Download I. Introduction: Motivation and Emotion A. Motivation refers to the

I. Introduction: Motivation and Emotion
A. Motivation refers to the biological, emotional, cognitive, or social
forces that activate and direct behavior.
B. Three basic characteristics are commonly associated with
motivation.
1. Activation is demonstrated by the initiation or production of
behavior.
2. Persistence is demonstrated by continued efforts or the
determination to achieve a particular goal, often in the face of
obstacles.
3. Intensity is seen in the greater vigor of responding that
usually accompanies motivated behavior.
C. Emotion is a psychological state involving three distinct
components: subjective experience, a physiological response, and a
behavioral or expressive component.
II. Motivational Concepts and Theories
A. Emerging in the late 1800s, instinct theories contended that
certain human behaviors are innate and due to evolutionary
programming.
1. Animals display automatic and instinctual behavior patterns
called fixed action patterns.
2. By the 1920s, instinct theories had fallen out of favor. Today,
psychologists taking the evolutionary perspective consider how
our evolutionary heritage may influence patterns of human
behavior.
B. Beginning in the 1920s, drive theories asserted that behavior is
motivated by the desire to reduce internal tension caused by unmet
biological needs such as hunger and thirst.
1. The principle of homeostasis states that the body monitors
and maintains relatively constant levels of internal states, such
as body temperature, fluid levels, and energy supplies.
2. When an internal imbalance is detected by homeostatic
mechanisms, a drive to restore balance is produced. This drive
state activates behavior to reduce the need and to reestablish the
balance of internal conditions.
C. Emerging in the 1940s and 1950s, incentive theories proposed that
behavior is motivated by the “pull” of external goals, such as rewards,
money, or recognition.
1. Incentive theories drew heavily from well-established
learning principles, such as reinforcement, and the work of
influential learning theorists, such as Pavlov, Watson, Skinner,
and Tolman.
2. Tolman stressed the importance of cognitive factors in
learning and motivation, especially the expectation that a
particular behavior will lead to a particular goal.
D. Arousal theory is the view that people are motivated to maintain
an optimal level of arousal, one that is neither too high nor too low.
1. The optimal level of arousal varies from person to person,
from time to time, and from one situation to another.
2. Sensation seeking is the degree to which an individual is
motivated to experience high levels of sensory and physical
arousal associated with varied and novel activities.
3. Like people, animals also seem to seek out novel
environmental stimulation.
E. Humanistic theories of motivation, which emerged in the late
1950s, were championed by psychologists Carl Rogers and Abraham
Maslow. They emphasize the psychological and cognitive factors in
motivation, especially the notion that people are motivated to realize
their highest personal potential.
III. Biological Motivation: Hunger and Eating
A. Energy Homeostasis
1. Calories consumed = calories expended
a. Food is converted into amino acids, fatty acids, and
simple sugars, providing “fuel” for your body. The
simple sugar glucose, or blood sugar, provides the main
source of energy. In the liver, glucose
is converted to and stored as glycogen.
b. The hormone insulin, secreted by the pancreas, helps
control blood levels of glucose and promotes the uptake
of glucose by the muscles and other body tissues. It also
helps in regulating eating behavior and maintaining a
stable body weight.
c. Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the rate at which the
body, when at rest, uses energy for vital functions, such
as heartbeat and respiration.
d. Adipose tissue, or body fat, is the main source of
stored, or reserve, energy.
2. Positive versus negative energy balance
a. Your typical or average body weight is called your
baseline body weight.
b. A regulatory process called energy homeostasis, the
long-term matching of food intake to energy expenditure,
helps you maintain your baseline body weight. Over
time, most people experience energy balance, so body
weight, including body fat stores, tends to remain stable.
c. Positive energy balance occurs when caloric intake
exceeds calories expended for energy. The excess
glucose is converted to body fat.
d. Negative energy balance occurs when caloric intake
falls short of the calories expended for energy. Body fat
stores shrink as the reserve energy in fat cells is used.
