Chapter 11: Motivation and Emotion Flashcards
What is Motivation?
• Motivation influences the direction, vigour and persistence of goal-‐directed behaviour. Homeostatic models view motivation as an attempt to maintain equilibrium in bodily systems.
What are some Sources of Motivation? 4
- Physiological factors
- Needs for food, water and air - Cognitive factors
- Expectations of success or failure, perceptions of strengths and weaknesses. - Social factors
- Influence of friends, parents or teachers, - Emotional factors
- Anxiety, panic, love, fear or anger.-
List the 3 theories:
- Drive Theories
- Incentive Theories
- Psychodynamic Theories
Explain Drive theory:
• Drive theories propose that tissue deficits create drives, such as hunger, that push an organism to reduce that deficit and restore homeostasis.
Explain Incentive Theory:
• Incentive theories emphasize environmental factors that pull people towards a goal. Expectancy x value theory explains why the same incentive may motivate some people but not others.
Explain Psychodynamic Theory:
• Psychodynamic theories emphasize that unconscious motives guide much of our behaviour. Abraham Maslow proposed that needs exist in a hierarchy, from basic biological needs to the ultimate need for self-‐ actualisation.
Self-‐determination theory emphasizes the importance of three fundamental needs-‐ competence, autonomy and relatedness, as well as distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
LIST the theories of MOTIVATION:
- Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy (1954)
- Approach-‐Avoidance Motivation (Gray, 1991)
- Evolutionary Psychology
Explain Maslows Needs Hierarchy (1954):
o When basic needs are met -‐ need progression
o When lower needs no longer satisfaction – need regression
o Criticisms
- Self-‐actualisation – vague and hard to measure
- Ordering of needs is somewhat arbitrary
- Concepts of needs progression/regression cannot readily account for important aspects of motivated behaviour
• Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy Theory: a motivation theory of needs arranged in a hierarchy whereby people are motivated to fulfil a higher need as a lower one becomes gratified.
What does Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy Theory Suggest?
o Maslow suggested that we are motivated simultaneously by several primary needs (drives) but the strongest source of motivation is the lowest unsatisfied need at the time.
o Satisfaction-‐progression process:
When lower need is satisfied, next higher need becomes the primary motivator (‘deficiency needs’)
o Exception: self-‐actualization is a ‘growth need’, because it continues to develop even when somewhat fulfilled
o Maslow identified the desire to know and desire for aesthetic beauty as two innate drivers that do not fit within the hierarchy.
o Physiological: need for food, air, water, shelter, etc.
o Safety: need for security and stability
o Belongingness: the need for interaction with and affection from others
o Esteem: the need for self-‐esteem wand social esteem/status
o Self-‐actualisation: the need for self-‐fulfillment, realization of one’s potential.
Explain the APPROACH-AVOIDANCE MOTIVATION (GRAY, 1991) on Motivation
o Behavioural activation system
- Activated by signals of potential reward and gratification of needs (and wants)
o Behavioural inhibition system
explain EVOLUTIONARY Psychology theory on motivation
o Initially focused on instincts
- Automatic, fixed stimulus-‐response patterns
• When someone encounters x, they will do y
- Proposed thousands of instincts to explain behaviour
o Problem: circular reading
o Genetics may influence but not determine our motivation
o Behavioural tendencies evolved as they helped humans adapt to their environments
o Acknowledges the role of both in-‐built tendencies and their interaction with experience.
Aim of Psychological processes?
• Physiological processes attempt to keep the body in energy homeostasis.
How does Psychological processes try to attain homeostasis?
- Changes in supply of glucose available to cells provide one signal that helps initiate hunger.
- During meals, hormones such as CCK are released into the bloodstream and help signal the brain to stop eating.
- Fat cells release leptin, which acts as a long-‐term signal that helps regulate appetite. The hypothalamus plays an important role in hunger regulation.
