Ch 9 Motivation and Emotion

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering Chapter 9: Motivation and Emotion, including biological drives, eating and sexual behavior, motivational frameworks, theories of emotion, and self-control.

Motives

Internal forces that move an organism to act in certain ways and not others.

Instinct

A genetically endowed tendency to behave in a particular way, triggered by specific environmental features.

Homeostasis

The maintenance of internal physiological equilibrium through sensing the internal environment and producing physiological or behavioral adjustments to keep it within a desired range.

Drive

An internal state of biological and psychological tension created by deviations from homeostasis.

Drive-Reduction Account

The motivational framework proposing that deviations from equilibrium create tension (drives), calling forth behaviors that alleviate the tension and restore homeostasis.

Pain Matrix

A distributed network of brain regions, including the amygdala, that underlies both sensory and emotional components of pain and triggers behavioral withdrawal.

Nonsuicidal Self-Injury (NSSI)

Intentional, self-inflicted physical damage to one's own body tissue (such as cutting, burning, or stabbing) without suicidal intent and not for a socially sanctioned purpose.

Escape-from-Self Hypothesis

The proposition that physical pain narrows attention concretely onto immediate physical sensations and injury, thereby decreasing awareness of painful psychological states like depression, hopelessness, or negative self-views.

Intrinsically Rewarding

Characterizing an activity or object whose incentive value and pleasure are an inherent, direct part of the experience itself.

Extrinsically Rewarding

Characterizing an activity or object whose reward value is not an integral part of the activity itself, but rather stems from external consequences or outcomes (such as financial compensation).

Wanting versus Liking

The neurological distinction between anticipating and actively seeking a reward (wanting, mediated by brainstem-to-cortex projections via the amygdala and nucleus accumbens) versus receiving and experiencing pleasure from a reward (liking, mediated by circuits between the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum).

Glucostatic Hypothesis

The theory that appetite and eating behavior are primarily regulated by blood glucose levels detected by glucoreceptors in the brain and periphery.

Dual-Center Theory

A model of feeding regulation proposing that the lateral hypothalamus acts as the 'go' center stimulating hunger, while the ventromedial hypothalamus acts as the 'stop' center signaling satiety.

Cholecystokinin (CCK)

A peptide satiety signal released by the intestinal tract during digestion that promotes the cessation of eating.

Neuropeptide Y (NPY)

A potent appetite-inducing neurotransmitter released by the hypothalamus that promotes eating behavior.

Adipose Cells

Fat cells distributed throughout the body that absorb fatty acids produced by the liver, swell during storage, and release fatty acids into the bloodstream to convert to glucose when supplies are low.

Lipostatic Hypothesis

The model proposing that long-term energy balance and body weight are regulated homeostatically based on target levels of body fat stores.

Leptin

A satiety hormone secreted into the bloodstream by full adipose cells that acts on hypothalamic receptors to signal sufficient fat storage and inhibit further food intake.

Ghrelin

A hunger-stimulating hormone secreted by the stomach lining when fat stores and caloric supplies are depleted.

Body Weight Set Point

The internally defended, calorie-based weight level that the body strives to maintain through compensatory adjustments in hunger and metabolic rate.

Unit Bias

The psychological tendency to view a served portion of food as a single, appropriate serving size regardless of its actual volumetric or caloric magnitude.

Anorexia Nervosa

An eating disorder marked by an intense fear of gaining weight, a severely distorted perception of one's own body as fat, and dangerous reductions in body weight achieved via severe dietary restriction, purging, or excessive exercise.

Bulimia Nervosa

An eating disorder characterized by recurrent episodes of uncontrolled binge eating followed by inappropriate compensatory behaviors (such as self-induced vomiting or laxative abuse) occurring at least once a week for at least $3$ months, typically in normal-weight individuals.

Compensatory Behavior

Actions performed by individuals with bulimia nervosa to prevent weight gain following binge eating, including self-induced vomiting, laxative or diuretic misuse, and extreme exercise.

Binge-Eating Disorder

An eating disorder identified in the DSM-5 characterized by recurring episodes of binging without regular compensatory purging or fasting, occurring at least once per week for at least $3$ months.

Body Mass Index (BMI)

A clinician's metric calculated as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters ($\text{kg/m}^2$), defining normal weight as $18.5$ to $24.9$, overweight as $25$ to $29.9$, and obese as $30$ or greater.

Thrifty Gene Hypothesis

An evolutionary explanation proposing that natural selection favored ancestors possessing efficient metabolisms that accumulated fat stores for periods of food scarcity, predisposing humans in calorie-rich environments to obesity.

Estrus

A period of cyclical hormonal and behavioral sexual receptivity in female nonhuman mammals, governed by hypothalamic, pituitary, and ovarian interactions.

Human Sexual Response Cycle

The four-phase physiological sequence of sexual arousal described by Masters and Johnson, consisting of excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.

Refractory Period

A recovery interval following orgasm during the resolution phase in men during which an additional orgasm is physiologically impossible.

Neurodevelopmental Perspective of Sexual Orientation

The view that human sexual orientation is biologically programmed into brain circuitry early during fetal development, as evidenced by correlations with handedness and older male siblings.

Fraternal Birth Order Effect

The statistical phenomenon in which gay men tend to have more older biological brothers, with each successive older brother increasing the odds of being gay by approximately $33\%$.

Motive to Belong

The fundamental human motivation to establish, maintain, and protect stable interpersonal connections and social acceptance to avoid the psychological distress of loneliness.

Performance Orientation

An academic achievement orientation characterized by an avoidance motivation centered on performing well, appearing smart, and avoiding looking foolish or failing.

Mastery Orientation

An achievement approach motivation focused primarily on learning new concepts, enhancing competence, improving skills, and persevering through adversity.

Fixed Mindset

The assumption that one's abilities and intelligence are static, immutable traits that cannot be substantially developed, leading individuals to avoid challenges and give up easily.

Growth Mindset

The belief that intellectual capacity and personal abilities can be cultivated and expanded through effort, instruction, training, and strategic perseverance.

Hierarchy of Motives

Abraham Maslow's organizational pyramid of human needs, proposing that lower-order physiological and safety needs must be satisfied before higher-order needs (belonging, esteem, self-actualization, self-transcendence) become salient.

Self-Actualization

The motive near the pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy that describes the desire to fulfill one's unique potential to the fullest extent possible.

Self-Transcendence

The ultimate motive added by Maslow near the end of his life, describing the desire to dedicate oneself to goals and causes beyond one's own ego, such as truth, justice, or faith.

Dweck's Basic Needs

Three early-appearing, universal psychological needs identified by Carol Dweck that fuel human behavior: the need for acceptance, the need for predictability, and the need for competence.

Dweck's Compound Needs

Four higher-order psychological needs that emerge developmentally from combinations of basic needs: trust, control, self-esteem/status, and self-coherence.

Emotion

Coordinated sets of behaviors, subjective feelings, and physiological changes that emerge when an environmental circumstance becomes relevant to personal goals.

Display Rules

Culturally learned, deeply ingrained conventions and norms that dictate when, where, and how intensely particular emotional expressions should be shown in social settings.

Discrete Emotions Approach

An emotion classification paradigm that defines specific, qualitatively distinct categories of emotion (such as anger, fear, joy, shame, and sadness).

Dimensional Approach (to Emotion)

An emotion classification paradigm that conceptualizes emotional experiences along continuous coordinate dimensions, typically pleasantness (valence) and activation (arousal).

Alexithymia

A condition characterized by severe difficulty in identifying, distinguishing, or verbally describing one's own emotional feelings.

Happiness Set Point

A baseline level of positive well-being that is substantially genetically determined and largely reflected in stable personality traits like high extraversion and low neuroticism.

James-Lange Theory of Emotion

The classical theory asserting that emotional feeling arises directly from the conscious awareness and perception of specific patterns of autonomic bodily responses triggered by an event.

Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion

The theory asserting that autonomic bodily changes are too slow and non-specific to produce distinct emotions, proposing instead that physiological arousal and emotional experiences occur simultaneously and independently.

Schachter-Singer Theory of Emotion

A two-factor model of emotion stating that emotional experience requires both general, nonspecific physiological arousal and a cognitive appraisal or label explaining the cause of that arousal.

Affective Neuroscience

The scientific discipline examining patterns of central nervous system activation and interrelated neural circuitry underlying emotional states.

Affect-as-Information Perspective

The cognitive theory proposing that subjective emotional feelings serve as informative evaluative cues that alter thinking styles during problem-solving.

Memory Consolidation

The biological process by which temporary memories are cemented into permanent neural storage, strongly enhanced by physiological arousal and amygdala activation.

Self-Control

The capacity to pursue long-term interests and goals when they conflict with immediate temptations or momentary impulses.

Delay of Gratification

The ability to forego an immediate smaller reward in order to obtain a more desirable, larger reward at a later time.

Strength Model of Ego Control

The psychological theory proposing that self-control relies on a limited pool of mental resources that becomes temporarily depleted (ego depletion) after sustained exertion.

Emotion Regulation

The deliberate or automatic processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they experience them, and how they express or experience them.

Situation Selection

An emotion regulation strategy that involves choosing to expose oneself to certain situations—and avoid others—based on their anticipated emotional impact.

Situation Modification

An emotion regulation strategy that involves actively altering external aspects of a current environment to modify its emotional impact.

Attentional Deployment

An emotion regulation strategy that involves redirecting attentional focus away from emotionally upsetting stimuli or toward neutral or distracting thoughts.

Reappraisal

A form of cognitive change in which an individual decreases an emotional response by reframing and altering the subjective meaning or interpretation of a situation.

Suppression

A form of response modulation in which an individual actively inhibits the outward facial, behavioral, or verbal display of an emotion, often incurring physiological and cognitive costs.