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Psychology, 5/e Wortman, Loftus & Weaver | |||||
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Psychology, 5/e Wortman, Loftus & Weaver | |||||
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Motivation can be defined as those factors that arouse, sustain, and direct behavior toward the attainment of some goal.
Darwin’s theory of evolution prompted humans to view themselves as part of the animal world. It was this tradition that led William McDougall to propose in 1908 that humans possessed a variety of biologically based instincts (innate forces which direct behavior in predictable ways) that served as motivators. However, such instinct-oriented theories soon lost popularity because thousands of instincts were identified. Also, the popularity of behaviorism in the mid-twentieth century, with its emphasis on learning, for a time produced a decline of interest in instincts, but recently the importance of instincts is reemerging. For example, the new field of evolutionary psychology focuses on the genetic basis of the range of human and animal behaviors, and accounts for social interactions by applying the principles of evolution. One application of evolutionary psychology is sociobiology, or the study of the adaptive significance of inherited tendencies.
Freud proposed that all human instincts could be categorized as one of two instincts--the urge for individual and species survival, and the tendency toward death. These two continually conflict. Also, some instinctive drives conflict with moral standards and are pushed into the unconscious through a process called repression. But although repressed, these impulses can still direct behavior, and are sometimes translated into a more socially acceptable form. This process is called sublimation and is responsible for creating a civilized society.
Drive-reduction theories define a primary drive (for example, hunger) as a biological need. Secondary drives (such as curiosity), which are also called learned motives, are learned from their association with primary drives. Both primary and secondary drives motivate the organism to perform some behavior that will reduce the drive state. Clark Hull believed that drives increase the organism’s activity level, thus increasing its chances of satisfying the drive.
Drive-reduction theorists, however, had trouble explaining behavior that was not aimed at reducing primary drives. Researchers found that animals were strongly motivated to explore and manipulate objects in their environments. Moreover, Robert White argued that humans and other animals experience intrinsic motivation--satisfaction from acting competently.
Some psychologists have argued that arousal of an organism can play a role in motivation. Optimal arousal theory suggests that humans are motivated to maintain a comfortable level of arousal. Optimal arousal theory helps explain the Yerkes-Dodson law, which states that performance is best when arousal or stimulation is not too high, and not too low.
Most psychologists agree that both biological and unconscious motivators influence our lives. Although biological motivators are important in survival and reproduction, they do not explain certain behaviors which do not satisfy any primary or secondary drives. The unconscious motivators described by Freud may well influence our lives, but these motivators are difficult to measure because they consist of forgotten events of early childhood.
The motivation to reproduce is extremely powerful. Darwin argued that the success of a species was defined by its ability to survive and reproduce, thereby passing on characteristics to future generations.
Hormones are the major influence in the sexual behavior of lower animals. Female rats are sexually responsive only when their ovaries are secreting high levels of estrogen. Women, in contrast, are generally sexually responsive throughout their menstrual cycles. In humans, hormones may help initiate sexual responsiveness, but environmental factors play a more significant role in sexual behavior. In men, hormones do play a role in sexual performance and interest, particularly if they are attenuated before adulthood. The role, however, is smaller in humans than in other animals.
Hormones interact with the central nervous system. In the sexual response, the hypothalamus stimulates the anterior pituitary gland to release the hormones that stimulate the secretion of sex hormones by the gonads and the adrenal glands. These sex hormones travel via the bloodstream back to the hypothalamus, where they activate the sexual arousal mechanism.
In addition to hormones, external stimuli (such as taste, smells, and sights) are needed to expand the original arousal into a sexual response.
In the late 1950s, Masters and Johnson published a laboratory analysis of sexual behavior based on observation of the sexual behavior of 700 people. The sexual response cycle is composed of four stages for both men and women. During the excitement stage, breathing, heart rate, and muscle tension increase as arousal begins. Blood rushes to the genital organs. During the plateau stage, the penis is maximally erect and the vagina further lubricated. During the orgasmic stage, muscles in the pelvic region and around the anus contract rhythmically. These contractions in men expel semen. The resolution stage involves the return to pre-arousal physiological levels.
Masters and Johnson have also identified a number of sexual dysfunctions--persistent or recurring problems with sexual activity. Men may have erectile failure, an inability to achieve or maintain an erection. In cases of primary erectile failure, the man has never been able to have an erection; secondary erectile failure involves difficulty with erections in only some situations. Premature ejaculation describes a condition in which ejaculation occurs too quickly. Inhibited ejaculation occurs when the man is unable to ejaculate during sex. Women may have vaginismus, involuntary muscle spasms in the vagina, making intercourse painful or impossible. Orgasmic dysfunction refers to the inability to experience orgasm. Primary orgasmic dysfunction refers to cases in which orgasm is never experienced; secondary orgasmic dysfunction involves cases where the woman experiences orgasm sometimes, but not during sexual intercourse or not with her primary sexual partner.