- Through classical conditioning neutral stimuli can acquire the capacity to trigger hunger.
- Cultural norms affect our food preferences and eating habits.
- Heredity and the environment affect our susceptibility to becoming obese.
- Anorexia and Bulimia occur more often in cultures that value thinness and are associated with somewhat different psychological profiles. Hereditary predisposes some people towards developing these eating disorders.
Explain MOTIVATION and ATTRACTION:
- The past half-‐century has witnessed changing patterns of sexual activity, such as an increase in premarital sex.
- During sexual intercourse people often experience a four-‐stage physiological response pattern consisting of excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution.
- Environmental stimuli affect sexual desire. Viewing sexual violence reinforces men’s belief in rape myths and generally increases men’s aggression toward women.
- Sexual orientation involves dimensions of self-‐identity, sexual attraction and actual sexual behaviour. Scientists do not completely understand the bases for sexual orientation.
• Men and women want to maximize their genetic success
o Maximize the likelihood that genetic material will survive into the next generation
- Most factors governing attraction are non-‐conscious.
- Individual behaviours themselves may not facilitate passing of genes, the motivations which drive those behaviours do.
- Biological differences in reproductive potential
Motivation and Attraction: WOMEN Pregnancy
• Women:
o Produce fewer sexual gametes
o Producing a child requires a high level of investment (9mnth gestation, breastfeeding)
o Can produce a small number of children
Motivation and Attraction: Men Sexual Reproduction
• Men:
o Produce many sexual gametes
o Producing a child doesn’t necessarily involve a high investment
o Can produce a large number of children
MEN VS WOMEN - attraction and motivation
• Based on these biological imperatives
• Due to the differences in the cost of producing offspring
o Women may want more opportunity to assess the quality of life of a potential mate
o Men may be less
• Gender differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers
o Clark and Hartfield (1989)
Dispositional factors (men may b more impulsive)
Social factors to consider (expectations and norms)
Contextual factors
Safety factors
• For males, there’s a limited investment in producing offspring
o Most concerned about a male’s potential fertility
• Women’ fertility tends to decline fairly quickly
• For women – highly invested in offspring
o Value access to resources in a partner
o Fertility declines less rapidly for men with age
• Cross cultural research
o Women are generally attracted to males with higher levels of
• Women demonstrate obvious preferences in physical attractive
• Checklist of desirables
o Good provider
o Good genes – features derived from high testosterone
o Nice, friendly, caring etc.
• The problem
o Hard to get
o High testosterone may lead to high aggression, social dominance, impulsive behaviour & domestic violence.
• Penton-‐Voak et al 1999
MEN VS WOMEN SUMMARY of Motivation and attraction:
- Men and women may differ in patterns of motivation to engage in sexual behaviour
- Men and women show distinct patterns of attraction that may be consistent with the motivation
SOCIAL SITUATIONS: High-need achievers, Low need achievers, “Mastery-approach, ego-approach, master-avoidance and ego avoidance”
- People differ in how strongly they need to affiliate, and some theorists view affliative behaviour as governed by homeostatic principles.
- Situations that induce fear often increase people’s tendency to affiliate. When afraid, people often seek the company of others who have been though or are currently experiencing the same, or a similar situation.
- Social exclusion is a painful experience for most people and it often leads to attempts to reconnect socially in new relationships.
- HIGH-NEED achievers have a strong motive for success and relatively low fear of failure. The tend to seek moderately difficult tasks that are challenging but attainable.
- LOW NEED achievers are more likely to choose easy tasks, where success is assured, or very difficult tasks, where success is not expected.
- MASTERY-APPROACH ego-‐approach, master-‐avoidance and ego-‐avoidance are four basic achievement goals. Compared with ego-‐involving environments, mastery-‐involving motivational climates foster more positive psychological and performance outcomes.
- Motivational goals may conflict with one another.
