2 Motivation and Emotion

Major Approaches to Motivation

• Instinct approach: suggests people and animals are born with preprogrammed behaviors essential to survival
  • Weaknesses: lack of agreement on number of primary instincts, unable to explain why behaviors evolve in some species but not others
• Drive-reduction approach: suggests a lack of basic biological need produces a drive to push an organism to satisfy that need
  • Drive: motivation tension or arousal that energizes behavior to fulfill a need
  • Primary drives: related to biological needs of the body or species
  • Secondary drives: related to behavior that fulfills no obvious biological need
• Arousal approach: believes people try to maintain a steady level of stimulation and activity
  • If stimulation and activity levels become too high, individuals try to reduce them
  • If stimulation and activity levels become too low, people seek out stimulation to increase them
  • People vary in the optimal level of arousal they seek out
• Incentive approach: suggests motivation stems from the desire to attain external rewards
  • Fails to provide complete explanation of motivation as organisms sometimes seek to fulfill needs even with no apparent incentives
• Cognitive approach: suggests motivation is a result of people's thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and goals
  • Draws distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
  • Intrinsic motivation: causes individuals to participate in an activity for their own enjoyment
  • Extrinsic motivation: causes individuals to do something for a concrete reward

Maslow's Hierarchy

• Places motivational needs in a hierarchy
• Suggests that before meeting sophisticated, higher-order needs, certain primary needs must be satisfied
• Self-actualization: state of self-fulfillment in which people realize their highest potential
• Importance of Maslow's hierarchy:
  • Highlights complexity of human needs
  • Emphasizes that until basic biological needs are met, people will be unconcerned about higher-order needs
  • However, research has been unable to validate the specific order of Maslow's hierarchy

Other Needs

• Achievement motivation: stable, learned characteristic in which a person obtains satisfaction by striving for and achieving challenging goals
  • People with high need for achievement are selective in picking challenges
  • Avoid situations with success coming too easily or unlikely to come
  • People with low achievement motivation tend to be motivated primarily by a desire to avoid failure
• Need for affiliation: interest in establishing and maintaining relationships with other people
• Need for power: tendency to seek impact, control, or influence over others and to be seen as a powerful individual

Understanding Emotional Experiences

• Emotions: feelings that generally have both physiological and cognitive elements and that influence behavior
• Functions of emotions:
  • Preparing us for action
  • Shaping our future behavior
  • Helping us interact more effectively with others

Theories of Emotions

• The James-Lange Theory:
  • Emotional experience is a reaction to bodily events occurring as a result of an external situation
  • Drawbacks: visceral changes would have to occur relatively quickly, physiological arousal does not invariably produce emotional experience, internal organs produce a limited range of sensations
• The Cannon-Bard Theory:
  • Physiological arousal and emotional experience are produced simultaneously by the same nerve stimulus
  • Rejects the view that physiological arousal alone leads to the perception of emotion
  • After we perceive an emotion-producing stimulus, the thalamus is the initial site of the emotional response
• The Schachter-Singer Theory:
  • Emotions are determined jointly by a nonspecific kind of physiological arousal and its interpretation
  • Based on environmental cues
  • Supports a cognitive view of emotions

Ekman's Universality Studies

• Expressions are rather universal across cultures
• Display rules can vary
• Universality Studies (Ekman, 1972):
  • Photographs of emotion thought to portray universally recognizable emotions were shown to observers in different countries
  • High agreement for 6 basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear)
  • Criticism: only literate, industrialized, modern cultures were included### The Roots of Emotions
• Later research contradicts Schachter and Singer's belief that arousal is a general, undifferentiated state, suggesting instead that arousal is more specific and that we may seek external cues to determine its source.
• Emotions are complex and multifaceted, encompassing both biological and cognitive aspects.

Multiple Perspectives on Emotion

• No single theory has been able to fully explain all the aspects of emotional experience.

Ekman's Universality Studies

• Facial expressions of emotion are rather universal across cultures.
• Display rules, or cultural norms governing emotional expression, can vary across cultures.
• Universality Studies (Ekman, 1972): Ekman's research showed that photographs of emotions thought to be universally recognizable were presented to observers in different countries, who then labeled each emotion.
• The results showed a high agreement for 6 basic emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, and fear.