Therapy for sexual dysfunctions usually involves first sensual exercises, and then gradually more sexual activities are introduced. Many of these problems occur in normal people occasionally; they become dysfunctions only when they are persistent and upsetting.
Because many sexual dysfunctions have no physiological basis, but instead are psychologically caused, the mind must play a powerful role in human sexuality. Studies have shown that men and women frequently fantasize about sex during and outside sexual activity. Because the mind is so important in human sexuality, some psychologists have suggested models of sexual arousal which emphasize cognitive processes.
David Watson and Lee Ann Clark have proposed that emotion has three essential components, First, an emotion usually involves some kind of expression, usually a facial expression. Second, emotions are usually accompanied by certain physiological changes, such as a change in heart rate. Third, emotions typically involve a subjective state or feeling, such as fear.
The somatic nervous system is important in expressing emotions, such as making facial expressions. Strong emotion is associated with the autonomic nervous system. This system works quite automatically and regulates the body’s internal environment. It is composed of the sympathetic division, which generally functions in emergency situations, and the parasympathetic division, which dominates during periods of relaxation.
If you were placed in an emotion-arousing situation, your sympathetic nervous system would be activated and you could expect to experience physical changes such as these:
a. Blood flows away from the internal organs to carry nutrients and oxygen to the skeletal muscles.
b. The pancreas secretes glucagon, which stimulates the liver to release sugar (energy) into the bloodstream, and the adrenals secrete epinephrine.
c. Breathing becomes deeper and faster, and the bronchioles expand.
d. Heart rate increases.
e. Eye pupils dilate, and visual sensitivity increases.
f. Sweat glands increase their activity.
g. Hair on the body stands up.
Once the threatening situation is over, the parasympathetic nervous system begins to return the body back to its normal, relaxed state.
Changes in emotional state can be detected by a machine called a polygraph. The polygraph can include such measures as the EDA (electrodermal activity which measures how sweaty the skin is), the EKG (electrocardiogram which measures heart rate), the pneumograph (which measures respiration), blood pressure, the EMO (electromyogram which measures muscle movement), and the EEG (electroencephalogram which records brain activity). The polygraph reveals the stress a person is likely to experience when he or she is lying. In fact, the device is often called a lie detector. Polygraphs can no longer be used in private industry to screen employees, but sometimes are used in criminal cases, even though polygraph evidence may not be allowed in court. The federal government uses polygraphs to test employees for honesty and to check their integrity in handling classified material.
Polygraphs can produce error in two ways: causing us to believe a lie, at which they are quite good, and causing us to not believe the truth, at which they are not so good.
Emotions are coordinated in the brain primarily by the hypothalamus and the limbic system. Stimulation of the hypothalamus has been shown to elicit an emotional response; lesions in the amygdala (part of the limbic system) inhibit emotionality. Damage to the limbic system can also produce violent behavior. The cerebral cortex is involved in emotions: the left frontal cortex is associated with positive emotions, whereas the right hemisphere is linked to more negative emotions. Studies also show that depressed people show more right hemisphere activity than do nondepressed people.
Messages can be communicated nonverbally through facial expressions, body movements, and voice intonation. Heredity and environment are both important in the development of nonverbal communication. Charles Darwin suggested that human nonverbal behaviors evolved because at one time they had survival value. Nonverbal expressions of several basic emotions can be correctly identified by people from diverse cultures, thereby supporting Darwin’s view that nonverbal communication, because it evolved through functional requirements, is the same in all cultures. Felt action tendencies, or "motivational urges," distinguish emotions from mere feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness. They also distinguish emotions from each other: fear and anger are both unpleasant but involve quite different action tendencies (withdrawal and attack, respectively).
The influence of environment on nonverbal communication is shown by individual and cultural differences. Different cultures score differently on the PONS (Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity), which measures ability to decode nonverbal messages. The highest scores are obtained by people from cultures similar to that of the United States, and women score higher than men on the PONS. In addition, adult women are more expressive than men, although this gender difference is absent in children. When people are asked to make facial expressions that mimic an emotion without knowing the significance of the expression, they experience the physiological effects associated with the emotion they mimicked.
