Motivation and Emotion

Motivational Concepts

Motivations - a need or desire that energizes and directs behavior.

Our motivations drive our behavior

Arises from the interplay between nature and nurture

Drives and Incentives

Drive-Reduction Theory - the idea that a physiological need creates an aroused state (a drive) that motivates us to satisfy the need.

1. We have certain physiological needs

2. If the needs are not met, it creates a drive

3. the drive pushes us to reduce the need

Physiological need - a basic bodily requirement.

Homeostasis - a tendency to maintain a balanced or constant internal state; the regulation of any aspect of body chemistry, such as blood glucose, around a particular level. The goal of the Drive-Reduction Theory is to achieve homeostasis

Incentive - a positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates (or pulls) behavior.

• The more these impulses are satisfied, the stronger the desire becomes

How are we pushed by our inborn bodily needs and pulled by incentives in the environment?

Need (food) → Drive (Hunger) → Drive-Reducing Behavior (eating)

Arousal Theory

Arousal = physically energized

Some motivating behaviors increase arousal

When our biological needs are met, we become bored and seek stimulation to increase our arousal

Aroused Individuals are either physically energized or tense

• Some motivated behaviors increase rather than decrease arousal

• Too much stimulation or stress motivates us to look for ways to decrease arousal

Yerkes-Dodson Law - the principle that performance increases with arousal only up to a “just right” or moderate point, beyond which performance decreases.

• Difficult tasks require lower arousal to provide the best performance

A Hierarchy of Needs

Some needs are more important than others

Hierarchy of Needs - Maslow’s five levels of human needs, beginning with physiological needs. Often visualized as a pyramid, with basic needs providing the foundation supporting higher-level needs.

1. Physiological needs - food, water, housing

2. Safety Needs - Feeling sate, secure, stable

3. Belongness and Love need - Need to love and be loved, feel belonging

4. Esteem Need - need for self esteem, achievement, competence, independence

5. Self-Actualization need - Need to live up to our fullest potential

6. Self-Transcendence need - Need to find meaning and identity beyond the self

We sense meaning when we experience our life as having purpose (goals), significance (value), and coherence (comprehensibility)

Exceptions to the hierarchy can make a statement (starving yourself as a form of protest)

Hunger

Hunger - one of the basic bodily needs

The Physiology of Hunger

What triggers hunger?

A.L Washburn swallowed a balloon inflated his stomach. Inside of the balloon was a recording device. The balloon tracked his stomach movements. Whenever Washburn felt hungry, he would press a button.

• When Washburn felt hungry, his stomach was having contractions

can hunger exist without stomach pains?

• Some researchers removed rats stomachs, creating a direct path to the intestine. The rats still continued to eat

What else can trigger hunger?

Body Chemistry and the Brain

The body knows what energy it uses and what energy it takes in

• allows us to maintain a steady weight

Glucose - the form of sugar that circulates in the blood and provides the major source of energy for body tissues. When its level is low, we feel hunger.

• Increases in hormone insulin (secreted by pancreas) diminish blood glucose, partly by converting it to stored fat

• Triggers a feeling of hunger when low

How does the brain sound the glucose alarm?

• some neural areas do the work (hippocampus and hypothalamus)

In one hypothalamic neural network (the arcuate nucleus), a center pumps out appetite-stimulating hormones, and another center pumps out appetite-suppressing hormones.

• When researchers stimulate the appetite-enhancing center, well-fed animals will begin to eat.

• If they destroy the area, even starving animals lose interest in food

Blood vessels serve as pathways for the body’s chemical signals to reach the hypothalamus, which monitors appetite hormones.

If you lose weight and find it slowly returning, blame the body’s “weight thermostat”

• appetite hormones, genetic expression, and brain activity that help maintain a steady weight

Basal Metabolic Rate - the body’s resting rate of energy output.

• When we decrease food intake, our metabolic rate drops

In Keys experiment, They reduced the amount of energy they were using — partly by being less active, but partly because their basal metabolic rate dropped by 29 percent.

Set Point - the point at which the “weight thermostat” may be set. When the body falls below this weight, increased hunger and a lowered metabolic rate may combine to restore lost weight.

