, Oskar asks the Renter if he thinks that they will find it. Oskar needed reassurance that he would be able to find it. I took it as if Oskar couldn’t find out what the key unlocked, that he would feel as if he let his father down. That is why he never gave up, no matter how hard it got. Oskar’s competence was supported with reassurance that they would find it.
Relatedness in this film was kind of all over the place, Oskar was very close to his father and his grandma, and then once the Renter was introduced, he became close with him, and was only emotionally close with his mother at the very end of the movie. The movie mainly focuses on Oskar’s relationship with his father, mother and the renter. After Oskar’s father died, he replayed the messages, and carried on searching for the 6th burrow as a way to keep his father alive and to remain close to him. Oskar mentioned that while he was getting closer to his dad by this search, he was also drifting away from his mother. Throughout the entire film, Oskar was distant with his mom, getting into fights with her and even telling her that he wishes she were dead. Since he was so close to his father, he wasn’t sure how to connect with anyone else. Throughout the film, Oskar tells his story to everyone he meets. I believe he does this because he does not have a close relationship with his mom; he needs to get that feeling by connecting with everyone he comes into contact with. After the first day of searching with the renter, Oskar feels like he finally has someone to talk to. His relationship with the renter is going well until he plays his fathers messages for the renter. I believe he does this because Oskar thinks that the Renter is his grandfather, and wants to bond over the death of his father, the renter’s son (though he is not positive). Towards the end of the film, Oskar’s mother tells him that she knew about the search the whole time and even went to peoples houses before Oskar to let them know about his journey. Soon they are bonding over stories about the same people and how different or similar their experiences were with a person. They start telling each other what they miss the most about his father. At the end he tells his mother that he doesn’t tell her enough that he loves her. At the beginning of the film, Oskar was distant towards his mother. After hearing that she had been keeping tabs on him the whole time, I believe that Oskar felt the connection with his mom and that he finally had someone to talk to.

Terms: Autonomy, competence, relatedness, perceived locus of causality, volition, supporting competence,

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a movie about an adolescent child named Oskar who is on a mission trying to discover how he can belong in this world without his father, played by Tom Hanks, the one person who seemed to understand him and his psychological needs.You discover that since Oskar’s dad died in 9/11, Oskar is not the same but tries to refuel his adventurous mindset when a key and lost family member come into the mix. In Chapter 6 it says that we have three psychological needs that need to be met in our lives. The three psychological needs are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. All of these needs are exhibited in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Autonomy is our need to make choices freely and independently in our lives. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close there are a few examples of autonomy. The example I am going to use for autonomy is when Oskar is on the bridge with the Renter. The renter faced Oskar with a choice of crossing a bridge he thought was dangerous or turning back. The renter convinced him to make this choice by giving him the incentive of a note in the middle of the bridge to read because the Renter doesn’t talk. Oskar ultimately had the autonomy of choice to either cross the bridge with a risk involved or just avoid the journey all together.

Competence is our need to interact efficiently with our surroundings within all aspects of our life. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close there are a few examples of competence. The primary one is when Oskar and the Renter were on the train when looking around to see what the key lead them to. Oskar taking the train for the first time since his dad died in 9/11 so he wore a gas mask and then the Renter convinced him to think about nothing/ random words such as student teacher. By the Renter convincing and supporting his competence, Oskar to get on the train, this helps Oskar interact more with his surroundings because he use to not ever ride any types of transportation because of what happened to his dad.

Relatedness is the need for everyone to belong and have close relationships with others. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close there are a few examples of relatedness. I think the biggest relatedness example is that Oskar apologizes for acting out and being angry after finding out that the key wasn’t something his dad left for him to find and it was for someone else. He was apologizing that he will try to be normal, eventually he will get back to normal. The need to belong and to have close relationships go hand in hand because we associate being “normal” and having lots of friends and good family relationships with being normal. I think that is really sad that he felt like he needed to apologize for grieving the loss of his father, but I think that this is a good example of relatedness.

To conclude Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a movie that signifies all of the psychological needs being met to an extent during a tragic time in a child’s life. Overall this movie was really good at helping me understand the psychological needs of a person and how they need to be met in order to run efficiently and effectively through life.


Key Terms
Autonomy
Incentive
Competence
Supporting Competence
Relatedness
Communal Relationships

Oskar, the protagonist in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is a young boy with Asperger’s Syndrome. Asperger’s Syndrome is considered to be on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum. This is very apparent throughout the entirety of the film as Oskar is capable of navigating through New York City on his own, not to mention just being extremely intelligent in general. In relation to psychological needs, Oskar has a very high level of autonomy and competence, while his relatedness is the lower of the three needs.

Oskar’s autonomy is a cornerstone of his personality. Oskar being able to do things on his own is something that his deceased father holds in very high regard. This is evident in the way Thomas establishes the “reconnaissance expeditions” for Oskar. Thomas would give Oskar clues, but never to the extent that it would give away the answer or location of the next clue. This motivated Oskar to take it upon himself to unravel the secrets his father was holding. Thomas provides motivation in a way that is supportive of Oskar’s autonomy, as Thomas’s goal is for his son to be a man that can accomplish his goals regardless of the boundaries that may hinder him (Asperger's Syndrome and the loss of his father).

I would say that Oskar’s most prevalent psychological need is competence. He has a large desire to be capable of solving any mystery he sets his mind to. Oskar is very much driven by stimulus. The primary source stimulating Oskar’s mind throughout the majority of the film is solving the 6th reconnaissance expedition. This rather unusual task was of the utmost importance to Oskar as it provided him with an optimal challenge. Oskar was aware of the possibility that he may never find the lock that fit the key his father left behind, but the positive feedback he was set to gain from finding the key’s true destination was immense as he believed it would bring him close to his father once again. In a roundabout way, it did. While typically optimal challenges are defined by being moderately difficult, I’d go ahead and say that this task was very difficult, but it turns out that this level of difficulty was optimal for Oskar’s need for competence and autonomy as all psychological needs are relative to the individual’s that possess them.

While Oskar tackled this optimal challenge of his, it was evident in scenes from the film that Oskar was engaged in a flow state very frequently. The first one that comes to mind is when Oskar is seen in his room with maps, phone books, census records, and other forms of information scattered all around him while he is constructing his elaborate system for finding each and every person with the last name of Black in New York City. Oskar is completely immersed in the task at hand and is diverting his complete attention and focus to planning out the course of action necessary for completing this 6th reconnaissance expedition.

While relatedness may be the psychological need that Oskar is lacking the most, I view it as being his most important need. When Thomas passed away Oskar was left without his primary source of stimulus, support, and companionship. With this newly found void, Oskar struggles to create social bonds that could potentially compensate for his father’s passing as social interaction is a large downfall of Oskar’s. When Oskar finally befriends his mute grandfather part of this social void is filled as they become rather fond acquaintances. While Oskar is going door to door and greeting his people of interest he initially has the mindset that these interactions will be in the form of exchange relationships. This being that Oskar will provide them with questions about his father and the key and in return he will potentially get information back from them. Oskar quickly learns with his encounter with William Black’s wife that these relationships will be of a more communal nature as Oskar becomes more intimately connected with the people he meets via that sharing of stories.

At the end of the film, Oskar finally completes his task via meeting William Black and exchanging heartfelt stories about their fathers. While Oskar’s need for competence may have played a large role in him achieving his goal, his need for relatedness and companionship was very much satisfied by the newfound friendships he had made along his journey. From meeting his grandfather to forming friendships with strangers all over New York City, Oskar had finally formed worthwhile social bonds that would help him navigate the world in a way that would make his father proud.

Terms Used:
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness
Optimal Challenge
Flow State
Social Bonds
Exchange Relationships
Communal Relationships

This movie was so good, but I am upset that I was crying through almost the entire thing! Right away I could see how this movie relates to chapter six and the concepts that go along with psychological needs. Oskar is a very determined little boy to say the very least and I am going to relate the things that I saw him throughout the movie that relate to the three main psychological needs.
We all know that autonomy is basically we want to decide how we spend our own time. After Oskar’s father passes away he find the key that he believes leads to something that his father wanted him to find. He leaves the house everyday looking what this key goes to and often begins to count how many times he lies to his mom about where he is going. He is spending his time exploring when he wants, how he wants, and where he wants. Perceived locus of causality refers to an individual’s understanding of the causal source of their motivated actions. For Oskar, this would be his father’s death and then finding the key later in his parent’s closet. Volition is the unpressured willingness to engage in an activity. Although Oskar is motivated to find where this key goes, he also has always enjoyed going on these expeditions and searches that his father set up for him. Perceived choice refers to the sense of choice we experience when we find ourselves in environments that provide us with decision-making flexibility that affords us many opportunities from which to choose. This would be basically every step that Oskar took to find where the key goes. Making the list of people with the name Black and adding numbers to see how long it would take him to see every person, etc.
Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise one’s capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. It is very clear the Oskar wants to do his job in his searches perfectly. He wants to know if he is on the right track, so he would often get frustrated when his father would not tell him if he was or not. He also has the skills to be going on these searches. This was evident when he first sets his mind on finding what the key goes to and packs his bag with all the required materials needed for his adventure.
Relatedness is the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved in warm relationships. Oskar had a high relatedness to his father when he was alive and still strived to have it even after his father passed away. He thought that if he could find where they key went to then he would still have his father there with him. However, he had a really low relatedness with his mother. Overwhelmed with grief, Oskar didn’t really interact with his mother like a child normally would. He even told his mother that he had wished it was her who died instead of his father.

