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.