- Approach-‐Approach conflict occurs when a person has to select between two attractive alternatives, whereas Avoidance-‐Avoidance conflict occurs when we are attracted to and repelled by the same goal.
What are emotions?
• Feelings or ‘affective states’ involving organised patterns of cognitive, behavioural and physiological reactions to changes in one’s relationship to the world.
• These reactions are:
o Partly inner, or subjective, experiences
o Partly measurable patterns of behaviour and physiological arousal.
• They serve adaptive motivating functions (generally)
o Emergency-‐arousal systems
**Anxiety and fear
o As a form of social communication
**Recognising and reacting to distress or happiness in others.
o Bonding
**Shared positive emotions (joy, happiness, love).
Subjective Experience of Emotion:
- Usually temporary
- Positive, negative or a mixture of both
- Emotions can directly alter thought processes.
- They motivate behaviour.
- Emotions are passions that you feel (whether or not you want to
Objective Experience of Emotions:
• Expressive displays
o Show feelings to others
o May be learned or innate
• Physiological responses
o Biological adjustments needed to perform the actions generated by emotions
What are Cognitive Reactions?
- The primary components of emotion are the eliciting stimuli, cognitive appraisals, physiological arousal, and expressive and instrumental behaviours. Innate factors and learning play important roles in determining the arousal properties of stimuli.
- The cognitive component of the emotional experience involves the evaluative and personal appraisal of the eliciting stimuli.
- Cross-‐cultural research indicates considerable agreement across cultures in the appraisals that evoke basic emotions but also some degree of variation in more complex appraisals.
Psychological Reactions – the brain
- Our physiological responses in emotion are produced by the hypothalamus, the limbic system, the cortex, and the autonomic and endocrine systems.
- There appear to be two systems for emotional behaviour; one involving conscious processing by the cortex and the other involving unconscious processing by the amygdala.
- Negative emotions seem to reflect greater relative activation of the right hemisphere, whereas positive emotions are related to relatively greater activation in the left hemisphere.
Explain the Autonomic Nervous System:
• Fight-‐flight
• Autonomic nervous system
o Sympathetic system
o Parasympathetic system
Explain Behavioural Reactions:
- There is an optimal level of arousal for the performance of any task. This optimal level varies with the complexity of the task; complex tasks have lower optimal levels.
- The behavioural component of emotions includes expressive and instrumental behaviours.
- The accuracy of people’s interpretation of these expressions is enhanced when situational cues are also available.
- Evolutionary theorists propose that certain fundamental emotional patterns are innate but agree that cultural learning can influence emotional expression.
Taking Cues from our Body: James Lang Somatic Theory
• Early theorists suggested that emotions are the subjective experiences generated from physiological reactions
o We look to out body to know how we feel
• James Lang Somatic Theory: maintains that we first become aroused then judge what we are feeling.
o I’m happy because I smile
o I’m scared because I run
Taking Cues from our Body: The Cannon-Bard Theory:
- The Cannon-‐Bard theory proposes that arousal and cognition are independent and simultaneously triggered by the thalamus.
- We don’t know what emotion we are experiencing until we register our bodily reactions.
Taking Cues from our Body: The Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• The Facial feedback Hypothesis
o Do we feel happy because we smile?
o Do we feel sad because we frown?
Taking Cues from our Body: Strack et al (1988):
o Participants held a pen in their mouth
o Rated cartoons according to how funny they were
o Those in the teeth condition rated the cartoons significantly funnier than those in the lip condition.
• Facial feedback evidence provides some support for the James-‐Lang Theory
o Problems
- There are many different identifiable emotions
- Similar physiological states can be associated with a range of different emotions
- Does not corroborate with the experience of emotion which often precedes any physical response.
o Critical role of cognition
- Appraisal of the situation and arousal.
Taking Cues from our Body: Lazarus (2001):
• Lazarus (2001): According the Lazarus’s cognitive affective theory, appraisals trigger emotional arousal
o All emotional responses involve initial appraisal (whether we are aware of it or not).
