I. Introduction: Motivation and Emotion A. Motivation refers to the biological, emotional, cognitive, or social forces that activate and direct

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1 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

2 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.

3 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

4 (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.

5 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.

6 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.

7 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.

8 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.

9 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

10 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.

11 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.

12 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.

13 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.