Chapter 9: Motivation and Emotion

Chapter 9: Motivation and Emotion How Does Motivation Activate, Direct, and Sustain Behaviour? - Motivation: factors that energize, direct, or sustain behaviour o Energizing because they activate or arouse behaviours –they cause animals to do something; ex. Desire for fitness might motivate you to get up and go for a run on a cold morning o Directive –they guide behaviour toward satisfying specific goals or specific needs, ex. Hunger motivates eating, thirst motives drinking, pride motivates studying hard for exams o Motivational states help people persist in their behaviour until goals are achieved or needs are satisfied, hunger gnaws at you until you find something to eat; a desire to win drives you to practice foul shots until you succeed o Motives differ in strength, depending on internal and external factors Multiple Factors Motivate Behaviour - Need: state of biological or social deficiency - Need hierarchy: Maslow’s arrangement of needs, in which basic survival (food and water) needs must be met before people can satisfy higher needs - Maslow’s theory is an example of humanistic psychology, viewing people as striving toward personal fulfillment - Self-actualization: a state that is achieved when one’s personal dreams and aspirations have been attained Drives and Incentives - Needs creates arousal, which motivates behaviour - Arousal: physiological activation, such as increased brain activity, autonomic responses, sweating, or muscle tension - Drive: psychological state that motivates an organism to satisfy its needs - Homoeostasis: the tendency for bodily functions to maintain equilibrium - Similarly, the human body regulates a set-point of around 37. When people are too warm or too cold, brain mechanisms, particularly the hypothalamus, initiate responses such as sweating (too cool the body) or shivering (to warm the body) - The drive state creates arousal, which encourages you to do something to reduce the drive, such as having a late-night snack - Over time, if a behaviour consistently reduces a drive, it becomes a habit; the likelihood that a behaviour will occur is due to drive and habit - Incentives: external stimuli (as opposed to internal drives) that motivate behaviours; getting good grade on exam is an incentive for studying hard; the comforting, sweet taste of the pumpkin pie is an incentive for eating 2 pieces, having money to buy a car or help pay your tuition is an incentive for working during summer vacation Arousal and Performance - The Yerkes-Dodson Law: according to this law, performance increases with arousal until an optimal point, after which arousal interferes with performance; students perform best on exams when feeling moderate anxiety - we are motivated to seek an optimal level of arousal, the level of arousal we most prefer - too little, and we are bored; too much, and we are overwhelmed Pleasure - Freud, proposed that drives are satisfied according to the pleasure principle, which drives people to seek pleasure and avoid pain Some Behaviours Are Motivated for Their Own Sake - Extrinsic motivation: motivation to perform an activity because of the external goals toward which that activity is directed; ex. Working to earn a paycheck - Intrinsic motivation: motivation to perform an activity because of the value or pleasure associated with that activity, rather than for an apparent external goal or purpose; ex. Listening to music, solving crossword puzzles, or listening to music, they are simply enjoyable - Creativity is the tendency to generate ideas or alternatives that may be useful in solving problems, communicating, and entertaining ourselves and others; although many creative pursuits are not adaptive solutions, creativity is an important factors in solving adaptive problems Rewarding Intrinsic Motives - Rewarding behaviours increase in frequency - You might expect that rewarding intrinsically motivated behaviours would reinforce them - Study: during a subsequent freeplay period, children who were expecting an extrinsic reward spent much less time playing with the pens than did the children who were never rewarded or the children who received an unexpected reward - The first group of children responded as though it was their job to draw with the coloured pens: Why would they play with them for free when they were used to being paid? - Psychological reactance is a motivational state aroused when our feelings of personal freedom are threatened o In general, when another person tells you not to do or have something, does htat very something become more desirable? o often we act in ways to regain that freedom, trying to obtain whatever is being withheld. Self-Determination Theory & Self-Perception Theory - self-determination theory: people are motivated to satisfy needs for competence, relatedness to others, and autonomy, which is a sense of personal control o argues that extrinsic rewards may reduce intrinsic value because such rewards undermine people’s feeling that they are choosing to do something for themselves o feelings of autonomy and competence make people feel good about themselves and inspire them to do their most creative work - self-perception theory: people seldom are aware of their specific motives and instead draw inferences about their motivations according to what seems to make the most sense o rewarding people for engaging in an intrinsic activity, but, gives them an alternative explanation for engaging in it: not because the behaviour is fun, but because of the reward. Therefore, without the reward. They have no reason to engage in the behaviour. The reward has replaced the goal of pure pleasure People Set Goals to Achieve - A goal is a desired outcome, usually associated with some specific object (such as tasty food) or some future behavioural intention (such as getting into medical school) - Self-regulation of behaviour is the process by which people alter or change their behaviour to attain personal goals - Challenging goals encourage, but not overly difficult –and specific goals are best - Challenging goals encourage effort, persistence, and concentration - In contrast, goals that are too easy or too hard can undermine motivation and therefore lead to