Chapter 4

Motivation

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 Explaining Motivation
• Motivation: Factors that direct and energize the behavior of
humans and other organisms
• It has biological, cognitive, and social aspects
• Complex concept
• Studied with a variety of approaches
• All approaches seek to explain the energy that guides behavior in
specific directions

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 Major Approaches to Motivation
• Instinct
• Drive reduction
• Arousal
• Incentive
• Cognitive
• Hierarchy of needs

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 Instinct Approaches: Born to be
Motivated
• Instincts: Inborn patterns of behavior that are biologically
determined rather than learned
• Instinct approaches to motivation: The explanation of motivation
that suggests people and animals are born preprogrammed with
sets of behaviors essential to survival
• Instincts provide the energy driving behavior
• Weaknesses
• Lack of agreement on number of primary instincts; 18-over 5000
• Not all human behavior is instinctual; complex behaviors are learned
• Replaced by newer approaches; however, still play a role in
certain theories, esp those based on evolutionary approaches
focusing on genetic inheritance

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 Drive-Reduction Approaches:
Satisfying Our Needs
• Suggest that a lack of some basic biological need produces a
drive to push an organism to satisfy that need
• Drive: Motivational tension, or arousal, that energizes
behavior to fulfill a need
• Primary drives - Related to biological needs of the body or of the
species as a whole, eg. Sleep, hunger, thirst
• Secondary drives - Related to behavior that fulfills no obvious
biological need, instead prior experience and learning bring
about needs, eg. Strong need for academic and personal
achievement, or attractive appearance
• We satisfy a primary drive by reducing the need underlying it.
Eg. If it is cold, we put on warm clothes

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 Drive-Reduction Approaches: Satisfying Our
Needs
• Homeostasis: Body’s tendency to maintain a steady internal state
underlies primary drives
• Using feedback loops, homeostasis brings deviations in body
(unmet need) functioning back to an optimal state, and operates
the need for food, water, stable body temperature, and sleep
• Limitations:
• Although drive-reduction theories provide a good explanation of how
primary drives motivate behavior, they cannot explain behavior in
which the goal is not to reduce a drive, but rather to maintain or even
increase the level of excited energy
• Both curiosity (eg. rushing to check notifications) or thrill-seeking
behavior (eg. Riding a roller coaster) shed doubt on drive-reduction
approaches as a complete explanation for motivation. In both these
examples, people are motivated to increase their overall level of
stimulation and activity

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 Arousal Approaches: Beyond Drive
Reduction
• Explain behavior in which the goal is to maintain or increase
excitement (stimulation and activity)
• Suggests that if stimulation and activity levels become too
high, individuals try to reduce them (akin to drive-reduction
approaches)…
• But also, if stimulation and activity levels become too low,
we seek out stimulation to increase them
• People vary in the optimal level of excitement they seek out;
some look for especially high levels of stimulation
• Daredevil sportsmen, high-stakes gamblers, and criminals

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 Incentive Approaches: Motivation’s
Pull
• After having a full meal, you still eat dessert because of drive-
reduction or maintenance of stimulation?
• Your eating behavior is motivated by the external stimulus of
the dessert itself, an anticipated reward, an incentive
• Motivation stems from the desire to attain external rewards,
or incentives, be it grades, money, affection, food.

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 Incentive Approaches: Motivation’s
Pull, Limitations
• Combination explanation of motivation
• Internal drives (proposed by drive-reduction theory) to ‘push’
behavior work in tandem with
• External incentives (proposed by incentive theory) to ‘pull’
behavior
• Rather than contradicting each other, drives and incentives
work together in motivating behavior
• Fails to provide complete explanation of motivation as
organisms sometimes seek to fulfill needs even with no
apparent incentives eg. Watching Netflix/YouTube even if
bored from doing so

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 Cognitive approaches to Motivation
• Suggest that motivation is a result of people’s thoughts, beliefs,
expectations, and goals
• Eg. How much a student is motivated to study is based on their
expectation of how much studying will contribute towards getting a
good grade
• Draws distinction between:
• Intrinsic motivation - Causes individuals to participate in an activity for
their own enjoyment, rather than for any actual or concrete reward. Eg.
A student studies a lot because he finds the subject interesting and
stimulating
• Extrinsic motivation - Causes individuals to do something for money, a
grade, or some other actual, concrete reward
• Intrinsic motivation is stronger than extrinsic
• In some cases, extrinsic reward may cause a decline in intrinsic
motivation

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 Maslow’s Hierarchy: Ordering
Motivational Needs
• Places motivational needs in a
hierarchy
• Suggests that before meeting
sophisticated, higher-order
needs, certain primary needs
must be satisfied
• Self-actualization: State of self-
fulfillment in which people
realize their highest potential in
their own way

