Self-determination theory (SDT) states that humans are driven toward activities believed to satisfy a set of basic psychological needs (i.e., competence, autonomy, relatedness). The desire to satisfy these needs is thought to be essential throughout an individual's life span and their satisfaction is thought to produce feelings of overall well-being. The current study examines the potential for preadolescents to vicariously satisfy these needs through exposure to media emphasizing the satisfaction of these needs by a protagonist. A total of 353 participants between the ages of 10 to 12 years completed an online experiment. Preadolescents randomly assigned to conditions were instructed to first watch an online comic book video and then complete a set of measures including the Children's Intrinsic Needs Satisfaction Scale (CINSS; Koestner & Veronneau, 2001), the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule for Children (PANAS-C; Laurent et al., 1999) designed to measure participant feeling of well-being, the moral measure of intuitively motivated behavior (M-MIMB; Hahn et al., 2019), the interest and enjoyment subscales of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI; Ryan, 1982) to measure story enjoyment, and a one-item measure of character liking. A 5 x 2 fixed-factor design varied exposure to one of five videos and one of two measurement-presentation orders. Participants were first exposed to a video emphasizing either one of two SDT intuitions (competence or relatedness) or one of three different controls, which emphasized either one of two altruistic intuitions (care or ingroup loyalty) or a pair of egoistic intuitions (hedonism/power). Participants then completed outcome measures presented in one of two orders (CINSS, M-MIMB, PANAS/story enjoyment and character liking, and demographics, or CINSS, PANAS/story enjoyment and character liking, M-MIMB, and demographics). Although findings fail to provide support for clams that preadolescents can vicariously satisfy SDT needs by watching a protagonist satisfy these needs, exposure to comics showing a protagonist satisfy these needs increased feelings of well-being. Findings fail to provide support for clams that viewing a character having their SDT needs satisfied could (a) vicariously satisfy those needs in preadolescent viewers or (b) increase story liking or character liking. However, viewing comics showing a protagonist satisfy these needs increased feelings of positive affect reported by preadolescent viewers along with their performance of prosocial sharing behaviors. The potential for future research examining these effects is discussed.
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