• When provided with lots of food, people tend to overeat and gain weight

Settling Point - the level at which a person’s weight settles in response to caloric intake and energy use; influenced by both environment and biology.

The Psychology of Hunger

Our hunger is pushed by our brain activity and brain chemistry

Taste Preferences: Biology and Culture

Body cues and the environment shape what we are hungry for

More stress → bigger craving for high carb foods as they boost serotonin levels

Culture affects what we crave

• People in Asia don’t crave cheese but people in North America do

People can learn some tastes because they are adaptive

• Humans tend to avoid unfamiliar foods

• Biologically to prevent us from getting sick

Tempting Situations

Situations control our eating:

• People tend to eat more with friends

• Larger serving size means people eat more

• when offered more variety of food people eat more

• When offered health food options first, people choose them more

Obesity - defined as a body mass index (BMI) measurement of 30 or higher, which is calculated from our weight-to-height ratio. (BMI provides general anchors and does not apply to all people equally.)

• Currently increasing

The Need to Belong

Humans are a social animal, they want to be with other people

Need to Belong - the need to build and maintain relationships and to feel connected to a group.

The Benefits of Belonging

Historically, being social increased our changes of survival

• Protect people, form community

Survival is also increased when people cooperate together

• its easier to kill something with 6 people than 1 dude

People in society belong to a group and prefer “us” vs “them”

Self-Determination Theory - the theory that we feel motivated to satisfy our needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

Our social behavior seeks to increase our feeling that we belong

• Studies show that separated/divorced people have earlier deaths than married people do

When an event or an individual threatens to dissolve social ties, people experience:

• Anxiety, Loneliness, Jealousy, Guilt

The Pleasure of Micro-Friendships

• Connecting while commuting

• Bantering with a barista

• Complementing a stranger

The Pain of Being Shut Out

Ostracism - deliberate social exclusion of individuals or groups.

• Humans use this to “punish”

Threatens our need to belong

Brain scares depict increased activity in areas that activate the response to physical pain

• Pain relievers can help to lessen social pain

People often respond to ostracism with initial efforts to restore their acceptance, followed by depressed mood, and, finally, withdrawal into solitude

• May make people disagreeable, uncooperative, and hostile

• Feeling loved activates brain areas associated with rewards and satisfaction and may temper pain of ostracism

• People in different cultures use the same words to describe how ostracism feels “Hurt, crushed”

Solitary Confinement??

Connecting and Social Networking

“a person is a person through other persons.”

Mobile Networks and Social Media

Mobile Phones

Texting and Instant Messages

The Internet

Social Networking

The Net Result: Social Effects of Social Networking

Internet serves as a social amplifier

But social media also leads people to compare their lives with others.

• If others have the “perfect life”, it can trigger envy and depression

People perceive that others’ social lives are more active than their own

1 in 4 people have a smartphone addiction

Often increases self-disclosure related to friendships

Teen depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rates have mushroomed

Does social media affect teen depression? yeah

Can Aid in finding a romantic partner

Decreases face-to-face communication and sleep

Increase loneliness, depression, and suicide

Supports narcissistic behavior

Maintaining Balance and Focus

1. Monitor your time online

2. Monitor your feelings

3. Break the phone checking habit

4. Refocus by taking a nature walk

5. Hide from your more frequently online friends when necessary

Achievement Motivation

Some achievements seem to never be fulfilled

Achievement Motivation - the desire for significant accomplishment, for a command of skills or ideas, for control, and for attaining a high standard.

• Grades, career, money

Motivational Impact

• Self-discipline surpassed intelligence test scores in predicting school performance, attendance, and graduation honors.

• Grit > Intelligence

When doing a project, people are more likely to be stuck in the middle (least amount of motivation)

Discipline focuses and refines talent

Individualist cultures encourage people to “follow their passion.”

Collectivist cultures focus less on personal passion and more on fulfilling one’s duty and obligations to family and friends.

Grit - in psychology, passion and perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Achievement is not a bell curve

Intrinsic Motivation - the desire to perform a behavior well for its own sake.

• Offering people rewards for their achievement can harm their intrinsic motivation

Extrinsic Motivation - the desire to perform a behavior to receive promised rewards or avoid threatened punishment.