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 Maslow’s Hierarchy: Ordering
Motivational Needs
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is important because it:
• Highlights the complexity of human needs
• Emphasizes that until basic biological needs are met, people will be
unconcerned about higher-order needs
• Spawned other approaches to motivation, including
• Self-determination theory: People have the three basic needs of
competence (need to produce desired outcomes), autonomy
(perception of control over one’s life), and relatedness (need for
fulfilling relationships)
• However, research has been unable to validate the specific order of
Maslow’s hierarchy

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 Human Needs and Motivation: Eat, Drink,
and Be Daring
• What biological and social factors underlie hunger?
• How are needs relating to achievement, affiliation, and power
motivation exhibited?
• Obesity: Body weight that is more than 20% above the
average weight for a person of a certain height
• Body mass index (BMI) - Based on a ratio of weight to height

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 Biological Factors in the Regulation
of Hunger
• Complex biological mechanisms tell organisms whether they
require food or should stop eating
• Changes in the chemical composition of the blood
• Glucose levels
• Insulin
• Ghrelin
• Hypothalamus
• Monitors glucose levels
• Regulates food intake
• Injury affects the weight set point
• Weight set point: Particular level of weight that the body strives to
maintain
• Metabolism: Rate at which food is converted to energy and
expended by the body
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 Social Factors in Eating
• Societal rules
• Cultural norms
• Individual habits
• Operant conditioning

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 The Roots of Obesity
• Possible factors in obesity
• Oversensitivity to external eating cues
• Insensitivity to internal hunger cues
• Higher weight set points
• Higher level of the hormone leptin
• Fat cells in the body
• Rate of weight gain during the first four months of life is related to
being overweight during later childhood
• Settling point: determined by a combination of genetics and
environmental factors

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 Eating Disorders
• Anorexia nervosa
• Severe eating disorder in which people may refuse to eat while
denying that their behavior and appearance are unusual
• Bulimia
• An eating disorder in which people binge on large quantities of
food, followed by efforts to purge the food through vomiting or
other means
• Factors in eating disorders
• Biological causes, including chemical imbalance, different brain
processing for information about food
• Society’s valuation of slenderness, undesirability of obesity

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 The Need for Achievement: Striving for Success
• Stable, learned characteristic in which a person obtains satisfaction by
striving for and achieving challenging goals
• High nAch seek situations in which they can compete against an
objective standard, eg, grades, money and prove themselves successful
• But people with high need for achievement are selective in picking
challenges; Avoid situations with success coming too easily or unlikely
to come, choose tasks of intermediate difficulty
• People with low achievement motivation tend to be motivated
primarily by a desire to avoid failure
• Seek out tasks in which they are sure to avoid failure; or very difficult tasks
in which failure has no negative implications
• People with a high fear of failure stay away from intermediate tasks
because they may fail where others have succeeded
• Those with a high nAch are more likely to attend college, to receive
higher grades
• High nAch is linked to future economic and occupational success
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 The Need for Affiliation:
Striving for Friendship
• Interest in establishing and maintaining relationships with
other people
• Those with a high need for affiliation want to be with friends
more of the time and alone less often
• Gender is a great determinant of how much time is spent with
friends; females want to spend more time with friends and
less time alone

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 The Need for Power: Striving for Impact on Others
• Tendency to seek impact, control, or influence over others and to
be seen as a powerful individual
• Those with a high need for power are more likely to belong to
organizations and seek office
• They work in professions in which their power needs may be fulfilled,
such as business management and teaching
• Display trappings of power, prestigious possessions such as electronic
equipment and sports cars
• Significant gender differences exist in the display of need for power
• Men with a high need for power are more aggressive, competitive,
extravagant and flamboyant
• Women with a high need for power are more restrained due to societal
constraints, and behave in more socially responsible ways such as
showing concern for others and demonstrating nurturing behavior

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 Understanding Emotional
Experiences
• What are emotions, and how do we experience them?
• What are the functions of emotions?
• What are the explanations for emotions?
• How does nonverbal behavior relate to the expression of
emotions?