B. Short-Term Signals That Regulate Eating
1. Physiological changes that predict eating
a. About 30 minutes before you eat, you experience a
slight increase in blood levels of insulin and a slight
decrease in blood levels of glucose. Even if you do not
eat, glucose will return to its baseline level.
b. The hormone ghrelin (or “hunger hormone”), which is
primarily manufactured by cells lining the stomach, is
also involved in the short-term regulation of eating
behavior.
c. Prior to eating, body temperature increases and
metabolism decreases. As the meal is consumed, this
internal physiological pattern reverses.
2. Psychological factors that trigger eating
a. Through classical conditioning, the time of day at
which you normally eat acts as a CS (conditioned
stimulus) and elicits reflexive internal physiological
changes (the CR, or conditioned response), which
increases your hunger.
b. Operant conditioning and positive reinforcement play
a role in eating; voluntary eating behaviors are followed
by a reinforcing stimulus—the taste of food.
c. Due to prior reinforcement, certain tastes, especially
sweet, salty, and fatty tastes, hold greater positive
incentive value.
3. Satiation signals: Sensing when to stop eating
a. Satiation is the feeling of fullness and diminished
desire to eat that accompanies eating a meal.
b. Satiation signals include
(1) stretch receptors in the stomach that
communicate sensory information to the
brainstem,
(2) the hormone cholecystokinin (CCK), secreted
by the small intestines, that promotes satiation and
reduces or stops eating, and
(3) sensory-specific satiety, the reduced desire to
continue consuming a particular food.
C. Long-Term Signals That Regulate Body Weight
Three of the best-documented internal signals are leptin, insulin, and
neuropeptide Y.
1. Leptin is a hormone secreted by the body’s adipose tissue
into the bloodstream.
2. Leptin is a key element in the feedback loop that regulates
energy homeostatis. When the leptin level in the brain
increases, food intake is reduced; when the leptin level is
reduced, eating behavior is triggered.
3. The hormone insulin, which is secreted by the pancreas, is
also involved in brain mechanisms controlling food intake and
body weight. As with leptin, increases in insulin reduce food
intake. Decreases trigger eating behavior.
4. During periods of negative energy balance and weight loss,
decreased leptin and insulin levels promote the secretion of
neuropeptide Y (NPY) by the hypothalamus. NPY triggers
eating behavior, reduces body metabolism, and promotes fat
storage.
5. In combination, the long-term and short-term eating related
signals provide a feedback loop monitored by the
hypothalamus. Over the course of time, energy balance is
achieved.
D. Eating and Body Weight over the Lifespan: Set Point or Settling
Point
1. Set-point theory proposes that humans and other animals
have a natural or optimal body weight, called the set-point
weight, that the body defends from becoming higher or lower
by regulating feelings of hunger and body metabolism.
2. Settling-point models of weight regulation suggest that
body weight “settles,” or stabilizes, around the point at which
there is balance between the factors influencing energy intake
and energy expenditure.
E. Excess Weight and Obesity
In the United States today, more than two-thirds of adults are above
their healthy body weight. How is healthy weight determined? The
body mass index (BMI) provides a single numerical value that
represents adult weight in relation to height. Today, more than onethird of adult Americans are considered to be overweight. But another
third of adults are obese, with a BMI of 30 or above. In addition, the
percentage of overweight people increases through adulthood.
However, excess weight is also a problem in early life, with over 17
percent of U.S. children and adolescents overweight.
1. Factors involved in becoming overweight include the
following:
a. Inadequate sleep disrupts the hunger-related hormones
leptin and ghrelin.
b. People often eat because of the positive incentive value
of the available food.
c. People overeat because of the “SuperSize It”
syndrome—much larger portions are offered for only a
few cents more.
d. People overeat because of the cafeteria diet effect—
the tendency to eat more when a wide variety of palatable
foods is available.
e. Forty-three percent of women and 37 percent of men
lead sedentary lifestyles.
f. Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is 3 to 5 percent lower
among women than among men, and it decreases by
about 2 to 3 percent per decade of life.
g. Of the six factors just cited, you can exert control over
all of them (with the exception of BMR) to counteract
becoming or remaining overweight.
h. (Critical Thinking) According to John P. J. Pinel and
his colleagues, the behavior patterns of sensory-specific
satiety and the cafeteria diet effect, combined with the
positive incentive value of easily available highly
palatable foods, have promoted levels of
“consumption that are far higher than those that are
compatible with optimal health and long life.”
