Motivation and Emotion Flashcards

Motivation

• Motivation: Mental states that cause people to engage in behavior directed toward achieving some goal or satisfying a need or desire.

Factors Influencing Motivation

• Four Basic Qualities of Motivation:
  • Activating: Stimulates us to do something.
  • Directive: Guides behaviors toward meeting specific goals or needs.
  • Sustaining: Helps us sustain behaviors until we achieve our goals or satisfy our needs.
  • Differing in Strength: Motives differ in strength depending on the person and the situation.
• Factors That Motivate Behavior:
  • Satisfaction of Needs:
    • Need: A state of being deficient in biological or social factors. Motivates behavior to compensate for the deficiency.
    • Example: Taking a second job to pay bills due to insufficient income.
  • Drive Reduction:
    • Drive: An internal psychological state that motivates behaviors to satisfy a need.
    • Example: Putting on a sweater when feeling cold to satisfy the need for warmth, reducing the drive.
  • Optimal Level of Arousal:
    • People are motivated to engage in behaviors that fit with their preferred level of arousal.
    • Example: One partner preferring calmness and staying in to watch movies, while the other prefers excitement and goes out to clubs.
  • Pleasure Principle:
    • People are motivated to engage in behaviors that make them feel good and avoid pain.
    • Example: Ordering dessert despite being full because it tastes good.
  • Incentives:
    • External factors that motivate behaviors.
    • Example: Practicing hard for a tennis championship due to the incentive of winning.
• Need Hierarchy:
  • Arrangement of needs where basic survival needs must be met before higher needs.
  • Maslow’s theory exemplifies humanistic psychology.
  • Self-actualization is at the top of Maslow's hierarchy.
• Drive Reduction and Equilibrium:
  • Drive: A psychological state that creates arousal, motivating behavior to satisfy a need.
  • Basic biological drives (thirst, hunger) maintain a stable condition.
  • Equilibrium: A stable condition.
• Homeostasis:
  • Tendency for bodily functions to remain in equilibrium.
  • Set point indicates homeostasis for the system.
• Optimal Arousal and Performance:
  • Arousal: Physiological activation or increased autonomic responses.
  • People are motivated to engage in behaviors based on their optimal arousal level.
• Yerkes-Dodson Law:
  • Performance increases with arousal up to an optimal point; after that, more arousal decreases performance.
  • The relationship is shaped like an upside-down U.
• Pleasure Principle (Freud):
  • Needs are satisfied based on the pleasure principle.
  • Motivates people to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
• Incentives:
  • External objects or goals that motivate behaviors.
  • Actions have consequences, affecting motivations.
• Intrinsic Motivation:
  • Desire to perform an activity due to its inherent value or pleasure.
• Extrinsic Motivation:
  • Desire to perform an activity to achieve an external goal.

Motivation to Eat

• Stomach and Blood Chemistry:
  • People without stomachs still report feeling hungry.
  • Receptors in the bloodstream monitor nutrient levels.
  • Glucose levels are monitored.
• Hormones:
  • Insulin: Secreted by the pancreas, controls blood glucose levels.
  • Ghrelin: Secreted by an empty stomach, increases eating behavior (short-term signal).
  • Leptin: Secreted by fat cells, decreases eating behavior (long-term body fat regulation).
• Brain:
  • Hypothalamus: The brain structure that most influences eating.
  • Ventromedial hypothalamus: Associated with feeling full (the “off switch” for hunger); damage leads to constant hunger.
  • Limbic system: Activated by seeing tasty food, causing craving.
• Biological Factors Summary:
  • Glucose levels in the bloodstream.
  • Hormones (insulin, ghrelin, leptin).
  • Signals from the brain (hypothalamus).
• Ventromedial Hypothalamus:
  • Satiety system; stops eating.
  • If destroyed, causes hyperphagia.
• Conditioned Eating:
  • The internal clock leads to anticipatory responses that motivate eating and prepare the body for digestion.
• Familiarity and Eating Preferences:
  • Avoidance of unfamiliar foods is adaptive (evolutionary sense).
  • Preferences are determined by ethnic, cultural, and religious values.
• Flavor:
  • Inborn preference for sweetness.
  • Animals stop eating quickly if they only have one type of food to eat.
• Cultural Influences:
  • Refusal to eat nutritious but culturally unfamiliar substances, even when starving.

