Week 3 – Emotion and Motivation

Lecture 1
Motivation and Emotion
- Closely related concepts
o Both originate from Latin word movere
o Relationship between them Is complex
o Our emotions motivate us, and our motives being gratified and thwarted can
lead us to feel emotions

What is motivation?
- To be moved to do something
- 2 components – what people want to do (goals) and how strongly they want to do it
(intensity)
- Motivation – goal-directed behaviour
o Goals can be proximal (close/stepping stone goals) or distal (the endpoint
goal)

Motives
- Needs, wants, interests and desires
- E.g. I eat because I’m hungry and I sleep because I’m tired
- Came be biological, social or a combination

Theories of Motivation
- Drive Reduction Theory
o Behavioural perspective
o Push theory – our internal physiology pushes us to behave in certain ways –
to keep a balanced system essential to our survival
 Homeostasis – a tendency of the body to maintain itself in a state of
balance or equilibrium
o Attempts to restore balance/tension to the body
o Primary and secondary drives
 Primary – innate drive; biological motived (e.g. food, drink, sex)
 Secondary – become drivers through conditioning (e.g. money)
o Can’t fully explain when we get hungry without being physically hungry
- Incentive theory
o Pull theory – external ‘pull’ people in certain directions
o Motivated by an attractive incentive – external stimulus or reward and
avoiding punishment
o Conditioning – motivated to behave in ways that have been rewarded and to
avoid behaving in ways that have been punished
o Pushed by expectation of an outcome from a behaviour
- Self-determination theory
o Motivated by need to make our own choices and control our own lives
 Autonomy – idea that we can be in control of our life
 Relatedness – affiliation and relationships with others
 Competence – feeling that when you do something, it has an effect
  When these three conditions are met, you are maximally motivated
o Types of motivation
 Intrinsic – comes from within; driven by interests; doing something
because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable (no tangible reward)
 Extrinsic – external to the individual; doing something because it leads
to a separable outcome (reward) – can undermine intrinsic
motivations – e.g. rewards and punishments
- Humanistic – Maslow
o Humans are motivated towards personal growth and ‘self-actualisation’ –
realising one’s full potential
o Proposed a hierarchy of human motives
o Basic needs – higher level needs at the top
o Can get stuck at one level e.g. life becomes revolved around securing food
and shelter and other basic level needs – can sometimes move back down in
life circumstances change
- Evolutionary theories – Darwin
o Certain behaviours which have allowed our species to survive and reproduce
have been selected over time – natural selection
o Motives which have helped us adapt to our environment have been selected
for
o Motives are instinctual – innate
o We evolved to care about others in our gene pool and protect them (inclusive
fitness)

Motivation and eating

- Biological explanations
o Neural pathways in the brain regulate hunger – involves he hypothalamus
which is said to regulate homeostasis
o Lateral hypothalamus (the sides/outside) – on button for hunger
o Ventromedial hypothalamus (the middle) – off button for hunger
- Environmental factors
o Food is readily available for us in comparison to our ancestors
o Tastes good
o Lots of variety
o Relatively inexpensive – fast food in comparison to fresh food
- Learned habits
o Culture and exposure to food has a big impact on our eating behaviour – food
practices are included in definitions of culture; religion and food;
modelled/reinforced behaviour from parents and others
o Influence – type of food you eat; when you eat; how much you eat – more in
presence of others, more when others are eating more
- Psychological factors
o Stress – link between stress and eating in humans and animals
o Link between feeling good/bad and eating – leads to emotional eating; eating
to distract/nullify negative mental states
o Personality characteristics
 o Body image and social ideals
 Women – thinness equated with attractiveness
 Men – strength/masculinity in appearance

Sexual Motivation
- Biological
o Physiological processes important for sexual motivation
o Hypothalamus
 Produces hormones which are secreted by pituitary gland
 Testosterone and oestrogen/progesterone
 Hormones have activational effects – desire and behaviour
- Cultural/Environmental
o Learned ‘scripts’ (implicit rules) for what is acceptable and attractive
influences motivation
o Premarital sex
o Clothing ‘rules’
o What is regulated as proper, moral and desirable varies considerable across
cultures and over time
- Psychological
o E.g. desire for intimacy and attachment
o Relieve stress
o Express love
o Prove desirability
o Peer pressure
o Thoughts/fantasies