2. Factors involved in obesity include the following:
a. Multiple genes on multiple chromosomes help create
susceptibility to obesity.
b. Many obese people experience leptin resistance, in
which the normal mechanisms through which leptin
regulates body weight and energy balance are disrupted.
c. Many overweight or obese dieters experience weightcycling, or yo-yo dieting—the weight lost through dieting
is regained in weeks or months and maintained until the
next attempt at dieting.
(1) One reason for weight-cycling is that the
human body is far more effective at vigorously
defending against weight loss
than it is at protecting against weight gain.
d. (Focus on Neuroscience) A recent study revealed
significantly fewer dopamine receptors for obese
individuals than for normal subjects. Among the obese
subjects, the number of dopamine receptors decreased as
BMI increased.
IV. Psychological Needs as Motivators
A. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
1. Abraham Maslow believed that people are innately
motivated to satisfy a hierarchy of needs progressing from
basic physiological needs to safety needs to belongingness and
love needs to esteem needs, with self-actualization as the
ultimate goal.
2. Maslow defined self-actualization as “a person’s full use and
exploitation of talents, capacities, and potentialities.”
3. According to Maslow, self-actualized people are
characterized by realism and acceptance, spontaneity, problem
centering, autonomy, continued freshness of appreciation, and
peak experiences.
4. In general, Maslow’s notion that we must satisfy needs at one
level before moving to the next level has not been supported by
research.
B. Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory
1. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination
theory (SDT) contends that optimal human functioning can
occur only if the psychological needs for autonomy,
competence, and relatedness are satisfied.
2. Intrinsic motivation is the desire to engage in tasks that the
person finds inherently satisfying and enjoyable, novel, or
optimally challenging.
3. Extrinsic motivation consists of external factors or
influences on behavior, such as rewards, social evaluations,
rules, and responsibilities.
4. According to Deci and Ryan, people who have satisfied the
needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness actively
internalize and integrate different external motivators as part of
their identity and values.
5. If one or more psychological needs are thwarted, people may
compensate with substitute needs, defensive behaviors, or
maladaptive behaviors.
6. Deci and Ryan have compiled an impressive array of studies
in support of self-determination theory, including cross-cultural
studies.
C. Competence and Achievement Motivation
1. Competence motivation is the desire to direct one’s
behavior toward demonstrating competence and exercising
control in a situation.
2. Achievement motivation is the desire to direct one’s
behavior toward excelling, succeeding, or outperforming others
at some task.
3. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was developed by
Henry Murray and his colleagues to measure human motives. It
is a projective test that requires the person to create stories
about ambiguous pictures. One scoring system measures need
for achievement, or nAch.
4. Power motivation is the urge to control or influence the
behavior of other people or groups.
5. Measures of achievement motivation generally correlate well
with various areas of success, such as school grades, job
performance, and worker output.
6. People who score high in achievement motivation expend
their greatest efforts on moderately challenging tasks, have the
ability to delay gratification, and tend to display original
thinking, seek expert advice, and value feedback about their
performance.
7. In individualistic cultures, the need to achieve emphasizes
personal, individual success, whereas in collectivistic cultures,
achievements are viewed as ways to fulfill the expectations of
family members or to fit into the larger group.
V. Emotion: Emotion is a complex psychological state that involves
subjective experience,
a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response.
A. The Functions of Emotion
1. Emotions can move us to act, triggering motivated behavior.
2. Emotions help us to set goals, but emotional states can also
be goals in themselves.
3. Emotions are important in many different areas, including
rational decision making, purposeful behavior, and setting
appropriate goals.
4. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to understand and
manage your own emotional experiences and to perceive,
comprehend, and respond appropriately to the emotional
responses of others.