Terms: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Perceived Locus of Causality, Volition, Perceived Choice

This film gives many great examples of the three psychological needs, autonomy, competency, and relatedness. Oskar receives proactive energy from these needs which promotes him to go out and engage in his environment.
Oskar shows high autonomy throughout the film as he makes choices to seek out the owner of a key that his father left him. While alive, Thomas pushes Oskar to talk to people he does not know and be socially interactive on their scavenger hunts throughout the city. Once Thomas dies, Oskar is forced to do this on his own. He meets with new people trying to finish the scavenger hunt and find the key’s owner. Oskar has an internal perceived locus of causality because he understands that he needs to finish the scavenger hunt for his father, that is his motivation. He also experiences volition because he is willing to get this key to its rightful owner because he assumes it is something to him from his father. Although Oskar may think “I have to do this for my dad”, he is asserting more of a want behavior because now that his father is gone, he is pushing himself to talk to new people to solve mysteries left by his father. No one is forcing him to continue the scavenger hunt. Oskar also experiences perceived choice because he has the choice to continue this hunt for his father. This choice is relatively unrestricted, making Oskar more intrinsically motivated to complete his goal of finding the owner of the key. This choice reflects Oskar’s personal value of closure with his father.
I would say Oskar shows different levels of competency throughout the film. In the beginning, Oskar did not believe he had the skills to master the optimal challenge of being socially interactive. His dad pushed him a lot in the beginning to speak to people on their scavenger hunts. Once Thomas died, Oskar became more intrinsically motivated to speak to new people about his father. He had to have felt competent enough in his communication skills to get ahold of new people and open up to them about his father in order to find out new information, such as who the key belongs to and what this key has to do with his father. A huge part of competency is feedback. Oskar’s task of talking to new people and getting out of his comfort zone is reinforced by the feedback on the note his father left for him once he completed the scavenger hunt.
For relatedness, I think Oskar is at a medium level. During the beginning of the film, it is difficult for Oskar to form new social bonds or even interact with people outside of his father. However, the bond he has with his father is more of a communal relationship because his father looks out for Oskar’s needs and they genuinely care about the welfare of each other. It seems as though Oskar’s relationship with everyone else throughout the film is only an exchange relationship because it is not obvious that Oskar cares about anyone else’s well-being to the extent that he did for his father. Once Oskar loses his father, he loses the communal relationship they had. The rest of the movie involves Oskar forming new bonds with people while trying to receive closure on his father’s passing.
Terms:
Psychological needs, autonomy, competency, relatedness, perceived locus of causality, volition, perceived choice, goal, value, intrinsically motivated, feedback, communal relationship, exchange relationship

The movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close gave viewers many great examples of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Firstly, the main character, Oskar, shows his strong desire for autonomy when he recognizes his weaknesses, which is a long list. One of his many weaknesses is ringing phones; he hates the noise, but he wished he would have had the strength to overcome his fear in order to answer the phone when his father called. Although Oskar could not overcome his fear of ringing phones, he was able to overcome his fear of bridges due to the help of his tambourine; he was rather proud of himself for overcoming his fear in order to continue his search for clues pertaining to his key. The book, Understanding Motivation and Emotion, states “And we want our behavior to arise out of and express our preferences and desires” (pg. 145), and this is exactly what Oskar wanted to do; he wanted to be in control of his life.

As for competence, the book I quoted above also states, “We all want to develop skills and improve our capacities, talents, and potential” (pg. 155). This is especially true for Oskar because he faces many challenges at a young age. For starters, he struggles to find people to relate to beyond his father, and then his father tragically passed away. Oskar finds a key in his father’s closet with the name “Black” on the envelope. He then pushes himself diligently to find everyone with the last name “Black” in his area because he wants to find where the key belongs and he begins to view every new “Black” as a friend; one more person that he did not know before beginning his journey. Thankfully, Oskar did not deal with failure tolerance, which occurs when people encounter difficult situations and choose to give up completely rather than persisting. Oskar had great amounts of intrinsic motivation and persisted until he successfully found where the key belonged.

Relatedness is something Oskar struggles with, because he thinks differently than others. Oskar’s father understood him very well; he knew that his son did not like talking to or engaging with other people, as a result, he constantly put his son in situations where he needed to interact with others in order to complete whatever mission they were working on that day. Oskar thought the only person who he thought truly understood him was his dad, and when his dad passed away he thought he had no one to relate to. After his father’s passing, Oskar befriends “the renter”, an elderly gentleman who lives in his grandmother’s apartment. The renter never speaks, which only motivates Oskar to want to get to know this man more. Eventually, Oskar feels connected to this man through the perception of a social bond. Oskar feels as if this man both cares about him and enjoys his company; two things Oskar does not feel often due to his constant state of (what I would call) paranoia. Sadly, this man leaves and Oskar is left alone with his mother. However, his mom proved to be someone who could mimic Oskar’s thinking, which pleased Oskar greatly, for he once again had someone who understood his abstract way of thinking.

TERMS USED

Autonomy
Competence
Engagement
Failure Tolerance
Intrinsic
Motivation
Perception
Relatedness

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tells the sad story of a child (Oskar) on the Autism Spectrum (Asperger’s) who lost his father in the the attack on 9/11. Due to his Asperger’s, Oskar is not your normal kid. He follows schedules very rigidly and very much does not enjoy communicating with other people. Oskar becomes distant from the rest of his family after his father dies as he and his father had a very strong relationship. Oskar finds a key in a vase with the name “Black” on the envelope. Oskar decides that this key has something to do with his father and decides to go on a scavenger hunt in order to find out what they key has to do with him and his dad. Throughout this hunt, Oskar doesn’t necessarily find what he is hoping for as the key belongs to someone else, but he is able to grow closer to his mother and grandmother and he is able to befriend his grandfather, even though he was unaware it was his grandfather.
I thought this film to be a great choice in relation to this chapter because it covers a lot of interesting aspects that tie in with psychological needs. In knowing what I was looking for while watching the movie, one question came into my mind about Oskar that I had never previously thought about. I was curious as to how those with mental disorders were able to fulfill their psychological needs? Some disorders likely don’t hinder those affected as much, but anything on the Autism Spectrum likely had to have been a significant challenge. While I was thinking about this, I was pleased to know that Oskar was able to at least help fulfill these needs a little throughout the scavenger hunt. Living with Asperger’s, Oskar had very little autonomy. He wasn’t able to go and do what he wanted, even though he likely didn’t want to go and do much. While he was on this final scavenger hunt, however, he was free. While he was never really alone, he felt like he was able to do what he needed to accomplish this task. He was making his own decisions. This scavenger hunt also allowed him to feel a sense of being competent. When he was able to do these scavenger hunts and succeed, that was one of the few ways he was able to fulfill the need for competence. Since his father had passed, he wasn’t able to feel this as often. This final scavenger hunt allowed him to feel this sense of competency as he was able to return the key to where it belonged. Along the way, his sense of relatedness improved as he became closer to his mother, grandmother, and grandfather. I understand that all of this was still likely meeting less psychological needs than an average child his age, but it was nice to see how he improved over the course of the movie.
Oskar’s father often tried to bring him an optimal challenge. The book states that this is when your skills are tested and there is an equal chance of succeeding as there is failure. Throughout these challenges, Oskar would be completely focused and be able to experience flow. The last challenge, proved to be too much of a challenge, however, as there was no real way to finish the “scavenger hunt” correctly. Oskar was bound to fail because the key actually did not have anything to do with his father. The goal was unobtainable. While Oskar was able to achieve flow throughout the hunt, he was ultimately left with failure. This time however, he was okay with it. He understood that failure sometimes happens and is okay. He was able to achieve a level of failure tolerance.
This movie was a great example of the psychological needs chapter and did a wonderful job of allowing us to think of the different connections between the movie and chapter.

Autonomy
Psychological Needs
Competence
Relatedness
Optimal Challenge
Flow
Failure Tolerance

In the movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar Schell displays each of these needs in many different ways. Oskar is a nine-year-old boy that is incredibly smart. Often times he acts in a mature manner that would make him seem much older. Oskar likes knowing that he has freedom. This was a lesson his father was trying to teach him before he was killed in the terrorist attack on 9/11. Thomas Schell prepared multiple adventures for his son to teach him that he could choose to do anything he set his mind to. This relates to two concepts from the text: Autonomy and competence.
Autonomy is the psychological need that says people want to have independence and freedom to make their own decisions. Within the idea of autonomy are three experiences that can all be seen on a continuum from high to low. Perceived locus of causality is the first experience that explains and shows this. This continuum stretches from external to internal: What is causing someone to make their decision? Are there external factors pushing someone in one direction or did the person make the decision due to their own needs? There are many things motivating Oskar throughout the movie, and they change from internal to external based on who is with him. In the movie, Oskar has an internal need to keep search for the location of the lock that matches the key he found. There are external factors (his grandmother and grandfather) that try to stop him from going on his journey. Because he makes his own decision, he would probably be higher on the continuum here. The next experience is volition, which is the willingness to engage in an activity. An example for me would be spending time outdoors. I would be very high on this continuum for that activity because no one would have to ask me to do it. The decision is made freely and not coerced. An example from the movie would be when Oskar visits all of the people with the last name of Black. He felt an internal coercion and could not stop until he found the lock. He originally wanted to spend very little time with each person but ended up learning a lot about them. Oskar would have been very low on this continuum at the start but would have advanced to a medium level by the end. The final experience that helps explain autonomy is perceived choice over one’s actions. This experience relates to the flexibility we feel when making a decision. Oskar feels more obligated to find the lock and feels like he has no other choice. In this experience, he would be very low on the continuum. When the needs above are not met, Oskar experiences breakdowns and cannot control his emotions.
The second psychological need that Oskar wrestles with is competency. Competency is the need that says people want to have the skill level to do a task. There is no question throughout the movie that Oskar has developed this skill with his father. He knows he is smart enough to do the task of exploring for the lock. That is why he becomes so frustrated when he continually fails. He gets even more frustrated when his grandfather comes with him because he feels a need to prove his skill. He is more than smart enough to achieve the goal, but he fails again and again. The task is very challenging and causes anxiety and worry. Ideally Oskar would enter a state of flow, but the challenge was too difficult during his adventures.
Terms: Autonomy, locus of causality, external, internal, volition, continuum, perceived choice, competency, flow, challenge, and task

Chapter 6 talked all about autonomy, competence, and relatedness as major psychological needs that everyone has. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was a good movie to exhibit situations in which characters show and try to satisfy these psychological needs. Oscar is a very peculiar kid. He is very bright but he has lots of quirks which play into his psychological needs. If I were to rate Oscar on his levels of autonomy, competence, and relatedness either being low, medium, or high, I would rate his relatedness low, his autonomy high, and his competence medium-high. Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior. Oscar shows a lot of this throughout the film. For almost the entire film he is off traveling around looking for whoever might know anything about the key that he found in the vase in his father’s closet. One way that he tries to keep ahold of his feeling of autonomy is by carrying around a tambourine that for some strange reason seems to calm him down when he gets overwhelmed in situations. By having this tambourine to help calm him down it gives him more control over the environment. This specific example also speaks about the person-environment dialect. The person acts on the environment out of curiosity, interest, and an intrinsic motivation to seek out an affect changes in it; the environment offers affordances, imposes structure, makes demands, provides feedback, offers need-satisfying or need-frustrating relationships, and offers a community and cultural context as the person strives to adjust and accommodate to it. The environment offers a need-frustrating relationship with Oscar because of all the people, traffic, buildings, transportation, and noise. Because of this need-frustrating relationship Oscar responds to the environment with his tambourine to help calm him down. Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise one’s capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. I rated Oscars competence as medium-high because he is a very bright boy. He feels a need to master the things that he is interested in. He starts something and is determined to finish it. He mapped out all of the people with the last name Black in New York and figured out how long it would take him to meet with each one. The estimated time ended up being about 3 years but that did not deter Oscar. I did not give him a 100% high rating for competence because as I stated when talking about autonomy he does not like the environment around him most of the time. Some of which became conditioned in him because of what happened on 9/11. He does not want to be anywhere that he considers an easy target for terrorists or whoever to attack because it makes him panicky. Relatedness is the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved in warm relationships. I rated Oscar as low in relatedness because he does not like to talk to people. When his mother and father were talking about Oscar going on his quest to find the 6th borough, his mother told his father not to make it too hard to which his father replied that this quest was going to make Oscar go out and have to talk to people which would be good for him because Oscar does not like to talk to other people. However, Oscar’s relatedness seems to increase throughout the movie as he is out looking for the owner of the lock that the key belongs to. He starts to talk to more and more people and it looks like it gets easier and easier to do so.