Lecture 2
What is emotion?
- William James in 1884 – first to ask question
o Remains mainly undefined – many different definitions
o Dozens of suggestions offered
- Can rule our daily lives
- Make decisions based of our emotions
- Determines activities we engage in
- Can be pleasant and unpleasant
- 3 key elements of emotion which are widely accepted
o Subjective experience – cognitive appraisal of events
 Emotions require a stimulus or trigger – future and past events
 Personal and subjective
 Affective forecasting - Sometimes what we expect to occur at an
event doesn’t happen – not great at always correctly appraising our
emotions – predictions of our emotions are surprisingly inaccurate
o Physiological response
 The fight or flight response – prepares the body for a response
 Have a bodily response to stress even if we know we are not in
immediate danger
 o Behavioural response
 Studies on facial cues identifies 6 fundamental emotions (happiness,
anger, fear, surprise, anger and disgust)
 People instructed to contract their facial muscles to mimic facial
expressions experiences these emotions to some degree – e.g. forces
smiling
 Facial expressions that accompany emotions are largely innate – don’t
learn them from watching other people; also no cultural differences in
facial expressions – spontaneously have them not from observation
- Overlapping terms
o Emotions – limited duration and serve adaptive function (try to tell us
something); involve cognitive appraisal, distinctive physiological or
neurological patterns, and subjective feeling
 Emotional states share 4 common features
1. Triggered by external or internal eliciting stimuli
2. Cognitive appraisal of these stimuli – attribute meaning and
significance to the stimuli
3. Physiological response – fight or flight
4. Behavioural expression
 Last 3 make up the ‘three components of emotion’
o Affect – difficult to define, often used synonymously with emotion; subjective
feeling – positive or negative; research generally groups emotions together to
reflect positive and negative affect
o Mood – involved more durable feeling states; emotion defining attributed
such as facial expressions and specific physiological patterns are absent; not
attributable to certain stimuli like emotions do
Neuropsychology of emotion
- Three particularly important areas
o Hypothalamus – link in circuit which converts emotional signals into
automatic and endocrine responses
o Limbic system – amygdala plays central role in linking sensory stimuli with
feelings
o Cortex – allows assessment of whether stimulus is safe or not, interpretation
of meaning or peripheral responses and regulation of facial expressions
 -

How good are we at perceiving emotions?

- Culture and emotion
o Some emotions go unrecognised in non-western cultures – e.g. remorse,
depression and anxiety go unrecognised in some cultures
o Variation is emotion display across cultures – norms that regulate the
appropriate expression of emotions – e.g. Japanese culture emphasises the
suppression of negative emotions in public
o Cross-cultural similarities – mainly for the 6 main emotions
- Culture and facial expressions
o Cross-cultural studies identified the main 6 emotions were most widely
recognised across cultures
o Display rules – emotional displays considered appropriate within a particular
culture
- Gender and emotion
o Women
 Experience more intense emotional states
 Are better able to read emotional cues in others – higher emotional
intelligence
 Tend to express emotions more intensely and openly than men
o Gender differences in emotional expression may reflect differing socialisation
patterns

Theories of emotion
- Somatic
 o James-Lange theory – different patterns of arousal leads to the expression of
different emotions
o Cannon-Bard theory – stimulus triggers brain activations; subjective feeling
and arousal are experienced simultaneously
o

- Cognitive
o Schachter’s two-factor theory – interpretation (appraisal) of cognitive arousal
leads to emotions
 Individuals don’t limit themselves to the present situation
 Useful in therapy
o

- Evolutionary
o Human emotions – product of evolution
o Innate facial expressions lends favour to this theory – emotions evolved
before thought/consciousness
o Provide adaptive value – pleasant and unpleasant emotions

Differences in recognising emotions

- Autism
o Difficulties in social interaction
o Lack of demonstrated empathy
o Non-verbal behaviours – e.g. eye contact
o Emotional reciprocity
 o Difficulty expressing and recognising emotions
- Proxemics – study of personal space
o Hall – 4 levels of distance – suggested that physical distance directly
correlated with emotional distance between two individuals
 Public (7.6m)
 Social (3.7m)
 Personal (1.2)
 Intimate (45cm)