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Chapter 10 Motivation and Emotion

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Gateway Theme

Our motives and emotions energize and direct many types of behavior.

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In this chapter, we’ll look at two separate but related concepts. The first, motivation, refers to the dynamics of behavior—the ways in which our actions are aroused, maintained, and guided. Motivation theories seek to answer the question, “why do we do the things that we do, do them in a specific way, and keep doing them over time?”

We will also look carefully at emotions, which we will define as a feeling state that has a physiological, behavioral, and cognitive component. While you may think of emotions as simply being “feelings,” you will find that they are far more complicated than that!

While this chapter presents these two concepts in somewhat distinct sections, you would do well to consider how they are interrelated.

Gateway Questions (1 of 2)

What is motivation, and are there different types of motives?

Are some motives more basic than others?

What causes hunger, overeating, and eating disorders?

In what ways are pain and the sex drive unlike hunger and thirst?

How does arousal relate to motivation?

What are learned and social motives, and why are they important?

What happens when emotions are felt?

What physiological changes underlie emotion, and can “lie detectors” really detect lies?

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Gateway Questions (2 of 2)

How accurately are emotions expressed by the face and “body language”?

How do psychologists explain emotions?

How can being more positive and optimistic help me in my personal and professional life?

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A Model of Motivation

Drive strength

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Motivational states involve several different components, including needs, drives, responses, and goals. Examine what each of these is and how they are integrated in motivational processes.

We are also frequently motivated by incentives, which are external rewards or stimuli that pull us to behave in a given way with the hopes of earning that prize.

Types of Motives

Circadian rhythm

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The following categories of motives affect and drive our behaviors:

Biological motives—including things such as food, water, temperature regulation, and so on. These are controlled by the body’s need for homeostasis, and we act in ways to restore and maintain that balanced state.

Stimulus motives—those that explore our need for various forms of stimulation (e.g., curiosity, exploration, etc.).

Learned motives—needs, drives, and goals that are acquired rather than innate.

The pattern of these motives may be influenced by such factors as biological cycles, including the 24-hour circadian rhythm. This regulates our attention and arousal, sleep cycles, and motivational states.

Maslow’s Hierarchy—A Famous Image

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

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Recall that Maslow’s model had five levels, four of which referred to basic needs and the fifth (or top) of which was a growth need called self-actualization.

He also suggested that self-actualization, which was a rather general term for reaching one’s full capacity and potential, was divided into smaller meta-needs that helped us move piece by piece toward the larger actualization goal.

Self-Determination Theory and Intrinsic Motivation

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Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory suggests that there are three different motives that drive behaviors:

Competence—mastery over one’s surroundings

Autonomy—desire to control our lives

Relatedness—connections to and caring for others

When we are driven by the possibility of external rewards, we’re operating from a place of extrinsic motivation, but when it is based on internal rewards, it is extrinsic motivation. For example, doing an activity because it brings pleasure or satisfies a curiosity, this is an intrinsically motivated action. These are not mutually exclusive, though. Some activities can be driven by both intrinsic and extrinsic motives.

Under what situations should extrinsic rewards be sought out to motivate a person’s behaviors?

Internal Factors in Hunger

The hypothalamus

Hypothalamic areas that control eating

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One of the most basic human sensations is hunger, which we experience almost immediately after birth (and possibly before). What factors drive hunger? Here we look at some internal and external hunger-related factors.

The primary areas of research into internal causes of hunger have focused on the hypothalamus, which has two areas that control eating functions. The “on switch” for eating is the lateral hypothalamus, while the “off switch” is the ventromedial hypothalamus. Various chemicals in our blood work together to signal hunger or satiety, including ghrelin, glucose, leptin, and glucagonlike peptide 1 (GLP-1), and these all interact with the hypothalamus to regulate eating activities.

Another part of the hypothalamus is the paraventricular nucleus, which is affected by the chemical neuropeptide Y (NPY). How does this system work to influence eating?

External Factors in Hunger and Obesity

The obesity epidemic

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While physical factors surely affect hunger, we are also influenced by stimuli from our environments. Many of these external cues also contribute to the obesity epidemic that has arisen in recent years.

Some of these cues include the following:

Taste and plenty—When we eat too much of something, we may find that the flavor becomes less attractive to us, which is called taste aversion. Think about how the first piece of pizza tastes compared to the fourth piece! This process can also be used in practical situations, as your text discusses the use of bait shyness.

Emotional eating—Who among us has not turned to food as a comfort device when sad, stressed, or even just bored? Should we eat when we’re not hungry? Is eating just about sustenance?

Cultural factors—Eating practices, including what we enjoy eating, are often influenced by the cultural surroundings of our upbringing.

Dieting

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One’s diet refers to the foods that they regular eat, but the term dieting is a catch-all phrase for attempts to alter eating patterns with the goal of weight loss. Many who attempt this get into an unhealthy yo-yo pattern of losing and gaining weight repeatedly.

Behavioral dieting includes several steps that help people make better decisions and create long-term healthy eating lifestyles, rather than short-term (and often unsustainable) changes. Review these techniques in your text.