Key Terms:
Psychological needs, person-environment dialect, autonomy, relatedness, competence

The film for this week introduces various examples of the three psychological needs known as: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The main character that demonstrated these three type of psychological needs is Oskar. Throughout the film, Oskar demonstrates a desire to fulfill these three psychological needs while attempting to complete his search for what his offer left after his death.

Autonomy is defined as the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior. During the beginning of the film, it is clear that Oskar and his father are bonding through scavenger hunts and other intellectual games. While Oskar is explaining his flashbacks, it is made evident that he has trouble interacting with other people. However, during one of his father’s scavenger hunts, he is informed that in order to solve a clue he must go and interact with individuals outside of the house. In this instance, Oskar is given the freedom to engage in the activity of interacting with strangers and as a result promotes his autonomy. Although he is uncomfortable, he willingly interacts with others in order to solve a clue. As described in chapter six, there are certain manners to support autonomy levels. This film demonstrates manners in which this can be accomplished. Oskar’s father builds a bond with him through similar interest and beliefs. His father supports Oskar’s autonomy because he included information that peeked his interest while explaining several clues about the scavenger hunt. Oskar develops an intrinsic motivation to find more clues in order to solve the mystery because his interest are being involved and as a result he develops a sense of freedom and interest while playing the game. However, when Oskar includes his grandfather in his adventure, he begins to diminish his grandfather’s autonomy. Oskar begins to explain that finding Mr. /Ms. Black is crucial and that there is no time to slow down. He lowers his grandfather’s autonomy because of the fact that he is commanding him rather than giving him a free choice.

Competence is the second psychological component included in this film. Competence is described as the psychological need to effective in interactions with the environment. Oskar demonstrate high levels of competence. Throughout the film, he demonstrates an immense level of knowledge regarding topics that most individuals would not begin to fathom. During a majority of the film, Oskar is seen pin pointing several points on the map and creating various manners in which he organized phone numbers and names. In one scene of the film, Oskar manages to create a booklet of his adventure with information about every person he comes across. Oskar organizes all the information he gathered during his search in an attempt to exclude useless information from the useful one. Although Oskar is presented with a challenging task of finding the meaning of the key, he is able to rise up to the challenge. The manner in which he organizes and collects data is proof that his competence level is high.

The final psychological component seen in this film is relatedness. Relatedness is described as the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people. In the beginning of the film, Oskar had a high level of relatedness because he had a deep connection with his father. However, his level of relatedness diminished when his father tragically passes away. While watching the film, it is clear that Oskar is picked on at school and the manner he treats his mother demonstrates that he does not have a deep connection with her. There is one instance in the film when Oskar is briefly discussing his adventures with his grandfather. He explains that although his grandfather doesn’t say a word, he feel as though he is accepting and understanding. The connection he has with his grandfather is apparent when he becomes emotional when his grandfather is leaving. Oskar pleads with his grandfather to not leave because he desperately needs his help to solve the mystery. Oskar finally experiences a form of relatedness when his mother reveals that she knew about his adventure the entire time. She informs him that although she knew about his adventure, she did not try to stop him because she knew that it was important to him. His mother also informs him that she has kept a watchful eye on him to ensure his safety. Oskar finally realizes that he has a deep connection with his mother and finally embraces this connection. He affirms this relatedness when he is explaining that he is finally able to accept that his father is gone, however he does not need to worry because he knows that his mother and family will be there for him. Overall, this film does a great job portraying the three psychological desires that need to be met through the main character Oskar.

Terms:
-Psychological Needs
-Autonomy
-Competence
-Relatedness
-Motivation
-Intrinsic Motivation
-Challenge

During Oskar’s first nine years of life, Oskar demonstrates positive well-being. Searching for the “6th burrow” gave Oskar a purpose to pursue locating the mystery land, and had the presence of his father Thomas who was nothing but supportive of Oskar and his hesitance to interact with others in a city as big as New York City. After Thomas’ death in 9/11 Oskar begins experiencing a negative well-being, thinking that him having Autism is a burden and having minimal emotional support from his mother (until the end of the movie).

Throughout the film, I think that Oskar displays high levels of autonomy. I think this because even though he and his father Thomas went on a majority of their adventures around the city together, Thomas gave ambiguous clues for Oskar. When Oskar found himself questioning Thomas about specific clues Thomas simply shrug his shoulders, leaving Oskar to decide what their next plan of action would be. This created a disruption of “flow” because although Oskar possessed medium to high levels of skills, Oskar’s competence was not as high in comparison to his dad’s clues. After Thomas’ death, Oskar still continues to display high levels of autonomy when he decides to have his paternal grandfather go with him on adventures. Oskar was persistent to not take public transportation, planned lunch, and bathroom breaks, with minimal sight-seeing along to the next “Black” residence in order to structure his schedule two see each person with the last name Black in NYC.

After Thomas’ death, Oskar grew from low levels of relatedness to high levels of relatedness. Oskar fulfilled his need of interacting with others by showing up to strangers’ homes to ask if any of them knew his father. Oskar also grew social bonds with the individuals he met along the way, as the “Blacks” and Oskar would often time exchange stories and experiences—Oskar reflects on these when laying with his mother and comparing which individuals or families that were most memorable to them. When watching the movie, it is easy to see the risk that Oskar is willing to take in order to ask William Black if he knew Oskar’s father, Thomas. Oskar rides with Abby Black, even though he was hesitant to get in the vehicle with her, Oskar took an elevator to the 32nd floor of William’s office building (even though he doesn't take the elevator at his own apartment complex) and was brave enough to open up and tell William what was on the sixth message his dad left on the answering machine. After Oskar pours his heart out to William regarding how he couldn’t bring himself to answer the phone even though it was home during his father’s final moments, he asks William to “forgive him”. I viewed this as a need satisfaction that Oskar felt he needed from William, in order to reduce Oskar’s guilt, anxiety, and stress from the situation.

ME TERMS:
Well-being
Competence
Autonomy
Structure
Relatedness
Flow
Need Satisfaction

In this week's movie, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, we see various perfect examples of the effect of psychological needs on people. We also get to see a great situation in which a specific organism's environment is drastically changed and how that affects his psychological need balance.

In the film, our main character is Oskar. Oskar is a very precarious young boy who is extremely intelligent for his age. Oskar is no average young boy and he has specific psychological needs because of this. The psychological needs being his needs for autonomy, competency, and relatedness. I will begin with autonomy. Oskar clearly has an extremely high need for autonomy, which is perfect because he lives in New York City and one must be very independent in a place like that. Perhaps the environment of Manhattan, New York is what drove Oskar to be such an independently driven kid. Oskar's autonomy is also greatly fulfilled by his father. Oskar's father is constantly challenging him with new optimally challenging tasks that require him to think critically and be independent. Oskar's father is an extremely autonomously supportive character in the film. Another thing that stuck out to me throughout the film is how seriously everyone Oskar came across took him. He is a child and if a child that age started interrogating me, I'm not sure what I would think. However, all the "strangers" that Oskar approaches on his journey seem to not just avoid brushing him off, but they seem to entice him to dig deeper and keep searching. The example that sticks out to me is the man in the key store. Oskar interrogates him about where this key he found came from, while the man does not have that information, he takes Oskar very seriously and discovers a clue for him. This is what I mean by these characters seeming to encourage Oskar to keep going. This, to me, is very autonomously supportive.

The second psychological need I think Oskar craves is relatedness. Throughout the movie we see Oskar getting into very deep and emotional situations. Oskar always seems to not want to hurt people's feelings, or if he does he immediately regrets it. I believe this is because Oskar has a high psychological need for relatedness. This is clearly shown after his father's death. Oskar all of the sudden has this massive void in his life, and he longs for the companionship that his father once gave him. Oskar's mother is pretty supportive of his relatedness needs as well. This was made clear to me when Oskar confronts his mother about 9/11 and says "I wish it would have been you in the building." Oskar's mother replies "me too". What I took this interaction as was that Oskar's mother was saying me too, not because she doesn't think she can handle her situation, just because she thinks that Oskar's father would have done a better job. I think Oskar's mother feels that if the roles would have been reversed and she would have died, that Oskar would have been more okay with it because he still has the very meaningful relationship with his father. However, when it comes to socialization with Oskar's peers, it seems he has almost no interest. I would say that Oskar has a high need for relatedness when it comes to his family. Oskar's parents reinforce there love in him throughout the movie as well, which gives him that sense of relatedness he needs.

Last but not least is competency, which I also feel Oskar has a very high need for. Oskar is constantly being challenged with tasks by his father in the beginning of the movie through these "reconnaissance mission" games. Oskar seems to enjoy these expeditions very much and is clearly intrinsically motivated to participate in these activities. These expeditions often require that Oskar think critically and talk to various people around Manhattan. This is definitely fulfilling Oskar's psychological competency need. Oskar is very intrinsically motivated to go on these expeditions and find out more information from his father. These expeditions require him to develop skills of socialization which he seems to get more and more comfortable with the more he does it. As well as think critically, Oskar is very intelligent and often exercises his brain. I

Also, lastly I would like to note that Oskar displays incredible engagement throughout this movie. In order for him to be able to do that, Oskar would need to fulfill most of his psychological needs, which he does very well throughout the movie. Even after his father's death, Oskar searches for other support systems to give satisfaction. Oskar displays most benefits of meeting all of his psychological needs. Especially the benefit of learning skills.

