Psychology: Emotions and Motivation

What Are Emotions?

• Emotion is an immediate, specific negative or positive response to environmental events or internal thoughts.
• Emotion (sometimes called affect) has three components: a physiological process, a behavioral response, and a feeling based on cognitive appraisal and interpretation of bodily states.
• Mood is a diffuse, long-lasting emotional state without an identifiable object or trigger.

10.1 Emotions vary in Valence and Arousal

• Primary emotions are innate, evolutionarily adaptive and universal across cultures, including anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise and contempt.
• Secondary emotions are blends of primary emotions, including remorse, guilt, submission, shame, love, bitterness and jealousy.
• Emotions are plotted along two continuums: valence, how negative or positive emotions are; arousal, how arousing emotions are, describing physiological activation.
• Physiological activation describes increased autonomic responses, such as increased heart rate.

10.2 Emotions Have a Physiological Component

• Emotions involve activation of the autonomic nervous system to prepare the body to meet environmental challenges.
• In 1937, the neuroanatomist Papez proposed many subcortical brain regions are involved in emotion. MacLean expanded this list.
• The hippocampus is important mostly for memory
• The hypothalamus is important mostly for motivation.
• Insula receives and integrates somatosensory signals from the entire body.
• The amygdala processes the emotional significance of stimuli and generates immediate emotional and behavioral reactions.
• Damage to the amygdala prevents developing conditioned fear responses to objects associated with danger.
• Emotional events increase activity in the amygdala, which improves long-term memory for the event.

Amygdala and Cognition

• The amygdala is involved in perception of social stimuli such as deciphering the emotional meanings of facial expressions.

10.3 Are Lie Detector Tests Valid?

• A polygraph uses an electronic instrument to assess the body's physiological response to questions.
• The use of polygraphs is highly controversial, but they continue to be used.
• Differences between physiological responses to control questions and critical questions determine if someone is lying.
• The problem with polygraphs is confirmation bias.

There Are Three Major Theories of Emotion

• James-Lange theory
• The Cannon-Bard theory
• The Schachter-Singer two-factor theory

James-Lange Theory

• In 1884, William James asserted that a person's interpretation of the physical changes in a situation leads that person to feel an emotion.
• Carl Lange independently proposed a similar theory.
• James-Lange theory of emotion states that people perceive specific patterns of bodily responses, and, as a result of that perception, they feel emotion.
• Facial expressions trigger the experience of emotions, and putting on a smile can therefore trigger a happy response.

Cannon-Bard Theory

• Walter B. Cannon and Philip Bard proposed that the mind and body experience emotions independently.
• Cannon-Bard theory of emotion is where information about emotional stimuli is sent simultaneously to the cortex and the body and results in emotional experience and bodily reactions, respectively.
• Emotional experience and a physical reaction occur at roughly the same time.

Schacter-Singer Two-Factor Therory

• Social psychologists Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer (1962) saw some merit in both theories and proposed a two-factor theory.
• Two-factor theory of emotion states a label applied to physiological arousal results in the experience of an emotion.
• When people misidentify the source of their arousal, it is called misattribution of arousal.

How are Emotions Adaptive?

• Emotions are adaptive because they prepare and guide behaviors.
• Negative and positive experiences have guided our species to behaviors that increase the probability of survival and reproduction.

Facial Expressions Communicate Emotion

• Charles Darwin argued that expressive aspects of emotion are adaptive because they communicate how we are feeling.
• Facial expressions provide many clues as to whether behavior is pleasing to others or likely to make them aggressive.
• Facial expressions, like emotions themselves, provide adaptive information.
• Dunlap (1927) demonstrated that the mouth better conveys emotion than the eyes, especially for positive affect.
• Researchers showed identical facial expressions in different contexts and found that the context profoundly altered how people interpreted the emotion.

Facial Expressions Across Cultures

• Darwin argued that the face innately communicates emotions understandable by all people, regardless of culture.
• Research has found general support for cross-cultural congruence in identifying some facial expressions.
• The support is strongest for happiness and weakest for fear and disgust.

Display Rules Differ Across Cultures and Between the Sexes

• Display rules are rules learned through socialization that dictate which emotions are suitable to given situations.
• Emotions most closely associated with women are related to caregiving, nurturance, and interpersonal relationships.
• Emotions associated with men are related to dominance, defensiveness, and competitiveness.

Emotions Strengthen Interpersonal Relations

• Interactions between others use emotional expressions as powerful nonverbal communications.
• Nonverbal displays of emotions signal inner states, moods, and needs.
• Theorists have reconsidered interpersonal emotions in view of humans' evolutionary need to belong to social groups.

How Are People Motivated?

• Motivation is a process that energizes, guides, and maintains behavior toward a goal.

Drives Motivate the Satisfaction of Needs

• A need is a state of biological or social deficiency.

Maslow's Need Hierarchy

• Maslow believed people are driven by many needs which he arranged into a need hierarchy.
• A need hierarchy is Maslow's arrangement of needs, in which basic survival needs must be met before people can satisfy higher needs.
• Self-actualization is a state that is achieved when one's personal dreams and aspirations have been attained.
• Maslow's hierarchy is more useful as an indicator of what might be true about people's behaviors than of what actually is true about them.

Drive Reduction and Homeostasis

• A drive is a psychological state that, by creating arousal, motivates an organism to satisfy a need.
• For biological states such as thirst or hunger, basic drives help animals maintain steadiness, or equilibrium.
• Homeostasis is the tendency for bodily functions to maintain equilibrium.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

• Intrinsic motivation is the pursuit of an activity for its own sake (and the satisfaction it brings.
• Extrinsic motivation - The pursuit of an activity for external rewards (i.e. money, recognition or praise:)

Pleasure/Pain and Approach/Avoidance Motivation

• Sigmund Freud proposed drives are satisfied according to the pleasure principle, which drives people to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
• The concept of hedonism refers to humans' desire for pleasantness.
• From an evolutionary perspective, positive and negative incentives are adaptive.
• Approach motivations seek out food, sex, and companionship and are typically associated with pleasure.
• Avoidance motivation encourages people to avoid negative outcomes, such as dangerous animals, because of the association with pain.
• Animals prefer to eat sweets, as sweetness usually indicates food is safe to eat.

Culture Plays a Role

• Eating habits are determined by a combination of personal experience and cultural beliefs, with little to do with logic but what one belives is food.
• Avoiding unfamiliar foods may be adaptive for survival, as they may be dangerous or poisonous.

Explore emotional expression, motivation theories, and brain structures involved in emotional experiences. Key concepts include display rules, Maslow's hierarchy, and theories of emotion.