autotelic

adj

1. Containing its own meaning or purpose; deriving meaning and purpose from within.

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

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

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

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

3. Not motivated by anything beyond itself; thematically self-contained.

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

noun

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

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

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