As a child, whenever I would make good grades on test, I’d always rush home with them so proud to show my parents how well I had done. It was always a good feeling to know that they were also proud of what I had accomplished. Likewise, when I made grades that were less than desirable, I tended to avoid telling my parents about it until I absolutely had to or they found out when I brought home my progress report. In the chapter on Motivation and Emotion, Bernstein, Penner, Clarke-Stewart, and Roy (2012) talk about achievement motivation and people’s need to achieve. He says that people with high achievement mastery are more likely to strive for excellence. This caught my interest because my father often tell me to strive for excellence in everything I do. As I did when I was a child, I still find myself excited to tell him when I have achieved excellence. Moller, Elliot, and Friedman (2008) study this in great detail to help explain why student feel a connection to their attachment to their parents and their perceived performance on exams. Moller, Elliot and Friedman conducted two studies. In the first study of 62 males and 120 females, with an average age of 19.5, they measured students’ perceived closeness to their parents after taking an exam, but before receiving any kind of feedback on the exam. They believed they would find a positive relation between the students’ mastery-goals and feelings of closeness to their parents (Moller, Elliot, & Friedman 2008). They concluded this first study in saying that more a student went for mastery-approach goals for the exam, the closer they reported feeling close to their parents after the exam and that the mastery-approach goals were not very different from the insignificant effects seen in performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals. In the second study they surveyed 71 males and 146 females with an average age of 19.4. In this second study they were more focused on determining a link between achievement goals and perceived closeness to parents after receiving feedback on the exam. They tested whether the object feedback moderated this relationship. In this second study, Moller, Elliot and Friedman had the students participate in a large group session where they answered a questionnaire that examined their specific achievement goals and perceived closeness to their parents at that time. A week later, they took the actual exam and filled out another questionnaire that assessed their perception of how well they had done on the exam and their perceived closeness to their parents. From this study, Moller, Elliot, and Friedman found that, like the first study, the more a student pursued mastery-approach goals, the closer they reported feeling to their parents. This study showed me that not only is it perfectly normal to think about how attached I am to my parents during and after exams, but also helped me explore why I would be so attached. Moller, Elliot, and Friedman (2008) explained that with a secure base, infants are more active in exploring their surroundings. I find this is also true in college. I’ve been struggling with what I want to actually major in, but I’m lucky enough to have parents who support me and are willing to let me explore.