Taking Cues from our Body: Schachter (1966):
• Schachter (1966): according to Schlacter’s two factor theory of emotion, arousal tells us how strongly we are feeling while cognitions derived from situational cures help us label the specific emotion.
o The intensity of physiological arousal tells us how strongly we feel about something
o Situational cues and appraisal of these give us the information to label what it is we are feeling.
Taking Cues from our Body: The Importance of appraisal
• The importance of appraisal
o The war arousal is interpreted and attributed will determine emotional reactions,
- E.g. a racing hart and rapid breathing may equally be attributed to being excited or anxious.
o Examining differences in the attribution of arousal
- Does arousal from one experience transfer to influence emotion in an independent situation.
Taking Cues from our Body: Dutton and Aron (1974):
o Had male participants crossing a gorge via a:
- High, exposed suspension bridge
- Low stable wooden bridge
o They were met at the opposite side by a female researcher
- Write an imaginative story based on a picture (TAT).
- Rate the female researcher on attractiveness
- Researcher provided her contact number if they wanted information about the study’s results.
o Those who crossed the ‘dangerous’ bridge:
- Rated the female as more attractive
- Featured more sexual content in their story
- Were more likely to attempt to contact her subsequently.
o They suggested that men in particular may feel more comfortable attributing arousal to attraction that to fear of the situation.
Taking Cues from our Body: Allen et al (1989)
• Allen et al (1989) replicated this effect
o Male participants told they were to receive either painful electric shocks or listen to a range of sounds.
• The cognitive attribution of physiologic states is important to determining emotional reactions
• More generally, cognitive theories suggest attribution is critical to shaping emotional experience:
o Not only in determining emotional reactions to physiological states but to the attribution and interpretation of
any event or situation
Explain Emotions involve reciprocal relationships between: ….
and their FUNCTION
• Emotions involve reciprocal relationships between o Eliciting stimuli o Cognitive appraisal o Physiological responses o Expressive behaviors o Instrumental behaviours
• Function: Emotions as Motivators
o Seek out those emotional states we identify as pleasant
o Attempt to avoid, eliminate or reduce the unpleasant
• Illustrate the functional benefits of emotions with reference to anxiety.
What is Anxiety?
• Anxious apprehension (Barlow 1988)
o Future focused
o Concerned with the identification and reduction, elimination or avoidance of potential threats.
• Acts on a number of physiological and cognitive systems to enhance an individual’s ability and motivation to deal with potential threats.
• Is experienced as unpleasant
o Creates a desire to reduce or eliminate it
• It increases arousal and activates physiological systems which can facilitate actions
• Anxiety is usually experienced as aversive
o Like pain, when you are anxious you are likely to be motivated to eliminate the cause.
• Being anxious makes you not want to be anxious
o Can reduce anxiety by eliminating the threat posed by a future negative event (i.e. The cause of the anxiety)
• Anxiety can be very helpful.
o “Without anxiety little would be accomplished. The performance of athletes, entertainers, executives, artisans and students would suffer; creativity would diminish; crops might not be planted. And we would all achieve that idyllic state long sought after in our fast-‐paced society of whiling away our lived under a shade tree. This would be deadly for the species as a nuclear war.” Barlow 2002
• At what levels can anxiety be helpful?
• Too high:
o Overwhelmed
o Difficulty concentrating
o Incapable of meeting goals
• Too low:
o Communicates low risk
o Not motivated to act
o Low awareness of potential danger sources
- The optimum amount of anxiety and arousal for performance is dependent on the actions that need to be completed.
- Performance is generally best when arousal and anxiety are moderate
• Optimal arousal will depend on the complexity of the task being performed.
o Very simple tasks: high arousal will be beneficial
o More complex tasks: high arousal hinders performance
• Anxiety works well when it assists us to prepare for and avoid future threats
When can Anxiety be UNHELPFUL?