Forgot to put list of terms in.

Terms:
Psychological Needs
Intrinsic Motivation
Engagement
Autonomy
Competency
Relatedness

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a movie full of challenges for young Oskar, who lost his dad at 9/11. While Thomas, the dad was still alive, he was helping Oskar some of his psychological needs such as competence and relatedness.

Before Thomas died, he and Oskar would search together for the long lost sixth borough of New York. They would find little things that proved the existence of a sixth borough. Occasionally, finding evidence could be difficult and challenging. Even though it may be challenging, it was never too challenging, thus satisfying Oskar’s competence need. Thomas has circled something in a newspaper article that was “never stop looking.” This was their new motto, and Oskar used this when he took on his own challenge of discovering what the key was for. We know later that a phone number was what was originally circled on the newspaper clip, but the ink soaked through to circle “never stop looking.” Eventually, the motto and the phone number helped him discover the secret to the key.

While Oskar was attempting to satisfy his own competency needs, he began to face a lot of struggles and difficulties. One thing that stuck out to me during this time was his failure tolerance. Black after Black, Oskar failed to find a link to the mysterious key. Instead of quitting, Oskar kept moving on to the next person whose last name was Black. With every fail, he was one step closer to finding the right person. I also think that adding that Oskar was intrinsically motivated is important because we can assume that he was searching for the lock to the key to find a piece of his dad that may have been left behind and had no extrinsic environmental factors playing into his search.

One last aspect of competency that I noticed was the oxymoron game this Thomas and Oskar played. This game was another way to challenge both Oskar and his father because each had to say an oxymoron and the other had to come up with a different one, and I assume the loser would be whoever couldn’t come up with one. This is another great way to satisfy competency levels.

I think relatedness is the other big psychological need seen in this movie. Oskar’s relatedness level for his father was very high but for everyone else it was more likely lower. Thomas would make Oskar hand out his own business cards and talk to complete strangers. This became a good trait to have once his father died because he has 472 Black’s that he needed to talk to in order to figure out the key. As he talked to each individual person, he created bonds with them and related to them in different ways. Once he found “the renter,” he made a new friend, who he figured was his grandfather. He let “the renter” join his search and told him things that he had never shared with anyone as he also did with Mr. William Black at the end of the movie. This is showing us that his relatedness levels are moving up on this continuum. The last person who we see make an impact on his relatedness scale is his mom. During the entire search, she knew exactly where he was and who he was talking to. She had “thought like him” and allowed him to be autonomous and let him do this on his own. Because she was on his own playing field, I think Oskar felt a much needed connection with his mom, which I think would move his relatedness level to a higher degree.

Terms:
Competence
Relatedness
Continuum
Key
Search
Challenge
Failure Tolerance
Struggle

Chapter 6 was all about psychological needs and the movie we watched to correlate was, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”. I thought that this was a great choice of movie to follow the chapter we read. The main character in this movie is Oskar Schell, a young boy who has Asperger’s disease. Oskar’s dad Thomas would make riddles for Oskar to follow, it was something Oskar loved to do but also was a way to get Oskar to talked to people, since he had a hard time doing this. Oskar’s dad dies in the 9/11 attack, and the whole film is following Oskar as he tries to solve his father’s last riddle. Autonomy is the freedom to make our own choice, and have a say in our own life. This was shown with Oskar throughout the film. Autonomy was shown when Oskar made the decision to solve his father’s last riddle, at all cost. Oskar made the decision on his own to take on the hard task of figuring out the “special” key. Perceived locus of control is a fundamental that goes with autonomy. Perceived locus of control is an individuals understanding of his or her motivations. Oskar’s perceived locus of control was shown by his motivation from the ‘special” key that his father had left him. Competence is the next psychological need, and can be described as the need to be challenged, and how to overcome challenges. Oskar was aware that this was going to be a difficult task and this is showing that he is going to deal with competence. Oskar put together a list of things for his backpack, that he was going to need to help him through this challenge. Oskar knew that he was going to be challenged with the idea of getting on a train, since he had not been on one after his father’s death. Oskar did overcome this fear of getting on the train and that would show he was able to overcome challenges. He had to overcome all of his surroundings that potentially gave him anxiety, especially bridges. Oskar has a hard time with the next psychological need, relatedness. Oskar had a string relationship with his father and his father knew how to communicate with him better than anyone else. Oskar has a hard time communicating with people that he does not know or is not close with. In one of the scenes he asks to kiss a woman and she denies him so then he asks to take her picture to remember her. I think that this is a good demonstration of relatedness and the progress he is making and yearning to have relationships with others. Oskar then befriends the “reenter” that lives in his grandmother’s apartment. For the first time since his father Oskar seems to have a strong bond and relationship with another individual. The very end of the movie is where there is a turning point for Oskar and his mother. This relatedness with his mother is what helps him to accept that his father is gone. Overall I thought this movie was super good and I was easily able to pick out the three components of psychological needs.

Terms:
Psychological needs
Surroundings
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness
Asperger’s disease
Locus of control

In the movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar’s psychological needs are established as an evident imbalance. The main source of his motivation is his relatedness, which was deteriorated after the absence of his father. His relationship with his father is also established early in the movie before his loss, as his father constructs a scavenger hunt for his son Oskar. This scavenger hunt gives his son a challenge at optimal level, and one can see from the scene where his son comments that he loves his father’s behavior when his father shrugs as if not knowing any answers. This scavenger hunt plays a part in raising Oskar’s competence. The movie shows Oskar as loving a good challenge since he has many throughout the film. Another part of competence, however, is feedback, which he ultimately receives from his mother who praises him on his skills doing the scavenger hunt.
Relatedness is the need to form emotional bonds and relationships with others. We were able to assume from the beginning of the movie that Oskar and his father had a really close bond and relationship from their interactions. However, we see his reaction after losing probably one of his primary relationships, and this puts a hinderance on his level of relatedness. His relationship with his mother is fair, but losing his father still seemed to hurt his own relatedness. This mother son relationship gets worse when Oskar says he wishes it was her who was in the building and not his dad. In a way to cope with this deterioration, we see Oskar from a bond with an old man who is living in a room rented out by Oskar’s grandmother. This works in the beginning because the old man seems to resemble his father in many ways. The way he looks and his guidance along Oskar’s journey leads the old man to be a father-figure for Oskar. Later in the movie, however, the old man ends up leaving out of nowhere. It seems since Oskar’s general relationships have experienced some heart ache, I would conclude his relatedness level would be at a low.
Finally, autonomy is the psychological need to have self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behaviors. One could assume autonomy didn’t play a huge part in Oskar’s life prior to the events of the movie. After the loss of his father, his autonomy level shot up to a high rank because of his search to find out which Black the key belonged to. Autonomy ultimately becomes a huge motivator for Oscar in trying to figure out what his father’s final riddle truly meant. It is evident that there are both internal and external sources of motivation on his journey. An internal motivator was Oskar’s desire to solve the riddle and find closure after the loss of his father. An external motivator was the key that was held inside the envelope. Oskar also experienced both supporting and controlling levels of autonomy support throughout his journey. His mom was a source of underlying support by communicating with the people Oskar would meet. Oskar’s grandfather is a source of control when he attempts to stop Oskar from his search.
Throughout the film, Oskar experiences many motivators through his needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. This film was a nice example of how all three play a part in formulating an individual’s engagement in a certain behavior.
Terms:
Autonomy
Relatedness
Competence
Psychological need
Drive
Feedback
Engagement
Support/Controlling ways to support Autonomy

This movie follows the story of Oskar Schell whose father was killed in attacks on the World Trade Center known as 9/11. After his father’s death, he starts to become depressed due to grief. The rest of the movie shows the journey that Oskar goes on in search of the lock for the key that Oskar found inside his father’s closet. Throughout the film, Oskar shows the three psychological needs in different states. These psychological needs are relatedness, autonomy, and competence.

The first need that can be deciphered is relatedness. This psychological need is based on relationships that we form with other individuals. The importance of relatedness stems from the underlying need to be in acquaintance with other humans. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar and his father had a very close relationship, which can be explained by the happiness the two shared in the film before his death. When a relationship is severed and cannot be replaced, the relatedness level takes an immense hit. There would never be another individual that could replace his father, especially the relationship they shared. Oskar then finds an old man that decides to help Oskar with his search. Oskar then meets his grandfather and a source of relatedness is formed, because Oskar tells him the story of his father and the search that he is on. His grandfather is one of the only people who can relate to Oskar, so this was much needed for his level of relatedness.

The second need is autonomy. Autonomy in psychology can be defined as the ability to make choices according to one’s own free will. This means having a sense of making your own schedule, being your own boss, and doing what you’d like when you please. I would say the main source of autonomy showed in this film would be the journey that Oskar decided to make trying to find the lock. No one told him to do this, and he decided that he’d like to find this lock to make himself happy and learn more about his father. There were times where things looked dreary and giving up was an option, but on his own accord he digressed. The key had nothing to do with his father in the end, which took him back to square one. He then decided that he was going to remember his father and stop chasing this journey that had no rational ending. This then sort of restored some autonomy for him.

The last need is competence. Competence is essentially one’s need to feel important and have effective interactions with the environment. It seems that Oskar’s level of competence is very high, because he set out on this intense journey to find a lock to a key he found in his father’s closet, not even knowing if there was a lock to begin with. He loved to be challenged, and that’s what fueled his drive in the long run. Oskar’s autism spectrum disorder made things challenging to begin with when it came to talking to people. His need for competence shows through the film especially at the end when he finally fulfills the journey and finds some answers he was looking for. Even though the clue was for someone else, he found a great source of competence from completing the journey.