5. Charles Darwin was one of the earliest scientists to
systematically study emotions and their expression. He argued
that emotions reflect evolutionary adaptations to the problems
of survival and reproduction.
a. Today’s evolutionary psychologists believe that
emotions are the product of evolution and that they help
us solve adaptive problems posed by our environment.
b. According to Darwin, emotional display serves the
important function of informing other organisms about an
individual’s internal state.
c. Not only are all human relationships heavily
influenced by emotions, our emotional experience and
expression, along with our ability to understand the
emotions of others, is key to maintaining social
relationships.
B. The Subjective Experience of Emotion
1. There are a limited number of basic emotions that all
humans experience. They are thought to be biologically
determined. The basic emotions are fear, surprise, anger,
disgust, happiness, and sadness.
2. Each basic emotion represents a family of related emotional
states.
3. People often experience a blend of emotions. In more
complex situations, they may experience mixed emotions.
4. Men and women differ little in the experience of emotions,
but women are more emotionally expressive.
5. Culture and emotional experience
a. Across cultures, emotions are commonly classified
according to two dimensions: the degree to which the
emotion is pleasant or unpleasant, and the level of
activation, or arousal, associated with the emotion.
b. Studies of Japanese subjects added a third dimension,
interpersonal engagement—the degree to which an
emotion involves relationships with others. Japan is a
collectivistic culture, so one’s identity is seen as
interdependent with those of other people,
rather than independent, as is characteristic of
individualistic cultures.
C. The Neuroscience of Emotion
1. Emotion and the sympathetic nervous system
a. When you are threatened, the sympathetic nervous
system triggers the fight-or-flight response, a rapidly
occurring series of automatic physical reactions.
b. The sympathetic nervous system is also activated by
other intense emotions such as excitement, passionate
love, or extreme joy.
c. Studies have found that there are differing patterns of
physiological arousal for different emotions.
d. Cross-cultural studies have demonstrated that the basic
emotions are associated with distinct patterns of
autonomic nervous system activity.
e. (In Focus) The use of polygraphs to infer whether
people are lying presents many potential problems,
including that there is no unique pattern of physiological
arousal associated specifically with lying. Also,
interpreting polygraph results can be highly subjective.
Because polygraphs have a high error rate, many states
do not admit them as evidence in court. Another way of
detecting deception is through a variety of nonverbal
cues, especially facial expressions. For example, when
people lie, microexpressions of fear, guilt, or anxiety
often “leak” through.
2. The emotional brain: fear and the amygdala
a. Studies have shown that the amygdala, an almondshaped cluster of neurons in the limbic system in the
brain’s temporal lobe, is a key brain structure in the
emotional response of fear in humans.
b. When a person is faced with a potentially threatening
stimulus, the visual stimulus is first routed to the
thalamus.
c. The information is then relayed simultaneously along
two neural pathways:
(1) the direct thalamus→amygdala pathway, which
triggers the brain’s alarm system, and
(2) the thalamus→cortex→amygdala pathway. If
the cortex determines that a threat exists, the
information is relayed to the amygdala along the
longer, slower pathway.
d. The amygdala then sends information along two
pathways:
(1) One pathway leads to an area of the
hypothalamus, then on to the medulla; together,
they trigger arousal of the sympathetic nervous
system.
(2) Another pathway leads to a different
hypothalamus area that, in concert with the
pituitary gland, triggers the release of stress
hormones.
e. Joseph LeDoux believes that the direct thalamus–
amygdala connection represents an adaptive response
that has been hardwired by evolution in the human brain.
The indirect route allows more complex stimuli to be
evaluated in the cortex.
f. (Focus on Neuroscience) A study using PET scans
found that each of four emotions (sadness, happiness,
anger, and fear) produced a distinct pattern of brain
activation and deactivation, indicating that each emotion
involves distinct neural circuits in the brain.
D. The Expression of Emotion: Making Faces
1. Psychologists Paul Ekman and Walter Friesen coded
different facial expressions by painstakingly analyzing the
facial muscles involved in producing each facial expression.
2. Ekman and his colleagues have found that people from many
different cultures, even remote ones, accurately recognized the
basic emotions expressed in photographs of facial expressions.