Kids with better intrinsic motivation for learning have better academic outcomes

Goal Setting

Make the Resolution

• SMART Goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely)

Announce the goal to friends and family

Develop an action plan

Create short-term rewards that support long-term goals

Monitor and record progress

Create a supportive environment

Transform the hard-to-do behavior into a must-do habit

Emotion: Arousal, Behavior, and Cognition

Where do our emotions come from?

Emotions are our bodies way of ensuring we do what is best

• Anger motivates fighting injustice. Gratitude strengthens relationships. Pride prompts hard work

Emotion - a response of the whole person, involving (1) bodily arousal, (2) expressive behaviors, and, most importantly, (3) conscious experience resulting from one’s interpretations.

• Does your bodily arousal come before or after your emotional feelings? (big debate)

• How do thinking (cognition) and feeling interact? Does cognition always come before emotion?

James-Lange Theory: Arousal Comes Before Emotion

Do we cry when we feel sad, or do we feel sad because we cry?

James-Lange Theory - the theory that our experience of emotion occurs when we become aware of our physiological responses to an emotion-arousing stimulus.

• Physiological response → realize it → react → emotion!

Cannon-Bard Theory: Arousal and Emotion Happen at the Same Time

Cannon-Bard Theory - the theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion.

• My pounding heart did not cause my feeling of fear, nor did my feeling of fear cause my pounding heart. So, according to Cannon-Bard theory, bodily responses and experienced emotions are separate.

Is the physical response and the emotion really separate?

• In an experiment, people with lower spine injury (cannot feel their legs) had no change in their emotional intensity

• People with upper spinal injury (cannot feel anything below their neck) had less emotional intensity

  • Other emotions that are expressed primarily above the neck were felt more intensely

Happen at the same time

Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory: Arousal + Label = Emotion

Two-Factor Theory - Schachter and Singer’s theory that to experience emotion we must (1) be physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.

Arousal can linger from one event to the next (Spillover effect)

• One group of men was told to expect feelings of arousal from the injection. Others were told by the trickster researchers that it would help test their eyesight. As they observe this accomplice, they begin to feel their heart race, their body flush, and their breathing become more rapid. They “caught” the apparent emotion of the other person in the waiting room. They became happy if the accomplice was acting joyful, and testy if the accomplice was acting irritated.

Spillover Effect is when arousal “spills” over from one event to the next, influencing response

• arousal fuels emotion, cognition channels it

Zajonc, LeDoux, and Lazarus: Emotion and the Two-Track Brain

Is the heart always subject to the mind?

According to Zajonc, we actually have many emotional reactions apart from, or even before, our interpretation of a situation

• reflect the automatic processing that happens in our brain

Some emotion travel the high road via the thalamus to the brain’s cortex

• Complex feelings

Low road involves a neural shortcut that bypasses the cortex and go directly to the amygdala, enabling a lightning fast response

• These emotions are processed without conscious awareness

The amygdala’s structure makes it easier for our feelings to hijack our thinking than for our thinking to rule our feelings

Embodied Emotion

Emotions involve the body

Some physical responses are easy to notice; others happen without your awareness.

The Basic Emotions

There are six basic emotions that a majority of scientists agree on:

1. Anger

2. Fear

3. Disgust

4. Sadness

5. Surprise

6. Happiness

Carroll Izard found four more

1. Contempt

2. Interest/Excitement

3. Shame

4. guilt

Other researchers recognize as many as 28, including different flavors of happiness like awe, love and pride

Emotions are categorized by their Valance (Positive vs Negative) and their Arousal (low vs high)

Emotions and the Autonomic Nervous System

In a crisis, the sympathetic division of your autonomic nervous system (ANS) mobilizes your body for action

• It triggers your adrenal glands to release stress hormones.

• To provide energy, your liver pours extra sugar (glucose) into your bloodstream

• . To help burn the sugar, your breathing rate increases to supply needed oxygen.

• Your heart rate and blood pressure increase.

• Your digestion slows, allowing blood to move away from your internal organs and toward your muscles

The Physiology of Emotions

When you are watching different movies, your body reacts (horror movie, sexually arousing, vs boring movie)

Different emotions can share common biological signatures.

Despite similar bodily responses, sexual arousal, fear, and anger feel different to us, and they often look different to others.