Terms:
Psychological needs
Autonomy
Relatedness
Competence
Drive

Throughout the movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar struggles to fulfill his psychological needs. Oskar clearly has issues interacting with people as in one scene, we see his father make him business cards to make it easier to start conversations. Oskar’s main source of relatedness is his father. The relationship with is father is so healthy and supportive that much of his father’s thinking and ideals are internalized by Oskar. Many times, throughout the movie, Oskar quotes ideals his father has said to him. Once his father passes away, he has no one else. He travels throughout New York making connections with people. In one scene, he unburdens himself to the renter. He has been holding his secrets in for so long that he must share them with someone else. In doing so, he begins to cultivate an emotional bond with the renter. The relationship is an exchange relationship as he is traipsing around town with the renter only to serve his own needs. Near the end of the movie, Oskar and his mother have a heart to heart. In doing so, Oskar finds another soul he can bond with. He realizes his mother cares and loves him just as much as his father did. He and his mother begin to form a communal bond in which they both support and genuinely care for each other. At the end of the movie, Oskar writes letters to all the people he met on his journey. In these letters, he singles out the people who have made the biggest impact on him and in doing so shows us how much of his need for relatedness has been satiated for the time being. He has made many new relationships that have made an impression on him. As a person who struggles with relationships in the first place, Oskar has grown and learned how to cultivate solid, supportive relationships.
Oskar also has a high need for competence. He is a very intelligent child and his father cultivated that need with challenges that helped him find flow. His entire journey is a big display of competence as he struggles with the challenge to find the lock to the key. His father structures expeditions for him so he can experience challenges that match his skill. He lets Oskar lead the expeditions in his own direction and gives him positive feedback when he finds the next piece of the puzzle such as the positive note he left for him at the end of the sixth expedition. Despite the positive and nurturing environment Oskar’s father has built for him, he has very little failure tolerance. Despite finding where the key belongs, Oskar destroys all his work in a fit of anger and disappointment as the answer to the puzzle was not quite what he had expected. The answer to the puzzle does not allow Oskar to feel flow and as he has never really failed before in his own eyes, he is unable to deal with the disappointment he feels. Despite this, in the scene where Oskar and his mother have a heart to heart, his mother reinforces his journey with positive feedback and pride, helping Oskar to see that he did not truly fail as he thought he did.
Terms: Needs, relatedness, internalized, exchange relationship, communal, competence, flow, structure, failure tolerance

The movie extremely loud and incredible close is a about a young boy Oskar who has a form of autism where he reacts to things differently especially change and the way he handles and reacts to it is mostly out of anger. The movie starts with some foreshadowing of his father and his relationship and how close the two were and then the 9/11 event happens causing his father to die. Oskar and his dad were working on a project together in which he needed to find all different pieces to put it together after his father passed he was still on the search for a key. This movie shows Oskar as he travels through all the different stages of psychologically needs. It first starts when he decides that he needs to leave his house and go out and ask different people from which he had clues about to see if they knew anything about the key or where it may be. For Osker this was relatedness since his dad was the person he was closest to and then he passed he didn’t really have anyone else he had his mother but for him he struggled to make relationships with people because of the way he was. He began his search and looking for people like the first women Mrs.Brown of which he asked her what she knew and if she could help. He went out of his bedroom to relate to people that knew his father in hopes of finding the key. He also became quite close friends with and older gentleman of which helped him as well. Another way that relatedness is shown is through Oskar and his mother’s relationship which from the scenes shown in the film we can assume that they are not as close to each other but Oskar does have the sense of wanting to help protect his mother has he made sure t hide the answering machine so that his mother wouldn’t have to hear his last words when he was dying. The next factor that is talked about is his need for Autonomy which is personal self-direction and goals that one pursues for themselves. For Oskar that was the want to go out and find the last key even though his father was no longer around. His father was the one that was giving him the push and want in the first place and after he passed he took it upon himself and had the strong want and drive to find it. Since he did suffer from a form of autism it was a challenge for him and he made sure that he did what he needed to get through and figure it out. He lied to his mom and the doorman at the apartment and the guy at the store when he skipped school because he knew it was something he needed to do if he wanted to find the last key. He also went out of his comfort zone by getting out in the world and exploring it he would bring with his things that he needed to comfort him when he got scared. It would have been much easier for him to just not live his house but because of his strong autonomy to complete finding the last key he had the want to do it. The last one that was shown within the movie as well is his need for competence. He had the need to be effective within the environment and just for himself as a person. He steps out of his comfort zone a lot to achieve what he wanted to. Even though he ran into many challenges in his life he didn’t let any of them stop him he keep going through it all.


Terms:
Psychological needs
Autonomy
Relatedness
Competence

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close follows a young boy, Oskar, on his intrinsically motivated journey to find the match to a key he found in his father’s closet. Finding the match to the key is important to Oskar because his dad passed away during the tragic attack on the World Trade Center that took place on September 11, 2001. Oskar believes it is his father’s final mystery for him to solve. This movie exemplifies the three psychological needs we learned about in Chapter 6: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
First, I will discuss parts of the movie that show examples of autonomy. According to the text (pg. 146), “autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior.” Oskar’s father instilled in him that if he has the information he can solve the problems. Throughout his journey, Oskar was able to take control over his search. His perceived locus of causality comes from within him (internal) due to his interest in solving the problem. An example of volition would be how Oskar kept saying he had to find the match to the key because it was the last mystery his father left behind. He is both freely wanting to do it out of interest and being coerced because he thinks his dad wanted him to solve it. An example of perceived choice would be when the renter told him to stop searching even though Oskar wanted to continue.
Next, I will discuss competence and how it relates to the movie. Competence is defined by the text as, “the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment” (pg. 155). Oskar enjoys a good challenge and even when he ran into obstacles, he kept trying new outlets. For example, he borrowed a lot of phonebooks from the doorman to track down which “Black” the key may belong to. He continued searching even though many of the people he met did not know his father or recognize the key. The events that occurred in his journey challenged him and reinforced his skills so they can develop and grow. Although the key did not bring closure to his father’s death, he was able to successfully solve the mystery of the 6th borough, and find some closure, when he found a note his father had previously written and hid in a park.
Finally, I will talk about a couple of the characters from the movie that helped satisfy Oskar’s need for relatedness. Relatedness is defined as, “the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people” (pg. 162). Oskar formed two close relationships after his father’s death. He has a very close relationship with his grandmother and they communicate through walkie-talkies to check in on each other to make sure they are both ok. They like and care for each other and trust they will always be there for one another. Oskar also formed a close relationship with the mute, older man renting a room from his grandmother. Oskar and “the renter” were able to form a special bond because the older man reminded him of his father. The renter accompanied Oskar on his journey to find the match to the mystery key.

Terms Used:
Psychological needs
Autonomy
perceived locus of causality
volition
perceived choice
Competence
Relatedness

The movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close provides tragic and moving examples of the three major psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, as well as the organismic and person-environment dialectic approach of psychological needs. In this reflection, I will analyze how Oskar, the main character, adapts to his turbulent environment through the application of these theories.

The organismic approach of psychological needs proclaims that environments change and organisms must adapt to those changes in order to survive, and the person-environment dialectic further describes the nature of the organismic approach by proclaiming that environments can either support or frustrate our adoption by virtue of what it affords or does not. These theories both reflect dynamic systems theory and the nurture perspective of psychology. The contrasting approach would be the mechanistic, biological, and nature-oriented approach.

Oskar lives in New York City, which as the title of the movie indicates, is an extremely loud environment that moves and changes quickly. On top of that, Oskar’s Asperger-like traits mde him sensitive to such environments. For example, Oskar says he is frustrated by old people, running people, airplanes, skyscrapers, loud noises, and especially bridges. Almost everything integral to big city life frustrates him. However, his survival and growth--his search of the lock and his eight minutes with his father--meant adapting to the city environment.

Before Thomas, Oskar’s father, dies, he is Oskar’s support for adapting to his frustrating environment. Oskar has a high relatedness need, especially in the kind he received from his father, which was autonomy-supportive. His father helped him engage with the frustrating world giving mysteries for him to solve and letting him go out and attempt to solve them. This was of great interest to Oskar. He had an intense curiosity and need to figure things out. And he was good at it. He was competent, as demonstrated by his non-spot spewing of facts, map-making abilities, creative filing systems, notebooks, and persistence to search every day, even if the thing he is searching for may never be found. The journey, what was found along the way, and the time spent with his father was good enough. The mystery solving activities drove him out of his comfort zone and into the city. By giving Oskar the freedom to explore, not only was Thomas helping him come out of his shell but since Thomas also wanted to be an explorer before becoming a jeweler, he reinforced his values in Oskar and forged a stronger bond between them.

Although able to handle some of the frustrations of the world with his dad, he hadn’t reached his maturity for growth potential. This is demonstrated when Oskar refused to swing after his father had taken him to his favorite swing when he was a child. This will be important later after we talk about how Oskar copes after his dad dies and how he grows.

After Thomas dies, the tactics Oskar used to adapt (or rather fails to adapt) changed completely. He was left on his own. However, he held onto what he knew to adapt. He kept searching for the 6th borough, and a year after his father died, he found the key in the blue vase. This spurred a new mystery to be solved, and one that Oskar hoped would allow him to savor his father’s memory for a little longer. He likened it to the 8-minutes of light we would have in the moments after our sun exploded if it were to ever happen. However, it was also a coping strategy for him to prevent himself from fully processing the pain and suffering of his loss. Like he told his mother later, he was just trying so hard to be normal. Although he was competent and autonomous at mystery-solving, he was missing his need for relatedness he had with his father. He denied at first by saying he did want to be comforted or to hear people stories. All he wanted was the lock and to have his 8 minutes with his father. He started to distance himself and fight with his mother but also showed signs of needing relatedness, for example, when he whispered “I love you,” under the door when he left. Later, he built a relationship with his grandfather, who helps him face his fears, for example, using the subway and walking over the bridge. When his grandfather leaves, I think Oskar internalized that he should not run away like his grandfather from his problems. Oskar eventually reconnected with his mother when she reveals she was trying to solve the mystery of her son and what he was doing all these nights. They bond over their love for Thomas and each other, resatisfying Oskar’s need for relatedness.

After this tumultuous journey, Oskar shows maturity and growth when he decides to go to the park his dad took him to swing. There he finds his father’s note that he solved the mystery, which I think he realizes is not finding the 6th borough, but rather, facing his fears. And that’s when Oskar swings like is as free as the light traveling from a star when it dies, and the movie ends.

