Download Goal Incongruent Emotions

Human Motivation
Chapter 10
Goal-Incongruent (Negative) Emotions
Goal-Incongruent Emotions
o
Thwart the attainment of personal goals
Generally negative
Negative emotions produce negative affect
Even though these emotions are negative, they
have evolved to ensure our survival, and
therefore, should not be shunned.
Fear and Anxiety
Fear: an emotional system that is sensitive to cues,
unlearned or learned, that signal physical punishment
(pain).
Anxiety: an emotional system that is attuned to situations
characterized by uncertainty, social comparison,
personal failure, and negative evaluation of personal
worth.
Fear evolved to ensure our immediate survival, and
anxiety evolved to ensure our social survival.
Fear and Anxiety
Anxiety is a negative emotion that alerts us to
potentially threatening situations:
Helps us focus on social-evaluative stimuli
Activates reverberating circuits (brain circuit that has been
activated stays activated for a period in the absence of the
stimulus) that give rise to ruminative thoughts (thinking about
ways to prevent social rejection/ostracization).
Many of the same psychological antecedents that
underlie anxiety also underlie depression (Example:
tendency to be self-critical; perceived sense of loss of
control.)
Fear and Anxiety
The Biological Component:
Considerable evidence suggests heritability of trait
anxiety; heritability for part of brain to be highly active.
Fear is caused by activation of the fight-flight system;
anxiety caused by the activation of the behavioral
inhibition system (BIS). When the BIS system is
activated, the organism directs attention to
environmental stimuli.
Anti-anxiety drugs reduce activity of BIS.
The right side of the prefrontal cortex (responsible for
negative/inhibiting emotions) is more active in
anxious/depressed individuals.
Fear and Anxiety
The Learned Component:
The BIS can be conditions by cues of punishment
forthcoming and cues of rewards being withheld.
Anxiety is an anticipatory response to the possibility of
an aversive outcome.
Phobia is a persistent and recognizable irrational fear
of an object/situation and is characterized by distress
and compelling desire to avoid the object or situation.
Systematic desensitization (repeated exposure to
stimuli while learning who to become relaxed) is
effective procedure for eliminating fears.
Fear and Anxiety
The Learned Component: (Cont.)
 Panic attacks: characterized by somatic symptoms,
dear of dying, and fear of losing control. Left
untreated, often increase over time.
 Treatment of panic attacks includes providing basic
information about attacks.
 Two types of anxiety:
1. Fear: governed by alarm reaction; fight/flight
response.
2. Anxious apprehension: governed by BIS; prepares
individual to cope with challenges of everyday life.
 Plays mediating role in panic-related disorders.
Fear and Anxiety
Cognitive factors play important role in arousal of fear
and anxiety:
 Viewing the world as threatening
1. Negative affectivity/avoidance temperament.
2. Bias in interpreting ambiguous stimuli.
3. Attentional bias to process threat cues.




Unwanted or intrusive thoughts
Loss of control
Ruminative thoughts about loss of control
Inability to make a coping response
Pessimism and Depression
Types of depression:
Normal: passing demoralization
Unipolar: a chemical or clinical disorder and needs to
be treated with drugs/psychotherapy.
Bipolar: characterized by both manic and depressive
episodes.
Depression is twice as high among university students
vs. comparable group on nonstudents.
Women are 2-5 times more prone to depression.
Modern Individualism
and the Rise of Depression
Depression in the U.S. has increased ten times
in last two generations.
Depression is mainly prevalent in
technologically advanced countries.
New form of individualism is highly
susceptible to depression.
Basic characteristics of modern individualism are
autonomy and self-reliance (we do not need other
people).
The Biological Component of
Depression
Evidence indicates depression runs in families;
although studies have failed to disentangle
genetic/environmental influences.
Depressed individuals show relatively more electrical
activity in the right hemisphere of the brain.
Type A depression: deficiency of norepinephrine and
dopamine; failure to meet environmental challenges.
Type B depression: depletion of serotonin; inability
to meet social challenges.
Depression is initially treated with drugs.
The Learned Component of
Depression
Feelings of learned helplessness and loss of
control are major antecedents to depression.
Helpless individuals do not believe that their
responses will have any effect on aversive or
noxious events.
Giving people a controllable experience
produces a proactive interference against
attempts to induce helplessness.
The Cognitive Component of
Depression
Individuals’ propensity to become depressed is
associated with their personal explanatory styles:
Permanence: cause of bad events is permanent vs.
temporary; good outcomes temporary vs. permanent.
Pervasiveness: bad events affect all parts of life vs.
seeing bad event as specific; wallow in misery vs.
stopping self from sinking deeper into depression;
explaining good events by transient causes vs.
permanent causes.
Personalization: when bad things happen, blame
themselves vs. others; believe good things come from
outside sources vs. self.
The Cognitive Component of
Depression
People who think more pessimistically are more
likely to become depressed.
Teaching people to think more optimistically does
result in the lessening/elimination of their depression.
Depressed people tend to engage in excessive
analysis or rumination.
Pessimism has been linked to more health concerns.
Depressed people tend to view their current/future
situations in negative terms.
Perfectionistic thinking can lead to high levels of
depressive symptomatology and anxiety.
Beck’s Four Errors in Thinking
1. Exaggeration: exaggerating negative aspects of
experiences.
2. Dichotomous thinking: viewing a partial failure as
a complete failure.
3. Selective abstraction: seeing only the negative
aspects of an experience and using that information
to make an inference about our ability.
4. Overgeneralization: using one outcome to make
inferences about our ability.
Guilt and Shame
Are uniquely human emotions.
Play a role in a wide variety of behaviors.
Have been linked to pessimism and
depression.
The capacity for these emotions are innate, but
their mode of expression is learned.
Tend to disrupt adaptive behavior when they
become excessive.
Guilt and Shame
The Biological Component:
Adaptive emotions that serve to ensure good
social relationships- dependent on being
sensitive to other’s needs and being motivated
to make amends when problems occur.
Guilt functions to prevent waste and
exploitation; inhibits aggression and
encourages people to make reparations.
Guilt and Shame
The Learned Component:
Guilt is a conditioned negative feeling- when our
parents show disappointment, we experience a
negative emotion (a punishment), which we come to
associate with the initiating event.
Power assertion leads to low levels of moral
development; induction high levels.
Researchers have found a positive relationship
between parental warmth and the development of
consciousness and guilt in children.
Guilt and Shame
The Cognitive Component:
Guilt is a cognitive process that involves a
well-developed self-structure.
Guilt occurs through self-reflection, when we
conclude our behavior has failed to meet some
internal standard of conduct.
Guilt and depression have been linked in a
couple theories.