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 Understanding Emotional
Experiences
• Emotions: Feelings that generally have both physiological (eg. Heart rate
increases) and cognitive elements (understand and evaluate what is
happening) that influence behavior
• It is possible to experience emotion without cognitive elements, eg. We
may react with fear or suspicion when coming in contact with an erratic or
unpredictable person without cognitive awareness or understanding of
what makes that person dubious; We fear cockroaches knowing fully well
they pose no physical threat
• Two system theories
• One system governs emotional response, another governs cognitive reactions
to emotional response
• Some suggest: we first experience an emotional response, later try to make sense
of it, eg. We react emotionally to a song without knowing why
• Others suggest: we develop cognitions about a situation, then react emotionally,
eg. We realize that a song’s lyrics relate to what we have experienced and then
emotionally react to it
• Perhaps the sequence varies from situation to situation
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 The Functions of Emotions
• What is we didn’t experience emotion?
• No despair, depression, remorse.
• Nor any happiness, joy or love.
1. Preparing us for action, eg. Seeing an angry parent would make
you react emotionally with fear and propel you towards
studying!
2. Shaping our future behavior: Emotions promote learning of
appropriate responses, eg. The embarrassment of a lame joke
going unappreciated will make you refrain from cracking lame
jokes in the future
3. Helping us interact more effectively with others: We
communicate our emotions verbally and non-verbally to others,
which makes it easier for them to understand and expect certain
behaviors from us in the future

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 Determining the Range of
Emotions: Labeling Our Feelings
• There are over 500 words to describe emotions
• Psychologists are challenged to identify important, fundamental
emotions and have come up with their own lists
• Most researchers suggest that basic emotions are:
• Happiness
• Anger
• Fear
• Sadness
• Disgust
• Cultural differences in description of emotions:
• German Schadenfreude: feeling of pleasure over another person’s
difficulty
• Tahiti musu: feeling of reluctance to yield to unreasonable demands
by one’s parents

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 Determining the Range of
Emotions: Labeling Our Feelings
• Broader list of emotions include:
• Surprise
• Contempt
• Guilt
• Joy

• Figure 1: Hierarchy of Emotions

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 The Roots of Emotions
• The James-Lange theory of Emotions
• Emotional experience is a reaction to bodily events occurring as a result of
an external situation or environmental event
• We experience emotions as a result of physiological changes that produce
specific sensations, which the brain interprets as emotions
• For every major emotion there is an accompanying physiological or gut
reaction of internal organs, called ‘visceral experience’
• We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we
tremble
• Drawbacks
• Visceral changes would have to occur relatively quickly, eg. If a stranger
approaches us with a gun, we feel fear instantaneously; but when waiting for
our turn to give a presentation to an audience, the fear builds up slowly
• Physiological arousal does not invariably produce emotional experience, ie.
Visceral changes by themselves are not sufficient to produce emotions. Eg.
Your heart beats faster and you sweat after climbing four floors of stairs but
don’t connect it to any emotion
• Internal organs produce a relatively limited range of sensations eg. Your heart
rate increases when you are thrilled and even when you are frightened
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 The Roots of Emotions (contd.)
• The Cannon-Bard theory of emotions
• Physiological arousal and emotional experience are produced
simultaneously by the same stimulus
• Rejects the view that physiological arousal alone leads to the
perception of emotion
• After we perceive an emotion-producing stimulus, the
thalamus is the initial site of the emotional response, which
ultimately produces a visceral response
• Limitations:
• Now we know that emotional responses are produced in the
hypothalamus and limbic system, not thalamus
• Simultaneous occurrence of physiological and emotional
responses have yet to be proven conclusively

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 The Roots of Emotions
• The Schachter-Singer theory
• Supports a cognitive view of emotions
• We identify the emotions we are experiencing by observing
our environment and comparing ourselves with others
• Emotions are determined jointly by (1) a nonspecific kind of
physiological arousal and (2) its interpretation based on
environmental cues
• Research supports that we may look to our surrounding to
determine the source of physiological arousal

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 Figure 2: Comparison of the Three Models

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 The Roots of Emotions (contd.)
• Contemporary perspectives
on the neuroscience of
emotions
• Different emotions produce
activation of different
portions of the brain
• Amygdala plays an
important role in the
experience of emotions
• Provides a link between the • Emotion-related stimuli can be
perception of an emotion- processed and responded to
producing stimulus and the
recall of that stimulus later
almost instantly
• Eg. If you got very scared by
watching a horror movie,
the next time you watch
another horror movie, you
will react with fear
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Identify
these
emotions

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 Do People in All Cultures Express Emotion Similarly?
• People across cultures express emotions similarly. How is it possible when
people from two very different and distant cultures could not have learned
to produce and recognize similar emotions?
• Facial-affect program present at birth
• Activation of a set of nerve impulses that make the face display the appropriate
expression
• Each emotion produces a unique set of muscular movements, forming
expressions
• The importance of facial expression in emotion is expressed through…
• Facial-feedback hypothesis
• Hypothesis that facial expressions not only reflect emotional experience but also
help determine how people experience and label emotions
• ‘Wearing’ an emotional expression provides muscular feedback to the brain that
helps produce an emotion matching the expression, eg. Smiling activates
muscles which sends a message to the brain indicating the experience of
happiness, if it is missing in the environment
• Some psychologist suggest that if no facial expression is present, emotion cannot
be felt

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