1. PowerPoint® Presentation by Jim Foley
Motivation and Work
PowerPoint® Presentation
by Jim Foley
© 2013 Worth Publishers

2. Module 32: Basic Motivation Concepts, and Hunger

3. Topics you might be hungry to learn about
Models of Motivation:
Instincts and Evolutionary Psychology
Drives and Incentives
Seeking Optimum Arousal levels
A Hierarchy of Motives
Hunger:
Body Chemistry and Brain control of Hunger
Cultural and Situational effects on Hunger
Obesity and weight control challenges: Physiology, social factors, food and activity factors
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4. Motivation: Chapter Overview
Does motivation work in humans by way of drives, incentives, and optimizing arousal, or by following a hierarchy of motives?
Some strong human drives we will examine include:
hunger, with an application to obesity.
sex, especially in relation to adolescents, orientation, and values.
belonging, relating to ostracism and networking.
Work motivation and organizational psychology
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5. Motivation
Motivation refers to a need or desire that energizes behavior and directs it towards a goal.
For example, Aron Ralston found the motivation to cut off his own arm when trapped on a cliff in Utah in What motivated him to do this? Hunger? The drive to survive? The drive to reproduce?
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The drive to survive might seem more obvious, but see if students can guess why the drive to reproduce is listed here. Ralston, after thinking he had no way to survive, had a dream of a one-armed man picking up a young boy. Maybe this stirred up his desire to live to be a father someday. [His first child, Leo, was born in 2010.]

6. Perspectives on Motivation
There are different ways of thinking of the way motivation works, all of which relate to the “push” of biological processes and the “pull” of culture, social forces, and ideals.
Instinct Theory  Evolutionary Perspective
Drive-Reduction Theory
Arousal [Optimization] Theory
Hierarchy of Needs/Motives
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7. Do Instincts Direct Human Behavior?
An instinct is a fixed (rigid and predictable) pattern of behavior that is not acquired by learning and is likely to be rooted in genes and the body.
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Humans may have a general nesting “instinct,” but the specific behavior is less predictable. The bird can only build one kind of nest, but humans may decorate a baby’s room in a variety of ways, or use this general “instinct” to simply buy and repair a home.
Human “nesting” behavior
Instinctual nesting

8. Instincts  Evolutionary Perspective
Other species have genetically programmed instincts “motivating” their actions.
Do humans?
Human babies show certain reflexes, but in general, our behavior is less prescribed by genetics than other animals.
We may, however, have general patterns of behavior which can be explained as emerging through natural selection.
Instinct theory has given way to evolutionary theory in explaining human behavior.
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9. Drive Reduction
A drive is an aroused/tense state related to a physical need such as hunger or thirst.
Drive-reduction theory refers to the idea that humans are motivated to reduce these drives, such as eating to reduce the feeling of hunger. This restores homeostasis, a steady internal state.
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10. Seeking Optimum Arousal
Some behavior cannot be easily connected to a biological need, and instead seems driven by a need to either increase or decrease our physiological arousal level.
Curiosity, as with kids and these monkeys, may be a way of increasing stimulation to reach an optimum arousal level.
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It seems that curiosity can be considered a basic need or drive to get to know one’s environment to improve the chances of survival. However, in this model, curiosity is seen as a way of seeking an optimum arousal level.
People with ADHD seem to seek stimulation for this reason; it increases dopamine levels almost as well as Ritalin, although the pursuit of such stimulation, even by fidgeting, can be disruptive.
It is not clear that the curiosity of scientists, though, serves to increase physiological arousal.

11. Hierarchy of Needs/Motives
In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed that humans strive to ensure that basic needs are satisfied before they find motivation to pursue goals that are higher on this hierarchy.
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12. Violating the Hierarchy?
Do hunger strikers and mystics feel secure enough in meeting their needs that they can do without food temporarily to pursue a higher goal?
Soldiers sacrifice safety, but could they be seen as fighting for safety, both indirectly (protecting the country) and directly (defeating the people shooting at them)?
Violating the Hierarchy?
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13. A closer look at one need/motive: Hunger
Research on hunger is consistent with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy:
In one study, men whose food intake had been cut in half became obsessed with food.
Hunger even changes our motivations as we plan for the future.
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14. Physiology of Hunger
Experiments and other investigations show a complex relationship among the stomach, hormones, and different parts of the brain.
Feeling hungry causes stomach contractions, but the feeling can happen even if the stomach is removed or filled with a balloon.
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15. The Hypothalamus and Hunger
Receptors throughout the digestive system monitor levels of glucose and send signals to the hypothalamus in the brain.
The hypothalamus then can send out appetite-stimulating hormones, and later, after eating, appetite-suppressing hormones.
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16. The Body Talks Back to the Brain
Hormones travel from various organs of the body to the brain (the hypothalamus) to convey messages that increase or decrease appetite.
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17. Regulating Weight
When a person’s weight drops or increases, the body responds by adjusting hunger and energy use to bring weight back to its initial stable amount.
Most mammals, without consciously regulating, have a stable weight to which they keep returning. This is also known as their set point.
A person’s set point might rise with age, or change with economic or cultural conditions. Therefore, this “set point” of stable weight is more of a current but temporary “settling point.”
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18. Which foods to eat? Taste Preferences
Some taste preferences are universal. Carbohydrates temporarily raise levels of serotonin, reducing stress and depression.
Other tastes are acquired and become favorites through exposure, culture, and conditioning.
Different cultures encourage different tastes.
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Some cultures find these foods to be delicious: reindeer fat and berries, or roasted guinea pig.