Terms:
Psychological Needs
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness
Organismic Approach
Person-Environment Dialectic

Oops, I meant to write adaptation, not adoption, in the second paragraph.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is about a nine-year old boy named Oskar who lost his father in the 9/11 attacks. Throughout the movie Oskar is on a quest to finish the last puzzle he and his dad had worked on together. This movie relates a lot to our latest chapter in terms of psychological needs—focusing on autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Oscar shows autonomy when he begins to wander through New York by himself in order to follow the “clues” that he found in his father’s closet. Autonomy is having the self-determination to make one’s own choices, and Oskar had to answer many open-ended questions while trying to find closure from losing his dad.
Relatedness was also a large theme throughout this movie. It’s mentioned at one point that Oskar was tested for Asperger’s, and although the tests were inconclusive he shares a lot of comparable traits. The one person he had always felt comfortable with was his father, and when he passed away Oskar refused to get close to his mother [with whom he felt he couldn’t relate to] and spent a lot of his time alone after 9/11. It wasn’t until after Oskar had met his grandfather [his father’s father] that he began to fulfill this psychological need. By being able to relate to somebody, he slowly began to talk to other people, which eventually led him to being able to open up and talk about the voicemails from his dad that he had kept secret for a year. To me, relatedness was the biggest of the three themes, because it was talked about so many times in the film. At one point, Oskar is spying on his parents in the kitchen and overhears the two talking about the newest puzzle, which is to find an extinct borough in New York. When making this puzzle, his dad set it up so that he would have to talk to everybody in Central Park, and it is then mentioned that Oskar has always had a problem relating to and forming relationships with others. However, through the film Oskar finally begins to make bonds and start relating to people such as his mother and grandfather.
Competence was another large portion of the movie. One thing Oskar and his dad loved to do were to solve riddles that his dad came up with. One example was one thing from every decade in a certain century, and the main riddle was the find the “sixth borough,” something his father had made up. Oskar was extremely competent in looking for clues his father had left for him, and in the end he completes the main riddle of finding this imaginary borough. To me, Oskar feels like he has to prove over and over again his competence. He has to show his mother he can do things well on his own, he has to show his father how well he is at these puzzles, and he even has to show the door man how intelligent he is with witty quips throughout the movie. He also enjoys being forced to think or to “look harder” for clues, which in turn helps him become even more competent.

Psychological needs
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness

The story is remarkably close to the Buddhist story of Kisa Gautami, who lost her one year-old son, and desperately tried to find someone who could bring him back to life. She finally comes to the Buddha, who instructs her that he can if she brings 4 or 5 mustard seeds from a family that has not experienced death. With new hope, she sets out to find that family. After a long search, she comes to realize that every family experiences and has to go on after death, which allows her to let go of her dead son’s body and move on. Oskar goes through a similar quest. Like many of his interactions with his parents, we see the importance of autonomy and motivation through intrinsic interests.

Before Thomas’ (Oskar’s father) death in the attack on the World Trade Center, we see a father who is able to motivate his son by getting into his world and understanding his perspective, and therefore able to use Oskar’s interests and ways of seeing the world to help him explore and grow. Thomas does not have to tell Oskar what he should do, but instead gives him a great deal of autonomy to make choices for himself and pursue growth by stimulating Oskar’s interests. Oskar also appears to suffer from an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)—he says the tests were inconclusive for Asperger Syndrome, but he displays the classic criteria—and his parents work to enhance his coping skills even if these may appear odd to others, and never seem to try to force Oskar to adopt behaviors that fit more to societal norms. They give him the opportunity to grow into who he is capable of being, and develop competence navigating the world that fits his personality and interests. This sets Oskar up to take on the daunting exploration that follows his father’s death.

Oskar’s mother (Linda) continues to give Oskar a great deal of personal space and autonomy to deal with his emotions and address his psychological needs after the death. Even when Oskar lashes out at her, she respects his autonomy to express his feelings and chart his own course. After Oskar finds the key and begins his search for the person with a last name Black that he believes the key must belong to, Linda works to understand the situation from Oskar’s perspective, and then figures out how to allow Oskar maximum autonomy while providing the structure that would help Oskar remain safe. In doing so, Oskar is allowed to take on new challenges which fulfill his high competency needs, continue to develop interpersonal skills (a deficit in those with ASD) that help him meet his relatedness needs, and keeps Oskar motivated to work through his pain in hopes that he will be able to start to move forward in rather than remaining stuck in the world of loss that follows 9/11.

Max von Sydow’s character of Oskar’s grandfather also gives Oskar a wide degree of autonomy, although he does so in a way that requires Oskar to acknowledge the needs of another person if he wants to have his company on his adventure. He agrees to follow most of Oskar’s rules, to take the lead in directing the exploration, and answers many of his questions.

In the end, as with Kisa Gautami, Oskar recognizes that so many of the people who he meets are wrestling with their own loss. He discovers a lot about himself, becomes capable of taking on new challenges (like overcoming some of his fears), and he is able to develop genuine relationships with his mother and grandfather in ways that were missing before. The autonomy allows for personal growth and learning, avoids stifling his innate motivational resources, and helps him persist until he gains the some of the healing he needs.

Terms: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, intrinsic motivation, interest, autonomy-supporting motivational strategies, innate motivational resources.

Extremely loud and Incredibly Close is a movie that shows the aspects of psychological needs in chapter six in great detail. The main character is a young boy named Oskar whom is currently in the care of his mother, because his father was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Oskar is little different from other kids, because he has Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Oskar’s father Thomas, would not let “ASD” get in the way of the competence that Oskar could be able to reach. In order for the two to think hard and have fun with each other, they would do scavenger hunt riddles to solve around the city. About a year after Thomas’ death, Oskar went into his dad’s old closet and found an unsolved riddle which was a key with the word “Black.” Oskar vowed and was determined to figure out what this last riddle meant in honor of his father and thought up ways to figure it out. All three of the main psychological needs including autonomy, competence, and relatedness are shown repeatedly in this film.

Oskar shows autonomy when he decides that he is going to solve the riddle and that no one is going to stop him or tell him otherwise. He thinks up his owns ways to solve it without asking the opinions of anyone else to influence how he goes about it. He decides to look up “Black” in the phone book and finds a ton of results for different addresses and people with that last name in New York. This could be shown competence as well, because he knows that the phonebook can be a valuable resource for a term like this. He also believes that with the help of the phonebook, he will have successful to solve the riddle. Oskar makes his own decision that whether the key was left for him or his mom or if he has to go to each address or find each “Black” family, he is going to do what it takes. Oskar also displays autonomy in the way that across his expedition to solve the riddle, he makes the decision to overcome his fears and use public transportation or go across bridges. Flow is also shown in this sequence, because when Oskar is in the process of solving the riddle his is intensely focused on just that. There is nothing else that Oskar thinks about or that is more important at that time then solving the riddle no matter what he has to do.

Oskar’s competency had always been put to the test when his father was alive, due to the fact that they did do all the scavenger hunt riddles. He knows that he has the competency to solve the last riddle even if his dad is not around to help conduct it. He truly has the ability and the resources to come up with the reasoning for the left behind key. This was like an optimal challenge for Oskar, because it would be a very difficult task for him, but would overall enhance his ability to learn and process information. This task was one that was not too difficult to the point of impossibility, but it was not one that was going to be easy for him to solve either. To solve the final riddle was Oskar’s way of seeking some positive feedback for completing the task successfully after the hard work and determination. Positive feedback from others is almost just as good, if not better than being able to solve the mystery for your own knowledge.

Relatedness is shown in this film when Oskar meets his grandmother’s roommate named Max. It is good that Oskar meets Max, because Oskar’s father Thomas was always the one there for him and the one that he socialized with. This is especially important because, Oskar and his mother Linda, are not on the best of terms at the moment. There is a lot of built up anger and possible guilt that could be making them argue with each other. Max and Oskar go on the search together to find the answer to the riddle and become close friends. Oskar does not have to feel so alone and disconnected from others anymore and Max would be happier too to have a companion. There is a lot of relatedness in the relationship as well because Oskar has ASD with some past trauma from his father’s 9/11 terrorist attack death while Max has trauma from his parent’s death in the World War II bombing. With Oskar having ASD, he does not communicate with the best of ways, but Max does not communicate verbally at all. They both have been through a lot of the same things so they know how the other feels, making them so close overall. Oskar later ends up figuring out that Max is a lot like his father Thomas, and that Max must in fact be Oskar’s grandfather. He also finds out from his mother that she knew about the search and has warned people that he would be out asking them for help. Overall Oskar needs to continue to have all of his psychological needs met in order to be happy and content with life, but to also ease the burden of his father’s passing.

Terms:
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness
Flow
Vitality
Feedback
Perceived choice
Psychological needs
Perceived locus of causality
Optimal challenge
Positive Feedback

This movie is all about Oskar, the son, trying to find peace and make sense of what has happened to his father. Oskar goes a long journey trying to find a key that he found in his dad’s closet 3 years after his father’s death. When Oskar was growing up, he was very close to his father, being on the high end of the relatedness spectrum. His father knew exactly what to do in order to keep Oskar interested. Relatedness refers to the desire and need to belong, feel appreciated, valued, and wanted and to form close relationships with the people around us. Oskar present this high need for relatedness with his father, but throughout the movie he struggles with finding someone else that understands him like his father did. By the end of the movie, Oskar’s mother confesses that she knew all along what he was doing. She tells Oskar that she wasn’t simply letting him go out on his own without knowing where he was. She created her own map, her own name cards, and made sure he was safe the whole time. These actions of Oskar’s mother created the relatedness between the two that Oskar lost when he lost his father.

Not only did the film show a long line of relatedness but there was a high level of autonomy within the parent/child relationship, between both parents and Oskar. Autonomy is the need for choice and decision-making flexibility within an environment. It is the need to express our wants and desires in the way we choose and in the timely manner that we want. A scene that very much displays this is when Oskar and his dad are at the swing set and they’re looking for the 6th burrow, a sort of scavenger hunt that the dad has created for Oskar. The dad explains to Oskar that he should swing because it’s fun and he believes he will enjoy it, but Oskar absolutely does not want to get near that swing. The father, though slightly disappointed, doesn’t make Oskar swing. Though he really wants him to, he walks away basically telling Oskar it’s okay. This is giving Oskar choice over his actions and letting him choose when he is ready to swing. Then you see Oskar finally swinging at the end of the movie, still displaying this idea of autonomy over this choice. His mother also displays this autonomy-supportive nature by letting Oskar search for the lock box that the key goes. Even though she is worried every second that he is gone, she gives him the space he needs in order to keep autonomous and even a little competent. By her letting Oskar seek out this lock box she encourage initiative by nurturing his interests, preferences, and psychological needs. She doesn’t try to find incentives to keep him away from trying to find this lock box, but instead supports it thus increasing Oskar’s sense of autonomy.