Need to Belong

• People are motivated to form groups.
• Need to Belong Theory:
  • The need for interpersonal attachments has evolved for adaptive purposes.
  • Example: The movie Cast Away

Need to Achieve Long-Term Goals

• Achievement Motivation:
  • The need or desire to attain a certain standard of excellence.
• Murray's Psychosocial Needs:
  • Power
  • Autonomy
  • Achievement
  • Play
• Factors Affecting Achievement:
  • Goals themselves.
  • Self-efficacy.
  • Ability to delay gratification.
  • Grit.
• Goals and Achievement:
  • Challenging goals encourage effort, persistence, and concentration.
  • Goals that are too easy or too hard undermine motivation.
• Self-Efficacy and Achievement:
  • Expectation that efforts will lead to success.
  • Challenging but not overwhelming goals lead to success.
• Delaying Gratification:
  • The ability to delay gratification is an indicator of success in life.
  • Marshmallow study.
• Grit:
  • Passion for goals and willingness to work toward them despite hardships.
  • Predictor for grades of college students.

Emotions

• Emotion:
  • An immediate, specific, negative or positive response to environmental events or internal thoughts.
  • Based on physical, bodily responses, affect thoughts and actions, and are subjective.
• Primary Emotions:
  • Evolutionarily adaptive emotions shared across cultures and associated with specific physical states.
  • Include anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise, and possibly contempt.
• Secondary Emotions:
  • Blends of primary emotions.
  • Include remorse, guilt, shame, submission, and anticipation.
• Moods:
  • Spread-out, long-lasting emotional states without an identifiable object or trigger.
• Valence and Arousal:
  • Emotions categorized by valence (negative to positive) and arousal (low to high).
  • Circumplex model.

Theories of Emotion

• James-Lange Theory:
  • Emotions result from experiencing physiological reactions in the body.
  • Facial feedback hypothesis: Facial expressions trigger the experience of emotion.
• Cannon-Bard Theory:
  • Emotions and bodily responses occur simultaneously due to brain processing.
• Two-Factor Theory:
  • Emotion is influenced by the cognitive label applied to explain physiological changes.
  • Misattribution of arousal and excitation transfer.

Brain and Emotions

• Amygdala:
  • Involved in the perception of social stimuli.
  • Helps interpret facial expressions.

Emotional Regulation

• Strategies to Regulate Emotions (James Gross):
  • Thought Suppression and Rumination:
    • Suppressing negative thoughts is difficult and often leads to a rebound effect.
    • Rumination involves focusing on undesired thoughts or feelings.
  • Positive Reappraisal:
    • Altering emotional reactions by thinking about events in more neutral terms.
  • Humor:
    • Has mental and physical health benefits.
    • Laughter improves the immune system and stimulates the release of hormones (dopamine, serotonin, endorphins).
    • Increases circulation, blood pressure, skin temperature, and heart rate, and decreases pain perception.
  • Distraction:
    • Thinking about something other than the troubling activity or thought.
    • Can backfire by leading to thinking about other problems.

Display of Emotion

• Display Rules:
  • Rules learned through socialization that dictate suitable emotions in certain situations.
  • Vary from culture to culture.
  • Differ for women and men (intensification, de-intensification, masking, neutralizing).

Influence of Emotion

• Affect-as-Information Theory:
  • People use their current moods to make decisions, judgments, and appraisals, even if they do not know the cause of their emotions.
• Decision Making:
  • Emotions influence decision-making in different ways.
  • Anticipating how choices might make us feel can guide decision-making.
• Judgments:
  • People in good moods rate their lives as more satisfactory.

Interpersonal Relations

• Guilt:
  • A negative emotional state associated with anxiety, tension, and agitation.
  • Excessive guilt has negative consequences.
  • Socialization is more important than biology in determining how children experience guilt.
• Embarrassment and Blushing:
  • Felt after violating a cultural norm, doing something clumsy, being teased, or experiencing a threat to self-image.
  • Blushing occurs when people believe others might view them negatively and communicates understanding that social awkwardness has occurred.