Emotion and Motivation Lecture Notes

Why We Care About Emotion and Motivation

• Impact on behavior and mental processes (cognition).
• Emotions influence how we behave and think.
• Motivation: Drives towards or away from something.
  • Motivations are based on personal experience, family, culture, society, and gender roles.

Psychology and Emotion

• Psychology often involves mood disorders (clinical depression, generalized anxiety disorder).
• Big questions in psychology: Why do people feel and behave the way they do?
• Understanding emotions and motivations helps explain behavior.

Key Term Definitions

• Emotion: A state (changeable, fluctuating) that represents moment-to-moment responses to an event (internal or external).
  • Emotions have cognitive (thinking), affective (feeling), and behavioral components (ABC of emotion).
• Mood: More stable and trait-like, associated with personality.
  • Example: Higher neuroticism relates to more negative mood.
• Affect: Umbrella term for general feeling states (emotion, mood, stress response).
• Appraisal: The meaning we attach to a stimulus (good, bad, neutral, scary, exciting). This is a cognitive activity.
• Arousal: Physiological response to a stimulus.
  • Can be assessed using galvanic skin response (skin conductance).
• Valence: Whether we appraise a stimulus as positive, negative, or neutral.
• Intra: Within the person.
• Inter: Between people.

Primary and Secondary Emotions

• Primary Emotions (Basic Emotions): Reactions to an activating event/stimulus (internal or external).
  • Examples: joy, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, fear.
  • Develop in young babies around three months and beyond.
• Secondary Emotions: Reactions to a primary emotion.
  • How we feel about our feelings, involve judgment.
  • Example: Sadness after losing a pet turns to guilt/regret about not calling the vet earlier.

Complex and Self-Conscious Emotions

• Complex Emotions: Blend of multiple emotions.
  • Example: Grief (sadness, anger, love), jealousy (love, fear).
• Self-Conscious Emotions: Self-judging emotions that develop in early childhood (15-24 months).
  • Involve judging ourselves positively or negatively.
  • Examples: embarrassment, pride, guilt, shame.

Emotion Across Cultures

• Some emotions are more universal (happiness, sadness, fear, awe).
• Others vary across cultures (embarrassment, contempt).
• In-groups: People we see as like us.
  • Examples: Students at Deakin vs. Monash, psychology students vs. business/law students.
• Out-groups: People not like us.
• Cultural display rules dictate how much we express emotions.
  • Learned from primary attachment figures and reinforced through interactions.
• Understanding these differences helps support better communication.

Purpose and Function of Emotions

• Provide us with information and prompt us to act.
• Intrapersonal Functions: Functions within the self.
  • Direct attention and action, influence thinking (adaptive).
  • Example: Surprise (eyes open wider to see more), disgust (screw up nose to avoid inhaling toxins).
  • Broaden and build theory (positive psychology): Positive emotions broaden thinking and visual field, building resilience; negative emotions narrow thinking and visual field.
• Interpersonal Functions: Functions between people.
  • Expressive behaviors: Communicate feelings to others (smiling, crying).
  • Instrumental Function: change the environment.
    • (glaring at someone to get them to stop doing something).

Expressing Emotions

• Many can recognize feelings through observing expressions and behavior.
• Developing a theory of mind helps to label the emotions of others.
• People high in Alexithymia (absence of words for emotion) have difficulty describing their feelings but can describe bodily sensations.
• Communication through verbal (words) and nonverbal cues (body language).
• Use of visual analog scales where people lack language to express feelings.

Theories of Emotion

• James-Lange Theory (Peripheral Theory): Activity in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) causes emotional experience.
  • Unconscious brain interprets the stimulus, PNS changes, awareness of changes leads to emotion.
  • Criticism: Every emotion would need a distinct set of PNS responses, little evidence for this. Paralysis wouldn't experience emotions based on this idea.
• Cannon-Bard Theory (Central Theory): Emotion starts in the brain (central nervous system, CNS).
  • Interpret the stimulus and feel the emotion simultaneously.
  • Originally thought thalamus was the emotional center, but now it is thought of as interaction of thalamus and amygdala.
• Schachter-Singer Theory (Cognitive Theory): Physiological arousal, and cognitive interpretations are key.
  • Feel arousal and then try to explain why, label emotions based on interpretation.
  • Examples: Fear and attraction have similar physical telltales.
• Lazarus' Cognitive Appraisal Theory: Cognitively appraising things and then labeling how we feel.
  • Need to interpret to drive emotion. Individuals have personal judgements of stimuli.
  • Relate stimuli to oneself to experience the effects and valence.
• Gross's Modal Model: The situation occurs, we pay attention to it, appraise it as having meaning, and then respond to modify the situation.
  • Doesn't focus on physiological arousal, more of a cognitive model.

Emotion Regulation

• No single right way to regulate emotions.
• Different strategies are available and might be intrinsic, self based, or extrinsic, external.
• Variety of strategies is optimal for better emotional outcomes.

Motivation

• Process that influences the direction, persistence, and vigor of goal-directed behavior.
• Largely physiological (hunger, thirst, sex), drive towards homeostasis.

Homeostasis

• Physiological equilibrium we are constantly moving towards being in.
• Body acts in specific ways to try and maintain that homeostasis.

BIS/BAS

• BAS (Behavioral Activation System): Approach system, driven towards reward and needs gratification. Includes left PFC.
• BIS (Behavioral Inhibition System): Avoid system, avoid punishment and pain. Connection within the limbic and right frontal lobe.

Humanistic Theories of Motivation

• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Suggested that we are motivated to strive for growth and self-actualization. Lower needs to be met before higher ones can be reached.
  • Little evidence.
• Self-Determination Theory:
  • Theory says that we have three fundamental human needs, supported in research.
  • Competency, autonomy, relatedness.