Competence is the desire to interact effectively with the environment by developing our skills and improving our capacities, talents, and potentials. This need results in humans seeking out optimal challenges in order to increase our competence. You can see this present within Oskar every time he hits a road bump. When he realized reaching all of the people named Black would take 3 years, he recalculated and a more effective way. When he talked to his grandpa and asked his if he believed he would be able to find, the grandpa said no and even Oskar slightly agreed with him, but he still didn’t give up. He had a need to succeed and show that he could complete this task he set out to do, and he would do it the best he could!

Terms: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Autonomy-Supportive

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a film about our main character Oskar, who is searching for the answer to what lock fits his key. He thinks the key is from his dad, but it turns out not to be anything special. Along the way he meets many new people, and this journey helps him overcome the loss of his father on 9/11. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, which means though socially awkward he is able to remember things exactly as they happened, which is why he is so good at hunting for clues with his dad, or when they were playing the oxymoron game. In Developmental Psychology, we learned people on the Autism Spectrum can sometimes get fixated on one thing or idea for hours, or only have one or two hobbies, which in this case was the idea of finding the lock for the key.

Relating to the chapter, Oskar has a very high level of autonomy. He is alone for most of the movie searching. Even when someone is with him, he is clearly in charge. He gave his grandfather a list of things to answer and what things he would need to do to follow the search. He also never told his mother where he was going, and actively lied about his destinations. He told strangers lies to keep them from asking too many questions, so he would be in charge.

His level of competence was also very high. He was very good at decoding puzzles and messages to find the answer, even when he received no help or just a shrug of the shoulders. He even liked when it was a challenge. He followed each clue every Saturday and never missed a house. He is also very competent in random facts. He knew everything about elephants, because he watched a documentary on them and remembered all of it. He asked many questions so he could find the answers to everything. He was constantly questioning the entire movie, even when it may not have been appropriate to ask it.

His relatedness was where he was lacking. He did not seem to have any friends, and his mom only mentioned one name of someone he hangs out with. He clearly lacked social skills and appropriate social boundaries, especially with people he just met. He would interrogate them, which did not seem like a problem to him even if they were getting agitated. He asked the first lady to kiss her even though he just met her and she was almost twenty years older than him.

After the loss of his father, who was his favorite person in the whole world, his social world collapsed. He was left with his mother, grandmother, and his not talking grandfather, who also ended up leaving. He did not seem to get along with his mother, but his grandmother seemed to be close with him, which was his primary social bond. He also admitted he did not like talking to people and his quest for finding the sixth borough would mean he would have to talk to everyone. At the end of the movie, he says he only wants to make his father proud, and even though his dad is gone he is going to try every single day to keep his 8 minutes going.

Terms:
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness
Social bond

The 2011 film, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was based off a novel about a small boy named Oskar. Oskar was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome—which is now under the Autism Spectrum. He follows clues that his father leaves for him in order to make a decision about what his next task will be. Oskar’s father created countless interactions for Oskar to have and to help him talk to strangers with one goal in mind. To find the sixth borough.
This chapter and book intertwine greatly due to Oskar’s psychological needs. His autonomy to control the environment and be on his own is high because he wants to get out of his house to find the clues. He started counting his lies that would eventually get him out into the city by himself to find out where the sixth borough was located. The lock that fits into the key is somewhere with a person named “Black.” As Oskar is searching for this person, he is forced to have many interactions with strangers, which is something he had a hard time with. His second psychological need, relatedness, was extremely low. He had a difficult time connecting with others, making friends, and even being with people in general.
Due to Oskar being on the spectrum, his IQ and competence is incredibly high, but his social ques are hard to come by. His interests include problem solving and working to find a solution in a timely manner because if there is not a solution or he does not succeed, he will drive himself crazy. He starts to show his symptoms of being on the spectrum was after his father was involved in the worst day ever. Before this day, Oskar’s father helped him meet his psychological needs. His environment had always been the same, but after his father passed, everything changed and he didn’t understand how to continue on without him. He needs to find the lock because it is something that he knows he can do. What he does not know is why some strangers would crash their plane into his father’s work.
Oskar then connects and uses his grandfather who does many similar things that his father used to do. His grandfather provides a new source of autonomy and also strengthens Oskar’s relatedness due to the fact that he refuses to verbally communicate and Oskar has to do it alone. For Oskar to succeed and complete the task in finding William Black and the lock for the key, Oskar needs high competence level, high autonomy, and high relatedness. All of these principles were satisfied during Oskar’s journey all around the city looking for Mr. Black.
After finding the lock and making it back home, he realized the bonds he formed all within this time were only making him better.
Terms: autonomy, relatedness, competence, flow

The movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close perfectly shows the three psychological needs discussed in chapter 6. The main character Oskar (interpreted by Thomas Horn) is a boy with a possible Asperger’s disorder which has striking behavioral patterns and attitudes. These behaviors reflect psychological needs like the need of autonomy that Thomas, his father, tries to support. Psychological needs are mainly personality based, so I would say that Oskar has a high need for autonomy: He seems to decide what to do with his time and interests rather than choose his course of action depending on environmental forces.
Furthermore, Thomas, who is very interested in science and discovering new things, tries to support his need of autonomy. He uses all the four essential ways of supporting autonomy listed in the book: 1) He nurtures Oskar’s inner motivational states by creating a clue game that keeps both interested, 2) He relies on informational language treating Oskar’s problems as natural events in the process of learning rather than a target for criticism, 3) He provides explanatory rationales that communicate the value, meaning, and utility when engaging in some behaviors, and 4) He acknowledges and accepts negative affect, as seen in the movie when Oskar did not want to try using the swing.
After his father’s death, Oskar starts a huge and almost imposible search driven by his need of competence: He interacts effectively with his surroundings developing skills that allow him to seek out and master this huge challenge. The difficulty of the task and its participation is set by Oskar in order to, according to the flow theory, satisfy his need for competence. His desire to keep with the search is reduced by some environmental factors like the structure of the task: The environment does not provide clear goals, guidance or positive feedback that leads to Oskar frustration and anger when he tries the key in the keys factory.
The most emotional part of the movie for me is shown by the need for relatedness. I think that Oskar (according to the Perception of a Social Bond section in chapter 6) had his need for relatedness satisfied because he has social bonds that care about his welfare and that like him, like his mother and grandmother. On the other hand, these relationships don’t deeply satisfy this need because he does not show his ‘authentic self’. We can clearly see how he lies and hides from his mom all the information about his project or even when he wants to tell her that he loves her. This need for relatedness is slightly being satisfied as the movie goes on, when Oskar decides to have The Renter as a companion during his project or when he tells about his dad’s call to William Black.
At the end of the movie, he seems much happier because he has all his needs covered: He feels free with his choices, feels competent because solving the enigma of the key and the “Sixth Borough” one, and because he feels closer and show his real self to his mom.

Terms used:
Psychological need
Autonomy
Inner motivational states
Informational language
Explanatory rationales
Negative affect
Competence
Flow theory
Environmental factors
Structure
Perception of a Social Bond
Relatedness

Extremely loud and incredibly close is a great example of the three basic psychological needs discussed in the book. We learned about competence, which is wanting to control/master you environment and wanting to know how things will turn out. The second need was relatedness which is our desire to interact with others or connect with them. Lastly autonomy which is the urge to “do your best”. I notice competence the most in this movie. It all started when Oscar’s dad spiked an interest in Oscar about the 6th borough, which ends up being what Oscar is looking for the whole movie. He tries to put together clues that he thinks his dad left for him after he was tragically killed during 9-11. Oscar finds this key which makes him ask questions about what it is, why its there, what it is he is supposed to find in order to get the clues to the sixth borough. I noticed relatedness first with Oscar in his father, he felt very close to his dad and found comfort in things like the way he shrugged, doing Taekwondo, and the clues his dad would give him. Secondly you see it with his grandma, who was there on the day of 9-11 and tried to comfort him after he found out something bad had happened but wasn’t sure whether or not his dad was still alive. He also shows a pretty strong sense of relatedness with his mother, which goes up and down through the movie but is especially strong at the end. This is because he finds out that his mom made her own map of where it was Oscar was going. They were able to bond for the first time over his father and his death. There was quite a bit of autonomy in the movie as well when Oscar is trying to finish out this mission of finding the 6th borough. He came up with what he thought was the best strategy to find the person with the last name “Black” which is what the envelope said with they key in it that he found in his father’s closet. He also expresses strong autonomy when it comes to visiting the people, he knew he couldn’t spend much time with them, he could only allow himself to eat for 19 minutes each Saturday when he visited them. Another big part of this movie that kind of fits all three of them, was the old man who rented out a place from his grandma. He got close to this old man whom he had a lot of curiosity about. He spent a lot of time with him and trying to get to know him, eventually putting it all together and figuring out the old man was in fact his grandfathers. He meets his ultimate goal of autonomy and finds the sixth borough clue. This movie again was a great example of the three basic psychological needs which are, competence, autonomy and relatedness.

Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness
Psychological needs

The movie extremely loud and incredibly close hits extremely close with what we just learned about in chapter six. This movie follows the child Oskar who searches for the final message of his father that is hidden somewhere in New York City. Oskar’s father died in 9/11, and Oskar is sure that his father has left him something. Throughout the film, Oskar shows all three psychological needs. These three needs are competence, relatedness, and autonomy.
Oskars dad dies in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and right from the beginning he shows his relatedness. He and his father were very close, and he wanted to relate to him. He gains the strength to look into his fathers closet, and finds the key that he believed his dad left him on purpose. He wanted to find this key because he wanted to feel close and relate to his dad. By finding this key and going out to try to solve this mystery, he tried to relate to his now deceased father.
Along with relatedness, Oskar shows competency. He has challenges while trying to fulfil the mystery of the key. He knew what he was competent of doing. His father set these up, knowing that Oskar will over come any challenges and will be competent in what he does. He starts off as a quiet boy, not wanting to really form outside relationships. When his father makes him search through many many of the same names in the phone book, he had to reach out. He was forced to go out of his comfort zone and socialize with new people, which was not easy, but he was competent and able to do it. This helped him reach and grow in his competency.
The last psychological need you can see in this film is autonomy. This was basically just the entire plot of the film. Oskar was trying to fill this need by finding out what his father had been wanting him to solve. Basically this whole movie he makes decisions on what he wants to do because it makes him feel good. Nobody is forcing him to do these different things but he does them because he wants to feel good about himself and his ultimate relationship with his dad.
Overall, this movie portrayed the three main physiological needs and how Oskar used them. He used autonomy, relatedness and competence throughout this movie. This movie was a great tie into the book and chapter six.