Nonverbal channels of communication are apparently more difficult to control than verbal channels. This is why people tend to trust them more than verbal messages as indicators of true feeling.
Every emotion is accompanied by a subjective feeling. People often have difficulty in describing the various emotional states. Two most important dimensions of emotion are pleasant-to-unpleasant and high-to-low activation, which form the basis of the circle of emotions on which all emotions can be placed.
Researchers in the field of emotion face two main challenges: creating specific moods in their participants and measuring subjective feelings. Moods can be manipulated by having participants read and think about mood-related statements, by giving them false positive or negative feedback, and by embarrassing or rewarding them. Moods are measured by asking participants how they feel, by asking them to comment on good or bad events, by having them free-associate to emotion-laden words, or by having them work at a monotonous task. When researchers manipulate participants’ moods, debriefing must be done with care.
Emotional traits are relatively stable and consistent ways that people differ from each other emotionally. For example, the trait of happiness is related to the frequency of positive emotions, rather than the intensity of any particular emotional response. Affect intensity refers to how strongly people experience their emotions, both positive and negative. Happiness can generally be described as a positive, enduring state that includes satisfaction with life, pleasures, and accomplishments.
Two phenomena are associated with emotion: physiological arousal and cognitive activity. Several theories have been offered to explain the relationship between these two characteristics, and they tend to emphasize one or the other of these phenomena.
The James-Lange theory of emotion proposes that emotion-arousing situations give rise to specific physiological changes. These changes prompt the subjective feeling of emotion. The particular emotion we feel (hate, fear, joy) is determined by the specific pattern of physiological change.
Walter Cannon published a reaction to the James-Lange theory that was critical on several grounds. First, contrary to the James-Lange theory, researchers were unable to find physiological differences in the various emotions. Second, Cannon believed that we feel emotions more quickly than the underlying physiological changes could take place. Third, injection of a drug that produced physiological arousal (such as epinephrine) was not sufficient to produce emotions. The Cannon-Bard theory states that sensory information goes to the thalamus, where it is transmitted simultaneously to the cerebral cortex (where the experience of emotion is processed) and to the autonomic nervous system (which triggers the physiological responses).
The facial feedback hypothesis holds that facial expressions play a key role in the experience of emotion. Research supporting this view shows that when participants move their facial muscles to positions similar to those used in various emotional displays, they tend to experience the associated emotion. A variety of explanations have been advanced to account for this finding.
The cognitive arousal interpretation of emotion draws on both the James-Lange and Cannon-Bard theories. It suggests that we experience physiological arousal and then search for environmental cues that help us appropriately label the emotion.
Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer conducted an experiment to test their contention that people label physiological arousal in such a way that the emotion they feel is consistent with their situation. In this experiment, participants were injected with epinephrine and placed in one of four conditions: informed (they were warned of the side effects produced by epinephrine), misinformed (they were warned of side effects unrelated to those produced by epinephrine), ignorant (they were told the injection would have no side effects), and placebo (they received an injection of saline solution). All participants then waited with a happy or an angry confederate. Those participants in the misinformed and ignorant groups were more likely to feel aroused in this situation. To label the arousal, participants looked to environmental cues as an indication of what emotion is appropriate in the situation. Thus Schachter’s theory--that physiological arousal signals to a person that an explanation for that arousal is needed--received support.
Another cognitive-based theory is cognitive appraisal theory, and states that our emotions are the result of our appraisal of the objective situation in which we find ourselves. In primary appraisal we evaluate whether the situation is relevant to our personal well being; in secondary appraisal we evaluate how we should react. Cognitive appraisal theorists believe we evaluate situations according to a limited number of specific dimensions, and our appraisals give rise to distinct patterns of physiological arousal and specific facial expressions.
Psychologists are interested in understanding what makes people happy. The social comparison theory states that our happiness depends largely on how we perceive our state in the world as compared to that of others. Advertisers employ this idea when they show us images of people who are much better off materially than we are. This may cause us to feel unhappy about what we have and thus desire to buy expensive products. The social comparison theory may work in the reverse direction also, as when Fidel Castro prohibited wealthy American tourists from visiting Cuban beaches in the early 1970s. This might have increased happiness for the relatively poor Cubans. However, the social comparison theory does not explain why some people who become very well off are still not happy. Adaptation theory suggests that our overall life satisfaction does not increase much when we enjoy huge windfalls because we simply get used to being well off, and that become s a new status quo. Ed Diener has found that people generally report that marriage and family life are the most important factors in subjective well-being. Financially well-off individuals sometimes were happier than people with average incomes, but not always.
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