19. Biology, Evolution, and Taste Preferences
Differences in taste preferences are not arbitrary. Personal and cultural experience, influenced by biology, play a role.
We can acquire a food aversion after just one incident of getting sick after tasting a food.
It is adaptive in warm climates to develop a taste for salt and spice, which preserve food.
Disliking new tastes may have helped to protect our ancestors.
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Instructor: after the third bullet point, you can add that forcing children to try new foods multiple times might make sense. Their first aversion to a food is a biologically protective reaction but it does not predict whether they will eventually like it.

20. How much do we eat? Eating depends in part on situational influences.
Social facilitation: the presence of others accentuates our typical eating habits
Unit bias: we may eat only one serving/unit (scoop, plateful, bun-full) of food, but will eat more if the serving size is larger
Buffet effect: we eat more if more options are available
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Instructor: the buffet effect (not an official term; I just made it up here) can be explained in evolutionary terms. See if students can guess or recall from the reading that our ancestors stored fat and nutrients during bountiful times, when more variety was available. For example, humans prepared for possible winter famines in early fall when more kinds of plants were bearing fruit and animals were storing fat.

21. Influences on Eating Behavior
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Instructor: here, you can try to bring the eating topic back to the chapter topic of motivation by showing how complex the idea of “motivation” can be when it comes to the case of a desire to eat a particular food. This may highlight the idea that food addictions and disorders are [now] missing from this chapter, so I’ve added a slide next that fills in a gap and connects to the next topic.

22. Variations from the Norm of Body Weight
In some cases, the set point of a person’s body weight drifts from a healthy weight.
Psychological disorders of eating can override this set point, ignore biological signals, and lead to extreme weight loss.
In other cases, the set point seems to drift upward. Biological tendencies can lead to increased weight that is hard to lose, leading to obesity.
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Instructor: I have added this introduction to the next topic to put it in context. Eating disorders used to be in this chapter and have been moved to the “Psychological Disorders” chapter, but I felt that an acknowledgement of them here would help show how these topics relate. Students may bring them up anyway, or at least may be interested in debating the relative role in obesity of biology, psychological factors, culture, and the idea that it’s just about choosing to eat more or less.

23. Obesity refers to an amount of body fat that increases the risk of health problems to the point that weight loss is a health priority.
Obesity is linked to diabetes, heart problems, arthritis, and some cancers.
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24. Is Fat Bad?
Having some body fat is normal and healthy; fat stores energy effectively for later use.
Body fat has been seen as a sign of affluence, and thus has been considered attractive.
Standards vary in different cultures, sometimes creating an unhealthy norm of being overweight or underweight.
Being mildly overweight is not considered a problem if the person is in good physical condition or exercising.
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25. Obesity and Life Expectancy
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26. Obesity and Weight Control
Physiology of Obesity
Once a person is obese, losing weight is not so easy as “just eating less.”
Fat has a lower metabolic rate then other tissue, so a person might gain weight when eating “normally.”
Eating less to lose weight slows metabolism. This prevents weight loss, and ensures weight gain when returning to a normal diet.
Even if weight loss succeeds, a formerly obese person will have to eat less than an average person just to prevent weight gain.
How does obesity develop,
and why is it hard to change?
It was adaptive for our ancestors to crave energy-rich food when available.
Problem: energy-rich ‘junk’ food is now easily available, and cheaper than healthy food
It is adaptive to slow down our burning of fat when food is scarce.
Problem: in poverty or in crash diets, our body can slow down weight loss
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Instructor: if you decide to keep the word “poverty” in the last bullet point on the left, you can prompt students by saying, “and when food is available to people in poverty living in neighborhoods with easy access only to convenient stores, what food is most easily and cheaply available?”
This is why people in poverty might be obese but it may not be a sign that they are “spoiled” or do not have a problem with adequate income.

27. Lifestyle Factors and Obesity
Social Psychology of Obesity
Discrimination based on weight has been found to be stronger than race and gender discrimination.
In one study, actors were seen as less employable when made to look heavier.
Even children are prejudiced against the overweight.
Perhaps as a result, people who are obese are more likely to be depressed or isolated.
Genetics and Obesity
Adopted siblings eating the same meals end up with a BMI/weight resembling biological parents, not people in the same household.
Identical twins have similar weights, even when raised apart with different food.
There seem to be many genes with effects on weight.
Lifestyle Factors and Obesity
People who are restless and fidgeting burn off more calories and gain less weight than others.
Inadequate sleep causes weight gain, despite increased active time, because of appetite hormones.
Having an obese friend correlates with becoming obese.
Sedentary lifestyles and fast food may be leading to increased body fat worldwide.
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28. Losing Weight: The Challenge Losing Weight: The Plan
Because of the physiological factors and perhaps due to lifestyle and peer issues:
once obese, weight loss is difficult, and permanent weight loss is even harder.
obsessive weight loss attempts can add to shame, anxiety, depression, and disordered eating habits.
Begin with an understanding of the metabolic challenges you face, so that you blame slow progress on physiology, not poor willpower.
Begin with self-acceptance and a decision to change, rather than feeling shame.
Make gradual and consistent, not drastic and varying, lifestyle changes.
Increase exercise and healthy food choices.
Get support.
Losing Weight: The Plan
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If you decide to move your body’s set point to a lower body weight: