Motivation and Emotion
Main ideas of the major approaches to motivation (instinct, drive-reduction, arousal, incentive, cognitive, hierarchy of needs), including specifics like instincts in infants, primary & secondary drives, notion of homeostasis, intrinsic & extrinsic motivation.
When we say we are motivated, what do we mean: We are inclined to engage in a specific behaviour, usually something we want to do
Motivation: Factors that direct and energise the behaviour of humans and other organisms
Motivation has biological pathways
Complex concept as there are various approaches that seek to explain the motives that guide people’s behaviour
Major approaches to motivation
Instinct: programmed with sets of behaviours essential for survival. These instincts provide energy that channels behaviour towards appropriate behaviour.
For instance, the instinct to eat food
Babies have instincts: they cry, they suck as part of their instinct
Drive reduction: behaviour is motivated by the needs to reduce internal tension, caused by unmet biological needs. For instance, eating food. Homeostasis berings deviations to functioning back to optimal use.
Works on negative feedbacks like hunger
Primary drive: related to the biological needs or the need of the species as a whole such as hunger, thrist, and sleep
Secondarys drives: drives that prop experience and learning bring about (for instinct, being financially well)
An issue for drive reduction is the concept of engaging in behaviour which increases excitement/arousal
Eating when we are not hungry
Engaging in thrilling behaviour
Homeostasis Meaning: Homeostasis is a system in the body which brings deviations in body functioning back to an optimal state using feedback loops.
Receptor cells throughout the body constantly monitor temperature and nutrient levels, and when deviations from the ideal state occur, the body adjusts to try and return to an optimal state.
Body’s tendency to maintain a steady internal state, which underlies primary drives.
e.g., need for food, water, stable body temperature, sleep
Maslow hierarchy of needs: Pyramid of needs, things at the bottom are basic needs while things at the top are more subjective. Things at the most basic level need to be fulfilled.
It is not a deterministic model; a suggestive model like “how would you focus on school when you are hungry” (not definitive in the sense that it is binary and linear). Moving up will be hindered without fulfilling bottom needs.
Self-actualization is being content with oneself; not caring about societal expectations. Be able to engage in one’s own path.
We need to be relatively satisfied with the needs at the lower levels before moving onto higher order needs.
Maslow would reference people like Gandhi
Arousal: Pleasure for a particular stimulus, if it is too low, we act to raise it. Trying to maintain certain levels of stimulation and activity increase or reducing them as necessary
If activity is high, we try to reduce them
If activity is low, we try to increase it
This optimal level of arousal is varied
Arousal and performance: a delicate balance
A bell curve: a point where stress and stress overload equally manage to ensure optimal performance.
Incentive: External rewards direct and energize behaviour. Suggesting that motivations stems from the desire to obtain valued external goals or incentives
Desirable properties of the external stimuli like grades and money
Extrinsic motivation: we do something to receive a concrete, external reward Examples
Money
Is it all about the rewards? We do things for the sheer love or enjoyment of it, no real external stimuli validation.
This is intrinsic motivation: we participate in an activity for our own enjoyment
Examples
Being morally right
Inherent joy
To develop a skill
Cognitive approaches to incentives: suggest that motivation is a byproduct of people’s thoughts, expectations and goal
Intrinsic motivation: we partake in an activity for our own enjoyment
Extrinsic motivation: we partake in an activity to receive a concrete external reward
We are more likely to persevere, work harder, produce work of higher quality when motivation for a task is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic
Providing rewards for desirable behaviour may cause intrinsic motivation to decline and extrinsic motivation to increase (this conclusion is controversial)
Need for Food/Eating: biological explanations and social factors in eating (largely from my slides).
Biological factors
Internal mechanisms regulate quantity and kind of food to eat.
Other species choose a well balanced diet
Complex mechanism tell organism whether they require food or should stop eating
It is not just an empty stomach
Changes in glucose are monitored by the hypothalamus which regulates feeling of hunger
Weight Gain:
One hypothesis is injury to the hypothalamus affects weight set point:
Weight set point: the level of weigh that the body strives to maintain
A body weight thermostat; hypothalamus calls for either greater or less food intake
Metabolism: rate at which food is converted to energy and expended by the body.
People vary with respect to their metabolic rate and that influences their ability to lose weight through eating and exercise.
Social factors in eating
Portion distortion: north american portions are too large
We eat on a schedule: like lunch and dinner even when we are not hungry
We rough put the same amount of food on our plate: regardless of activity
We eat for comfort: because we are bored, to soothe sad feelings
We eat mindlessly: often while doing other things
Hyper processed food
It is cheaper,
tastes good, and convenient.
Hyper palatable foods; they are designed to be easily eaten (repeatable).
Government allows this due to profit, both from companies who make theses, the health care industries
Need to Belong/Affiliation: why is it a fundamental human need and what happens when people feel or are actually excluded? Slides on the social isolation epidemic and the connection between perceptions of loneliness and physical health from the Scientific American Article.
Affiliation: The need to associate with and maintain social bonds with others: this is a fundamental human need
Strong evolution component to bonds, we evolutionarily speaking, stuck with bonds
We form bonds easily and resist their dissolution (them disappearing)
We monitor our environment and interaction to make sure we are included/belonged
Ostracism & fear of rejection: being ignored or excluded by others leads to pain and attempts to reconnect
Panic and anxiety (i.e. what did I do, what is it about me, how to get back to not be rejected)
Social isolation from pandemic: Loneliness is a public health issue, especially due to the pandemic
Increase of loneliness
Less need of interactions; technology
Restriction of interactions like amazon and doordash
Cost of living
Technology and sense of connection; internet but not same feeling
Stress hormones are released through loneliness, impacting health.
higher blood pressure,
decreased resistance to infection
increase disease and cancer
Research indicates that lower age groups indicate a higher level of negative effects from loneliness. Why?
Lack of emphasis on true relationships
Transitional period (semi-adult) being hindered
Social media: sense of connectedness, but paradoxical as you can still feel alone
Need for achievement: characteristics of people high and low on this.
Need for achievement: presents a stable, learned characteristic in which satisfaction is obtained by striving for and attaining a level of excellence
High need for achievement: seeks out situation in which they can compete some standard to prove themselves successful
Tend to avoid situations in which success will come too easily and situations in which success is unlikely
Low need for achievement tend to be motivated by desire to avoid failure:
seek out easy task, being sure to avoid failure or they seek out very difficult tasks for which failure has no negative implication
Emotions: what are the primary functions of emotions, Ekman’s research on the 6 universal emotions and cross-cultural differences. The key ideas from the 3 major models of emotion (James-large, Cannon-Bard, Schacter-Singer), as well as the ideas of Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett and Dr. Susan David (in my slides and from their posted TED talks on eClass).
Emotions Definition: We do not know what emotions definitively are
They are not linear
Emotions are complex phenomena that are intertwined with motivation, cognition, neuroscience and many more
Primary functions of emotions:
Prepares us for action: acts as a link between events in our environment and our responses
Shapes our future behaviour: acts as reinforcement or punishment
Helps us to interact effectively with others: acts as a signal to observers, allowing them to understand what we are experiencing and to predict our future behavior
Hierarchy of emotions: Emotions are organised, with sub-branches with further emotions
E.g. emotion→love→fondness
This is contested by Dr: Susan David and Dr: Brene Brown
Ekman’s research on the 6 universal emotions and cross-cultural differences.
Ekman’s 6 universal emotions
Through their research, they argued there are cultural similarities to distinguish and differentiate between facial expressions of emotions
6 fundamental emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust
Argued that is process is nearly instant and automatic
Cross-cultural differences in Emotions
There are significant cross-cultural similarities in emotion recognition but they attitudes regarding emotion, such as how we think, express, regulate and experience emotions are heavily different
For instance, socially engaging emotions being support by a culture or not being supported,
Display rules: norms surrounding the appropriateness of emotions. Rules which indicate when, how, and to whom we can express emotions
For instance, we typically smile in a professional setting with someone new we meet
We do not stare and smile at people
Nonverbal expressions of emotions
Nonverbal leakage: unconscious spillover of our emotional state in our non verbal behaviours (like physical expressions)
Clenched jaw while saying I am fine: The bodies rarely lies
Root of emotions: We cannot define the specific role physiological respsonse play in the experiencing of emotions
Two theories
Specific bodily reactions cause us to experience a particular emotion
Physiological responses results from the experience of an emotions
3 major models of emotion
James-large: States that we experience emotions as a reaction to bodily events that are external situations, which are in turn, are interpreted by the brain as emotional experiences
However…
Emotion experiences frequently occur before there is time for physiological changes in motions (we have emotions before physiological events occur)]
Physiological arousal does not necessary invoke and produce emotional experiences
Cannon-Bard: Observed 3 flaws in James-Large’s theory
Physiological changes occur too slowly to trigger emotional responses
Physiological arousal can occur without experience of emotion (like when exercising)
People experience different emotions from the same patterns of physiological arousal (e.g. fear, joy, anger, sexual attraction.
Cannon-Bard’s theory: Emotions occurs when the thalamus sends signals simultaneously to the cortex and autonomic nervous system
Argued it is not necessary for different emotions to have unique physiological patterns associated with them: as long as the message sent to the cerebral cortex differs for each specific emotion.
We now understand that the hypothalamus and the limbic system, not the thalamus, play a major role in emotional experience.
The simultaneous occurrence of the physiological and emotional responses, which is a fundamental assumption of the Cannon-Bard theory, has yet to be demonstrated conclusively.
Schacter-Singer: this theory proposes that 2 psychological events must occur to experience an emotion
There is an emotional provoking event, we experience it as an undifferentiated/ambiguous condition of arousal
We aim to understand that arousal, so we use the external environment for cues and our cognitive interpretation of the arousal
This is the emotion: we create labels for the arousal we experience
Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett: Theory of constructed emotion
The brain is not hardwired to emotions; emotions are not built into your brain, they are just built
Emotions are guesses by the brain in the moment: we do have control over these guesses
Past Experiences our brain uses predicts and constructs our experience of the world
We experience emotions, and we construct these emotions. They have physical sensations that can be the same in two different contexts:
For instance, stomach rumbling next to cookies vs nervousness
We can architect the situation to be sometime else to control our emotions
Dr. Susan David: breaks down on the distinction between “good” and “bad” emotions, they are just emotions
Emotions serve a function, we need to know the function of them
We should not suppress our emotions as we need to know them
Suppression also amplifies the emotions
“Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life”
Research exploring the Neuroscience of Emotions in terms of patterns of activation in the brain while recalling positive or negative experiences.
Researchers have used Brain PET to show that certain emotions produce the activation of specific portions of the brain
Happiness was related to a decrease in activity in certain areas of the cortex
Sadness was related to an increase in particular portions of the cortex
**These results have critics and skeptics
Happiness: why is happiness such an elusive emotion for so many of us, and what factors DO and DO NOT predict happiness or subjective well-being?
Happiness is an elusive emotion (meaning difficult to achieve) due to 3 reasons
Hedonic treadmill: we adapt to new circumstances, requiring more adaptations for contentment (the more you have, the more we want)
Tendency to make upward social comparison rather than downward
Asymmetry of affective experience: losing $50 feels worse than finding 50