• Anxiety can be unhelpful
o When the frequency, intensity and duration of anxiety is disproportionate to the threat posed by a situation.
o Leads to misappraisal of non-‐threatening situations, stimuli or events as highly threatening.
o Leads to avoidance and withdrawal.
• Anxiety in the lead up to and during performance and social situations
• E.g. a job interview, presentation, public performance
o Motivates preparation
o Elevates arousal immediately prior
Anxiety in social and performance situations can be problematic when:
o Highly frequent, persistent and severe:
- Occurs often and for long durations
- Extreme anxiety about being embarrassed or humiliated
o Occurs at inappropriate times
- Irrational – is not related to a legitimate source of danger
• Heightened social anxiety is associated with overestimating:
o The likelihood
o Severity
o Consequences of negative events
• Leads to avoidance of social/performance situations due to the fear of embarrassment and humiliation
o May miss out on education and job opportunities
• Vicious cycle of anxiety and avoidance
o Situation -> anxiety -> avoidance -> short term relief -> long term escalation -> increased fear, reduced confidence
Explain Specific Fears and Phobias:
- It is highly adaptive to experience anxiety when confronted with certain situations and stimuli
- The physiological and cognitive changes that accompany anxiety will assist with limiting the danger poses by the potential threat.
• Anxiety reactions to specific stimuli and situations may be problematic when:
o Highly frequent, persistent and severe
- Occur for long durations
- Extreme anxiety about the feared situation
o Occurs at inappropriate times
- When there is no real threat
• Leads to avoidance of many situations/places due to anxiety about the feared object.
Explain Treating Emotional Problems: such as ANXIETY
o Breaking the cycle of avoidance
- Graded exposure to feared situations/stimuli
o Addressing cognitive distortions regarding the feared situation/stimuli
- Assisting with correcting misappraisals of threat
- Helping people to identify and change biased patterns of thinking about the likelihood, severity, and consequences of feared situations
Summary: Cognition vs Behaviour vs Physiology
• Emotions involve the mutual influence of cognition, behaviour and physiology.
• Are subjectively ‘felt’ and can be objectively observed
o Serving individual and communicative functions
• Cognitive appraisal of events and physical states directly influence emotional reactions
• Emotions can motivate adaptive responses to
o Attain positive outcomes
o Avoid or reduce negative outcomes
• Disturbance in emotional wellbeing fundamentally underpins many mental health problems.
Cognitive Bias and Emotional Vulnerability: ANXIETY DISORDERS AND CLINICAL DEPRESSION
Anxiety Disorders and Clinical Depression
• Both types are very common
o Major depression: lifetime risk = 8-‐17%
o Anxiety disorders: lifetime risk = 15-‐25%
Cognitive Bias and Emotional Vulnerability: Thought Content and Emotional Vulnerability
• Characteristic thoughts in dysfunctional anxiety/depression
o Anxiety: thoughts concerning imminent future danger
o Depression: thoughts concerning hopelessness and low esteem
• Two possible accounts for this
o Negative thinking is symptom of emotional dysfunction.
o Negative thought is cause of emotional dysfunction.
Cognitive Bias and Emotion Vulnerability: The assessment of Interpretative Bias
• Self-‐reported interpretation
o People with these disorders often have negative interpretations
o Limitations
- At best, the approach can reveal only participant’s beliefs about their likely patterns of interpretation.
- Impossible to dissociate response bias from genuine interpretations.
- Such data will always be susceptible to experimenter demand effects.
• Homophone spelling task
o Limitations
- Response bias/demands effects if both meanings are identified
o Researchers have sought to develop methodologies
EXPLAIN Causation and Correlation
- Correlation doesn’t imply causation
- Interpretive bias may cause emotional vulnerability
- Emotional vulnerability may cause interpretive bias
- Another variable may cause emotional vulnerability and interpretive bias