3. Display rules are social and cultural regulations governing
emotional expression, especially facial expressions. Display
rules vary across cultures and for different groups within a
given culture.
4. (Critical Thinking) Emotion in nonhuman animals?
a. Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits,
motives, emotions, or behaviors to nonhuman animals or
inanimate objects.
b. Animals clearly demonstrate diverse emotions—fear,
anger, surprise. But, to understand how they subjectively
experience such feelings raises questions that cannot be
fully answered at this time.
VI. Theories of Emotion: Explaining Emotion
A. The James–Lange Theory of Emotion: Do You Run Because
You’re Afraid? Or Are You Afraid Because You Run?
1. American psychologist William James and Danish
psychologist Carl Lange proposed a similar theory at about the
same time, a theory now known as the James–Lange theory of
emotion.
2. The James–Lange theory holds that emotions arise from the
perception of body changes. James believed that emotion
followed this sequence:
a. We perceive a stimulus;
b. physiological and behavioral changes occur, which
c. we experience as a particular emotion.
3. Walter Cannon challenged the James–Lange theory,
criticizing it on several grounds.
a. Cannon pointed out that bodily reactions are similar
for many emotions, yet our subjective experience of
various emotions is very different.
b. Cannon argued that our emotional reaction to a
stimulus is often faster than our physiological reaction.
c. Artificially inducing physiological changes does not
necessarily produce a related emotional experience.
d. James had proposed that if a person were cut off from
feeling body changes, he would not experience true
emotions. Studies of people with spinal cord injuries do
not support this idea.
4. New research provides support for the James–Lange theory.
a. Antonio Damasio’s findings—that each basic emotion
produced a distinct pattern of brain activity and that these
changes occurred before they were interpreted as an
emotion—support the theory.
b. Support is also provided by research on the facial
feedback hypothesis—the view that expressing a
specific emotion, especially facially, causes the
subjective experience of that emotion.
(1) When people mimic the facial expressions
characteristic of a given emotion, they tend to
report feeling that emotion.
(2) The basic explanation for this is that the facial
muscles send feedback signals to the brain, which
uses the information to activate and regulate
emotional experience.
B. Cognitive Theories of Emotion
1. The two-factor theory of emotion is Stanley Schachter and
Jerome Singer’s theory that emotion is the result of the
interaction of physiological arousal and the cognitive label that
we use to explain the arousal. This theory stimulated a lot of
research, but it received little support.
2. The cognitive-mediational theory of emotion, developed by
Richard Lazarus, asserts that emotions result from the
cognitive appraisal of a situation’s effect on personal wellbeing.
a. According to Lazarus, all other components of
emotion, including physiological arousal, follow the
initial cognitive appraisal.
b. Some critics of this theory argue that emotional
reactions to a stimulus or event are virtually
instantaneous—too rapid to allow for the process of
cognitive appraisal. They suggest that we feel
first and think later.
c. Complex stimuli must be cognitively appraised before
an emotion is generated. For simple stimuli, emotional
responses (e.g., fear) can be virtually instantaneous,
bypassing conscious consideration.
VII. Application: Turning Your Goals into Reality
Psychological research has identified strategies for getting motivated,
acting, and achieving goals.
A. Self-Efficacy: Optimistic Beliefs About Your Capabilities
1. Self-efficacy is the degree to which you are convinced of
your ability to effectively meet the demands of a particular
situation.
2. Two strategies for strengthening self-efficacy are
a. mastery experiences—experiencing success at
moderately challenging tasks in which you have to
overcome obstacles and persevere—and
b. social modeling or observational learning—observing
and imitating the behavior of someone who is already
competent at the task you want to master.
B. Implementation Intentions: Turning Your Goals into Action
Many people have trouble initiating the actions required to fulfill their
goals and then persisting in these behaviors until the goals are
achieved.
1. Form a goal intention: Transform your general intentions into
a specific, concrete, and binding goal.
2. Create implementation intentions: Make a specific plan to
carry out your intended behavior, linking the intended behavior
to specific situational cues.
C. Mental Rehearsal: Visualize the Process
Mentally visualizing yourself in the process of dealing effectively with
a situation can enhance your performance.