failure - Focusing on concrete, short-term goals facilitates achieving long-term goals Self-Efficacy and Achievement Motivation - Self-efficacy: is the expectancy that your efforts will lead to success; this belief helps to mobilize your energies - Achievement motive: is the desire to do well relative to standards of excellence o Those high in achievement need set challenging but attainable goals; those low in achievement need often set extremely easy or impossibly high goals Delayed Gratification - Once common challenge in self-regulation is postponing immediate gratification in pursuit of long-term goals - Transcending immediate temptations to achieve long-term goals - Children able to delay gratification at age 4 were rated 10 years later as being more socially competent and better able to handle frustration - The ability to delay gratification in childhood has been found to predict higher SAT scores and better school grades - Most successful strategy involved turning hot cognitions (tasty marshmallows) into cold cognitions (neutral clouds) o Involves mentally transforming the desired object into something undesired; children reported imagining a tempting pretzel as a brown log o Hot cognitions focus on the rewards, pleasurable aspects of objects, whereas cold cognitions focus on conceptual or symbolic meanings People Have a Need to Belong - Need to belong theory: the need for interpersonal attachments is a fundamental motive that has evolved for adaptive purposes Making and Keeping Friends - Not belonging to a group increases a person’s risk for various adverse consequences, such as illnesses and premature death - Such ill effects suggest that the need to belong is a basic motive driving behaviour, just as hunger drives people to seek food and avoid dying from starvation - Researchers found that students who autonomously chose to spend time alone reported lower levels of loneliness than did students who preferred not to be alone or were forced by circumstances to be alone - The take-home message is that just as a lack of food causes hunger, a lack of social contact causes emptiness and despair Anxiety and Affiliation - Feeling anxious makes people want to be with others o Results: the participants who were told the shocks would be painful (the high- anxiety condition) were much more likely to want to wait with others o Conclusion: increased anxiety led to increased motivation to be with others, at least for females - High-anxiety participants wanted to wait only with other high-anxiety participants, not with people who supposedly were waiting just to see their research supervisors - So misery loves miserable company, not just any company - Social comparison theory: we are motivated to have accurate information about ourselves and others; we compare ourselves with those around us to test and validate personal beliefs and emotional responses, especially when the situation is ambiguous and we can compare ourselves with people relatively similar to us What Determines How We Eat? - Common sense dictates that most eating is controlled by hunger and satiety Time and Taste Play Roles - we eat not because we have deficient energy stores but because we have been classically conditioned to associate eating with regular mealtimes - the clock indicating mealtime is much like Pavlov’s metronome –it leads to various anticipatory response that motivate eating behaviour and prepare the body for digestion - rats presented with a variety of high-calorie foods gained much more weight than rats that were give only one type of food - one reason rats and people eat more when presented with a variety of foods is that they quickly grow tired of any one flavor - sensory-specific satiety: is the phenomenon in which animals will stop eating relatively quickly if they have just one type of food to eat, but they will eat more if presented with a different type of food o may be advantageous because animals that eat many types of food are more likely to satisfy nutritional requirements and thus to survive than are those that reply on a small number of foods o eating large meals may have been adaptive when the food supply was scarce or unpredictable Culture Determines What We Eat - what people will eat is determined by a combination of personal experience and cultural beliefs - generally, familiarity determines food preferences - avoidance of unfamiliar foods is an example of neophobia, the fear of novel things o this behaviour makes sense because unfamiliar foods may be dangerous or poisonous, so avoiding them is adaptive for survival o children will much more likely to eat a new food offered by their mothers than the same food offered by a friendly stranger - local norms for what to eat and how to prepare it –guidelines called cuisine –reinforce many food preferences - culturally transmitted food preferences powerfully affect what foods people eat Multiple Neural Processes Control Eating - hypothalamus is brain structure that most influences eating - damage to this dramatically changes eating behaviour and body weight - Scientific method: relationship between the hypothalamus and eating o Hypothesis: damage to the hypothalamus affects eating behaviour and body weight o Results: Damage to the VMH caused rats to eat large quantities of food, leading to extreme obesity o Damage to the LH causes diminished eating, leading to weight loss and eventual death o Conclusion: damage to the hypothalamus produces dramatic changes in eating and body weight - Region of prefrontal cortex processes taste cues such as sweetness and saltiness; appears to process information about the potential reward value of food - Craving triggered by see good-tasting food is associated with activity in the limbic system, which is the main brain region involved in reward - Damage to limbic system or the right frontal loves sometimes produces gourmand syndrome, in which people become obsessed with fine food and food preparation  they are not obsessed with eating but quality and variety of the food itself, food’s reward properties Internal Sensations - Stomach contractions and distensions are relatively minor determinants of hunger and eating - Eating a small amount of food stops stomach contractions, but