Eating Disorders

Rating body shape

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In contrast to obesity, there are three eating disorders that pose just as much, if not more, threat to one’s physical health.

Anorexia nervosa, which is a relentless and dangerous pursuit of excessive thinness

Bulimia nervosa, which involves pinging and compensating (purging, fasting, or obsessive exercising)

Binge eating disorder, which involves repeated episodes of “out-of-control” eating that are not followed by purging behaviors.

What are the dangers of each? What factors contribute to the development of each of these conditions in individuals?

While many associate these conditions with women, understand that they affect men too. Men also can struggle with muscle dysmorphia, which involves excessive unrealistic worry about not being muscular enough.

Refer to the text for some information about the treatment of eating disorders and the influence of cultures on these problems.

Thirst and Pain

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Go for a jog on a hot day, and you’ll likely be familiar with the concept of thirst. Eat too much salt with your lunch or dinner, and you’ll soon have the same experience.

Thirst exists in two forms—extracellular and intracellular. What causes each, and what is the best way to overcome them?

An episodic drive that we all experience is the immediate desire to avoid and reduce pain. A number of factors, including learning and modeling, affect our individual pain tolerance levels.

The Sex Drive

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The sex drive, or our individual desire to engage in sexual activity, is affected by a number of factors. We’ll discuss this more in Chapter 11, but for now we note that it is affected by a number of factors. These include hormone levels (including estrogens and androgens) as well as external factors.

Unlike other drives, the sex drive does not require a body need. This is described as a nonhomeostatic need. In other words, you may want sex, but you don’t need sex.

For an amusing story about need versus want when it comes to sex, read about the Coolidge effect in the textbook.

Arousal Theory and Peak Performance

Relationship between arousal and efficiency

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Arousal has a number of meanings, but in this context it includes both physical and psychological activation.

Arousal theory offers that there is an optimal level of arousal that each person is driven to maintain, and that we are motivated toward behaviors that establish and keep us at these optimal levels. Those with higher optimal arousal levels are called sensation seekers. What activities might they regularly prefer?

The inverted U function (or the Yerkes-Dodson law) shows us how the level of arousal we experience might affect performance on different activities, and how this relationship is affected by different levels of task complexity. What other factors could influence our best performance on a given activity?

Coping with Test Anxiety

Preparation

Relaxation

Rehearsal

Restructuring Thoughts

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Do you struggle with test taking? Do you feel that your exams underrepresent your true knowledge? Maybe you feel like you study well, but when you get to the test your “mind goes blank.”

Review this section in the text for some suggestions on how you might reduce this anxiety and improve performance.

Opponent-Process Theory and Social Motives

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As you’ve read, we tend to be driven by a desire to maintain homeostasis. This is a basis of the opponent process theory, which suggests that intense or extreme emotional or cognitive states may cause us to feel (or think) opposite direction, thus maintaining a form of psychological homeostasis. In this regard, repeated exposure to the same stimulus can intensify both of these effects.

Social motives are those that come from cultural conditioning and socialization. One of them, the need for achievement (nAch), has been widely studied.

The Need for Achievement

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Why do some people have a need to pass the class, while others crave an A? Maybe you really want to be promoted at work, while others are just happy to show up, do their job, and go home. These differences may be partially attributed to different levels of nAch. Refer to the text for some characteristics of high nAch individuals.

The need for power, or nPow, is another social motive. It refers to the extent to which people desire control over others and situations.

The Components of Emotions

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Each emotion that we experience comprises three essential components:

Emotional feelings—the subjective experience that we might be aware of or report to others (e.g., “I feel happy”).

Physiological arousal—the manner in which our bodies respond to the affective experience including hormonal and neurological changes.

Behavioral changes—the actions that we engage in response to the emotional state (e.g., laughing and hugging someone).

Basic Emotions

Moods by the week

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Some researchers have suggested that specific emotions, called basic emotions, are universal to human beings and are not culturally specific. Refer to your text to see some of the attributes of a “basic” emotion, as well as the difference between an emotion and a mood state.

Fight or Flight and Lie Detectors

Polygraph

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Recall from Chapter 2 that the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system is sometimes described as a “fight or flight” system. When we experience emotional stimulation, this system activates and causes physiological changes. When the need for such arousal ends, the parasympathetic system is responsible for calming us back down and reversing the initial changes.

These are the details that are detected by a lie detector, which in reality might be better labeled as an “emotions detector.” The polygraph is designed to detect subtle changes in physiological functions that are assumed to be associated with dishonest responding. But if other factors can cause the same changes, do these machines validly tell us when a person is lying?

Emotion and the Brain

Parts of the limbic system

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Refer to your text for a discussion of how different parts of the amygdala as well as the cerebral hemispheres are related to emotional experiences, and how positive and negative emotions are processed differently in the brain.

Facial Expressions

Simplified faces

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The manner in which we express emotions is complex and multifaceted. One factor is facial expressions, which in some regards are culturally universal but are also subject to display rules that dictate how we express ourselves.

Body language, or kinesics, is also an important component in emotional communication. If a teacher sees that a student is slumped down in their seat, doodling instead of taking notes, and not appearing interested, do you think that there is communication taking place here? Even if the communication is unintentional, how much do we rely on body language as we share with others?