Terms: psychological needs, relatedness, autonomy, competence

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has the main character named Oskar who, after his fathers tragic death in 9/11 has discovered a key that he believes will bring him closer to his dad. Throughout the movie there were several concepts from chapter six that were related to the film. A big topic in the chapter that was seen throughout the entire film was the concept of autonomy. Oskar has the desire to do what he pleases and wants to be able to make his own choices. He wants to be the ones to make the decisions and the next steps within his journey. We see autonomy working as he develops a system of finding out where the key may go. He completely goes on his own way of trying to find the people with the last name Black and he has the desire to keep it his way. With the topic of autonomy Oskar also displays the perceived locus of causality. This meaning that he has the desire to keep trying to find the person the key belongs to because of a personal source, that source beings father. He has the motivation to go weeks on end to reach his goal. He has no body telling him no and nobody telling him that he cannot do what he is doing. This displays the concept of volition. Oskar has a high level of volition because he is engaging in activities and feels that he is on the journey for himself and nobody else.
Aside from autonomy we see at the beginning of the film that Oskar would have a very very low level of relatedness. We see how he struggles with the outside world away from home once he steps away from his apartment on his own. His parents even have a discussion that finding the sixth borough would allow Oskar to interact with a large amount of people and he could finally gain the social skills that he needs. As the film continues relatedness levels begin to increase. We see this as he meets new people such as the Renter and Abby Black. We see how he becomes much more open to talking with strangers and even though he views some of the situations as being unsafe, he still has that internal voice of his father telling him that everything will be okay.
To go along with relatedness and autonomy, we see that Oskar has very high levels of competence. He has a brilliant mind and he knows it. There is a scene where him and his mother get into an argument where he uses his knowledge of different scientific facts as fuel for his argument. We see that Oskar also uses what the chapter calls “flow” this is basically that Oskar puts himself in situations where he can use his knowledge to absorb more knowledge and put that into his involvement in an activity. For example, we see in the film how he uses his knowledge to try and make sense of things around him. He tries to get the Renter to say why he cannot speak by mentioning facts to why people often do not speak. Overall this film highlighted the concepts of autonomy, relatedness and competence.

Terms
Autonomy
Relatedness
Competence
Volition
Locus of causality

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that follows the story of Oskar Schell, and his father Thomas Schell who dies on September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center was attacked. Oskar is revealed to have Aspergers Syndrome, which is a developmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. I enjoyed watching this movie, and was glad that it was put on the list as I really like how it relates to psychological needs. One psychological need is relatedness or a need for social interaction, and Oskar happens to have Aspergers which affects his connections. The only person that Oskar got along with in the film very well was his father before he died. After his father's death his relationship with his mother is aggravated when he says that he wishes it was her instead of his father. The only relationship that he actually has contact, and communication with is his grandmother, then supposedly his grandfather who help him find about a key he had found. The primary way to improve relatedness is with interacting with others trying to start a new relationship with someone new, and Oskar has difficulties in doing so. On the other hand Oskar I’d consider to be very high in competence, able to face a challenge with his full attention. When he finds the key, the name Black is mentioned, and he finds that 472 Black’s are in New York's phone book. His mother, knowing that he had found the key went ahead in advance and informed every person with the last name Black that her son Oskar would be visiting them. Something that Oskar did with his father on a regular basis was solve riddles or go on scavenger hunts. One thing that he learns from one of his hunts is that New York City once contained a sixth borough, or divisions in New York. Related to competence is optimal challenge and flow, which was provided by his father in the forms of riddles and scavenger hunts. Flow is the state of concentration and the deep involvement in an activity, and is usually a pleasurable experience. Optimal challenge is when skill matches the challenge, and offers a sense of pleasure when the task is completed. For Oskar these puzzles were those things, and with no longer being able to do that with his father impacted him. Competence can have positive results like creativity, task performance, better health and positive emotions. When Oskar no longer had puzzles, these things could have been affected as puzzles and scavenger hunts were his way of communicating and interacting with the world and others. Relatedness has positive results as well like less negative emotion, and school/life satisfaction. With Oskar having Aspergers, these could have a major impact on how he goes about in his life. It could have been the reason for the outburst against his mother wishing that she had died instead, and that he only has relationships with family members with no mention of having friends from school or any other place.
Terms used: Flow, Optimal challenge, Competence, Autonomy, Aspergers Syndrome, emotions, communication

For this week’s assignment, we had to watch movie “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”. This movie displays many great examples of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. One of the main character of the movie named Oskar, shows his vigorous eagernesses for autonomy when he becomes aware of his vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The movie depicts one scene where he shows his weakness when his phone rings. It seems like that he does not like the ringing noise and tries to ignore it. However, he wishes to overcome his fear by picking up the phone whenever his dad called him. After seeing a couple of scene of the movie, it is clear that Oskar does not overcome his fear of ringing phone. But, with the help of a tambourine, he was able to overcome his fear of bridges. Although, he was very pleased by the fact that he overcame of this fear which then motivated him to continue his search towards clues belonging to his keys. Oskar wanted to be control in his life and what he does. According to our textbook, there’s a phrase that said “and we want our behavior to arise out of and express our preferences and desires” (pg. 145)”. This phrase can definitely relate to the movie because this is exactly what Oskar wanted to do and tried to show the viewers.

The movie also shows great example of competence. For example, in the movie, it showed how Oskar faces many obstacles at such a young age. An example of this would be when he tries to find some people who could relate to his dad, but then unfortunately, his dad passed away which was very tragical time for him to deal with. There’s a phrase in the book that states “We all want to develop skills and improve our capacities, talents, and potential”(Page 155). I think this phrase can relate to what is happening to Oskar in the movie. Later, the movie portrays Oskar finding an envelope with a key in it with “Black” written on it. He gets motivated to find everyone with the last name “Black” around where he lived. He has the motive to do this because he is very anxious to find out where this key reside. This led him to view every new “Black” as a friend. Moreover, it was very fortunate for Oskar to maintain his tolerance throughout this journey, especially when people almost gave up and were rendezvous during crucial situations. The movie showed great example of intrinsic motivation of Oskar when he finally figures out where the key belonged.

Finally, the movie showed many example of relatedness and how Oskar kind a struggle at that point. Oskar is a character who has different point of views than other people around him. But, his father implicated him very well because his father knew that Oskar does not like to be around people. But, Oskar’s dad wanted him to interact with people around his so he always tried to put him somewhere where there are many people he could around and engage with so they could finish the tasks they are working on. Unfortunately, after his dad passing away, Oskar felt very helpless because he knew very well that his dad understood him no matter what and now he has nobody beside him to support him emotionally. He becomes friend with the renters, who was an elderly and honorable man that lived in the same apartment as his grandmother. The movie shows that the renters were really quiet type of a person. This kind of motivated Oskar to wanting to talk to him and getting to know him better. Oskar felt at a point that the renter truly enjoys being around him, and talking to him. But, unfortunately, he leaves too and Oskar is left with his grandmother alone. But finally, the renter mom turned out be someone Oskar being around with. This was someone who could understand him completely. This was a very grateful moment for Oskar that he finally found someone in his life who understood him the way he thinks than rest of the world. He really needed someone at that point after his father’s death.

Terms Used:
Intrinsic Motivation
Relatedness
Competence
Autonomy
Motivation
Emotion

When I read the chapter and thought about how psychological needs relate to people, I mostly thought about how they related to me and my life. It was very interesting to consider Oskar’s psychological needs in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close because it allowed me to view psychological needs from a different perspective. Although Oskar said his aspergers testing was inconclusive, Oskar definitely had special needs, likely on the autism spectrum or some extreme anxiety disorder, considering his lack of social skills, no-filter-commentary, sensitivity to sound and touch, seemingly irrational fears (gas mask on subway), outbursts of anger, and fixations on his expedition. Even though Oskar had special needs, his psychological needs remain the same as mine: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Oskar’s father, Thomas, did an amazing job of being autonomy-supportive-- catering to Oskar’s intrinsic interests of searching, learning, and problem-solving by creating expeditions. The expeditions spurred curiosity and created optimal challenge for Oskar, which united Oskar and his father. They bonded through relatedness from communication, common interests, story sharing, and quality time; their love and concern for each other’s well-being was reciprocal. By creating the expedition, Thomas knew he would also be contributing to competence, leaving clues, so he could help Oskar solve the mysteries and experience flow. He even created positive feedback by leaving the posthumous congratulatory note to Oskar for completing the expedition. By feeding Oskar’s psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, Oskar was engaged in the expedition, spending the vast majority of his time and energy on the expedition, even enduring physical pain (blisters and feet peeling) and emotional fatigue (listening to many other people’s emotional stories).
On the other hand, Oskar’s mother, Linda, appeared to utilize controlling motivation throughout the majority of the movie, which contributed to low relatedness between Linda and Oskar. Oskar was closer to his father than he was to his mother, which was made clear when Oskar told Linda that he wished she would have died instead of his father. The communication seemed to be lacking between Oskar and his mother, and most of Linda’s communication with Oskar sounded like demands. For instance, when Oskar was leaving to try his key at the first Black household, Linda said, “Leave your cell phone on. Check in every hour.” She did not explain her rationale or that she was worried about her son’s safety; she simply made commands. Linda was also controlling when she was on the phone with her husband for the last time, saying, “Find the stairs,” “You come home right now,” and “Stay talking to me.” She did not explain what she was seeing on television, tell her husband that she loved him, or explain her reasoning behind her commands; Thomas didn’t heed her commands. By the end of the movie, it was revealed that Linda has also been secretly autonomy-supportive. She had figured out Oskar’s plan, visited every person on Oskar’s Black list, and allowed Oskar to have high perceived autonomy. She utilized controlling motivation when she talked with Oskar because she was fearful of Oskar’s safety, yet she was being autonomy-supportive by allowing Oskar to explore the city alone, which was very challenging and nerve-racking for her. After Linda explained her motives and actions to Oskar, Oskar came to realize that Linda was not an unsupportive, unrelatable enemy; she was a caring, supportive, worried mother. Their relationship drastically changed, and Oskar suddenly trusted her with his emotional and vulnerable thoughts, sharing what he missed about Thomas, and even stating, “I thought only Dad could think like me.” Oskar began relating to his mother, which shifted their relationship deeper into the communal relationship realm.
Terms: psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, autonomy-supportive, flow, controlling motivation, communal relationship, engagement

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