Brain scans and EEGs reveal that some emotions also have distinct brain circuits

• People who are prone to depression, or who have generally negative perspectives, also show more activity in their right frontal lobe

• When you experience positive moods — when you are enthusiastic, energized, and happy — your left frontal lobe will be more active.

Polygraph - a machine often used in attempts to detect lies; it actually measures emotion-linked changes in perspiration, heart rate, and breathing, which are not always tied to lying.

• Humans have similar bodily arousal in response to anxiety, irritation, and guilty

  • Many innocent people do get tense and nervous when accused of a bad act

• Guilty Knowledge Test is more effective

  • Use of facts that only a guilty person would know (info not released to the public)

Expressed and Experienced Emotion

Our facial expressions can give clues as to what people are feeling

Detecting Emotion in Others

People communicate without words

• People who are in love often look into each others eyes.

• Can looking into someone’s eyes jump start love?

  • researchers asked straight male-female stranger pairs to gaze intently for 2 minutes either at each other’s hands, or into each other’s eyes. After separating, the eye gazers reported feeling a tingle of attraction and affection

Our brain is great at detecting subtle emotions and non-verbal threats

• Non-threatening cues are more easily detected than deceiving emotions (Duchenne smile)

Despite our brain’s emotion-detecting skill, we find it difficult to detect deceiving expressions.

• Computer programs outperform` humans when detecting deception from images or videos, because liars’ and truth-tellers’ behavioral differences are often too subtle for the human eye

Gender and Emotion

Women’s skill at decoding emotions may help explain why women tend to respond with and express greater emotion, especially positive emotions

• All of this has led to the extremely strong perception (nearly all U.S. 18- to 29-year-olds in one survey) that emotionality is “more true of women”

Researchers also manipulated a computer-generated, gender-neutral face to display different emotions. People were more likely to perceive the face as male when it wore an angry expression and as female when it wore a smile

• Is anger a masculine emotion?

• Women who express “male-typed” anger pay a penalty in the workplace, such as being labeled “out of control”

Gender differences in empathy?

• If you have empathy, you identify with others and imagine being in their skin.

• Women are far more likely to consider themselves empathetic than men

  • And are more likely to express empathy

Are gender differences nature vs nurture?

• Evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists note that similar female-male empathy differences occur in nonhuman animals

• People with high power and privilege are less motivated to empathize (men are more likely to have power)

Culture and Emotion

In the US, people often smile, say hi and make eye contact with a stranger walking in the street.

• this is super weird people non-Americans

The meaning of gestures also change throughout cultures

• . In 1968, North Korea publicized photos of supposedly happy officers from a captured U.S. Navy spy ship. In the photo, three men had raised their middle fingers, telling their captors — who didn’t recognize the cultural gesture — it was a “Hawaiian good luck sign”

Do facial expressions have different meanings in different cultures

• Researchers travel around the world, showing people pictures of humans making different faces and asking them to guess the emotion

• One analysis of 6 million videos from 144 countries found reliable associations between facial expressions and social contexts

  • Smiles and laughter are the same in every culture

  • Anger and Fear are different in cultures

But people differ on other expressions, especially anger and fear, even when matching exaggerated poses to a limited set of emotion words

Facial expressions are not crystal balls into our emotions

• we control our facial expressions to fit in, influence, or lie to others

Facial expressions are also culturally shaped, with display rules guiding when to express an emotion, which emotion is appropriate, and how much of an emotion to express.

The Effects of Facial Expressions

William James struggled with feelings of depression and grief, he came to believe that we can control our emotions by going “through the outward movements” of any emotion we want to experience. “To feel cheerful,” he advised, “sit up cheerfully, look around cheerfully, and act as if cheerfulness were already there.”

• That’s what mom tells me to do

• Can outward expressions trigger our inward emotions and feelings

Facial Feedback Effect - the tendency of facial muscle activation, alone, to trigger corresponding feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness.

Some people with depression or borderline personality disorder have reported feeling better after between-the-eyebrows Botox injections that freeze their facial frown muscles. However, Botox paralysis of the frowning muscles also slows activity in emotion-related brain circuits and weakens emotional experiences

Behavior Feedback Effect - Going through the motions awakens the emotions