Consider this: When you are talking on the telephone, do you tend to emphasize your points with arm and hand motions? The fact that nobody can see these body movements underlies the fact that they are an important, almost automatic part of our emotional expressions.

The James-Lange and Cannon-Bard Theories

Early theories of emotion

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William James and Carl Lange independently suggested that the common belief that emotions cause physiological changes was reversed from reality, noting that in fact we experience physiological changes in response to an emotion-causing event. Then, that physiological response leads to an affective experience.

Walter Cannon and Philip Bard, also working independently, felt that there was no reason to think that these components must come in a given sequence. They argued that different emotional components occur in different areas of the brain, and as such they occur simultaneously.

Cognitive Theories of Emotion

Early theories of emotion

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Stanley Schachter’s cognitive model noted that arousal must first go through a cognitive interpretation before we know what emotion to experience. In other words, we take the time to ask ourselves about the nature of that arousal, and then assign the appropriate label. Another way of saying this is that we take a moment to think about the way our body is responding, and then we end up at a specific emotional state.

Carol Izard’s cognitive approach, the differential emotions theory, suggests that we experience emotions in a basic form as children and that they become more complex and varied as we grow and mature. Eventually, they develop into emotional schemas that guide our responses to different events.

As we discussed with stress, emotions are also influenced by our individual appraisals of individual situations. So our emotional responses and reactions depend on how we evaluate a given set of stimuli.

The Facial Feedback Hypothesis

Facial feedback and emotion

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If you’ve ever been told to “turn that smile upside down,” you were being guided by the basic tenets of the facial feedback hypothesis. In this model, the notion is that muscles that control our facial expressions feed information back to the brain about how we are feeling. As such, if you frown you will eventually feel upset, and smiles can cause or enhance happiness.

How do you think this theory relates to the conventional (and perhaps incorrect) wisdom that suppressing emotional expression can actually decrease emotional arousal? Read your authors’ opinions on this idea.

A Contemporary Model of Emotion

A contemporary model of emotion

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Perhaps all of these models, or at least several of them, are correct in their own right. A contemporary theory of emotion would combine features from several different approaches.

If cognitive appraisal factors into the way the autonomic nervous system is activated which in turn leads to the cognitive experience of an emotion as we are responding to it, this would be a hybrid explanation of several different approaches presented in this chapter. As such, the models that have for years been posed in an “either/or” manner may, in fact, exist simultaneously.

Normal Time

Eight Time Zones East

C o re

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4:004:00 8:008:0012:00 Midnight

12:00 Midnight

12:00 Noon

12:00 Midnight

12:00 Noon

4:004:008:00 8:008:00

Self- actualization

Esteem and self-esteem

Love and belonging

Safety and security

Physiological needs: air, food, water, sleep, sex, etc.

Esteem and self-esteem

Love and belonging

Safety and security

Physiological needs

Basic Needs

Self-actualization as expressed through meta-needs: wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, richness, simplicity, aliveness, beauty, goodness, uniqueness, playfulness, truth, autonomy, meaningfulness

Growth Needs

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Obese

Overweight

0 1960– 1962

1971– 1974

1976– 1980

Overweight and Obese in America: An Epidemic

1988– 1994

2005– 2008

2009– 2012

Pe rc

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f A

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rw ei

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Actually most attractive to men

Perceived current weight

Perceived ideal weight

Perceived as most attractive to men

2 3 4 5

Pe rf

o rm

an ce

Pe rf

o rm

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Ef fi ci

en cy

o f p er

fo rm

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Lo w

H ig

Optimum

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(b) Simple task

Low High Arousal level

(a) Inverted U function

Low High Arousal level

Lo w

H ig

Disorganization Frenzy Panic

Coma

Sleep

Optimal level

Emotional disturbance— overly aroused

High Arousal level

Low

OptimumOptimum

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cr ea

si n

al er

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Pleasant

Unpleasant

–1

–2

–3 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35

D ai

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Day

Respiration

GSR

Blood pressure

Heart rate

Cingulate gyrus Mammillary body

Thalamus

Hippocampus

Amygdala

Hypothalamus

Fornix

Angry Sad Happy Scheming Neutral

Time

James-Lange Theory

Emotional feelings (fear)

Emotional stimulus

Cannon-Bard Theory

Thalamus Behavior (run) Emotional stimulus

ANS arousal

Summary: Emotional arousal, behavior, and experience are released by the thalamus and are nearly simultaneous.

Schachter’s Cognitive Theory

Arousal plus label (“I am afraid.”)

Emotional stimulus

Behavior (run)

Summary: Arousal alone does not produce emotion; arousal must be labeled or interpreted.

ANS arousal Behavior (run)

Summary: After bodily arousal and behavior occur, you can feel your pounding heart, rapid breathing, flushed face, and sweating; this is what makes up the experience of emotion.

Time

Contemporary Model of Emotion

ANS arousalEmotional stimulus

Cognitive label (emotion schema)

Behavior (run)

Emotional expression (fearful face)

Emotional feelings (fear)