usually leads people to eat more - Explanations for hungry: glucostatic theory: which proposes that the bloodstream is monitored for its glucose levels. Because glucose is the primary fuel for metabolism and is especially crucial for neuronal activity, it makes sense for animals to be sensitive to deficiencies in glucose - Lipostatic theory: a set-point for body fat in which deviations from the set-point initiate compensatory behaviours to return to homeostasis. For instance, when an animal loses body fat, hunger signals motivate eating and a return to the set-point - Hormone leptin is involved in fat regulation o Released from fat cells as more fat is stored o Travels to hypothalamus, where it acts to inhibit eating behaviour o Acts slowly so it takes considerable time after eating before leptin levels change the body o May be more important for long-term body fat regulation than for short-term eating control o Might also influence reward properties of food and make it less appetizing, so may have short-term effects o Animals lacking the gene necessary to produce leptin become extremely obese and that injecting leptin into these animals leads to a rapid loss of body fat - Ghrelin, seem to affect eating o Originates in the stomach and surges before meals; it then decreases after people eat and may play an important role in triggering eating o When people lose weight, an increase in ghrelin motivates additional eating in a homeostatic fashion What Factors Motivates Sexual Behaviour? Biological Factors Influence Sexual Behaviour - Sexual response cycle: a pattern of physiological responses during sexual activity (diagram pg. 407) o Excitement phase: people contemplate sexual activity or begin in engaging in behaviours such as kissing and touching in a sensual manner; people report feelings of arousal o Plateau phase: pulse rate, breathing, and blood pressure increase, as do the various other signs of arousal; inhibitions are lifted and passion takes control o Orgasm phase: involuntary muscle contractions throughout the body, dramatic increases in breathing and heart rate, o Resolution phase: female response is more variable than the male response Hormones - Involved in producing and terminating sexual behaviours - Influence sexual behaviour through: o physical development of the brain and body; in the developmental phase of puberty, hormone levels increase throughout the body and stimulate physical chances –the development secondary sexual characteristics o motivation; they activate reproductive behaviour; males have a greater quantity of androgens than females do, and females have a greater quantity of estrogens and progesterone o androgens are much more important for reproductive behaviour than estrogens are o for men and women, testosterone –a type of androgen –is involved in sexual functioning o another important hormone is oxytocin, released during sexual arousal; may promote feelings of love and attachment between partners; seems to be involved in social behaviour more generally - hypothalamus most important brain region for stimulating sexual behaviour Neurotransmitters - nitric oxide, critical for sexual behaviour - when this system fails, males cannot maintain an erection; drugs that enhance this system, such as Viagra, have been developed to treat erectile disorders - it is not clear whether such drugs can be used to treat women’s sexual disorders, but they appear to enhance the sexual experience for healthy women Variations Across the Menstrual Cycle - recent evidence indicates that women may process social information differently depending on whether they are in a fertile phase of the cycle - during ovulation, women preferred the more masculine faces - women who were ovulating rated self-assured men as more desirable potential sexual partners, but women who were not ovulating did not Neural Correlates of Viewing Erotica - effect is greatest for men who have higher blood levels of testosterone - men showed more activation of amygdala - men are more likely than woman to report visual erotic stimulation as pleasurable, but this might simply mean that more erotica is produced for men than for women Cultural Scripts and Cultural Rules Shape Sexual Interactions - sexual scripts: are cognitive beliefs about how a sexual episode should be enacted; for instance, the sexual scripts indicates who should makes the first move, whether the other person should resist, the sequence of sexual acts, and even how the partners should act afterward Double Standards Sex Differences in Sexual Motives - consistent finding in nearly all measures of sexual desire is that men, on average, have higher level of sexual motivation than women do –allowing for many individual exceptions - erotic plasticity: refers to the extent that sex drive can be shaped by social, cultural, and situational factors; women have higher erotic plasticity - sexual strategies theory: evolutionary theory that suggests men and women rank the importance of qualities in their relationship partners differently because of fender-specific adaptive problems o because having offspring is a much more intensive commitment for women, they likely are more cautious about having sex Mating Strategies Differ between the Sexes - men are more concerned with appearance and women are more concerned with status - Women who view themselves as very attractive appear to want it all –status and good looks - In one study: men and women reported kindness and intelligence as necessary in their selection of mates, but their views of status and attractiveness differed. For the average woman seeking a long-term mate, status was a necessity and good looks were a luxury. in contrast, men viewed physical attractiveness as a necessity rather than a luxury in mate selection - Human behaviour emerges to solve adaptive problems and to some degree the modern era introduces new adaptive challenges based on societal standards of conduct. These standards shape the context in which men and women view sexual behaviour as desirable and appropriate People Differ in Sexual Orientation - Evolutionary theory: lesbians and gays often act as “spare” parents to their siblings’ offspring, and unreliable evidence suggest they are sensi