1. Motivation and Emotion
Chapter 7

2. Explaining Motivation
Learning Outcomes
Explain instinct approaches to motivation
Explain drive-reduction approaches to motivation
Explain arousal approaches to motivation
Explain incentive approaches to motivation
Explain cognitive approaches to motivation
Apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to motivation
Apply the different approaches to motivation

3. Instinct Approaches
Motivation: the factors that direct and energize the behavior of humans and other organisms
Instincts: inborn patterns of behavior that are biologically determined rather than learned; essential to survival
Instincts provide energy that guides behavior
According to instinct approaches to motivation, people and animals are born preprogrammed with sets of behaviors essential to their survival.
When psychologists first tried to explain motivation, they turned to instincts, inborn patterns of behavior that are biologically determined rather than learned.

4. Drive-Reduction Approaches
Drive-reduction approaches: lack of a basic biological requirement (such as water) produces a drive (such as thirst) to obtain that requirement
Drive: motivational tension, or arousal, that energizes behavior to fulfill a need
Primary drives
Secondary drives
Homeostasis: the body’s tendency to maintain a steady internal state; underlies primary drives
After rejecting instinct theory, psychologists first proposed simple drive-reduction theories of motivation to take its place.
Primary drives are related to the biological needs of the body or of the species as a whole.
In secondary drives, prior experience and learning bring about needs, such as a strong need to achieve academically and professionally.
Using feedback loops, homeostasis brings deviations in body functioning back to an optimal state, similar to the way a thermostat and a furnace work in a home heating system to maintain a steady temperature. When deviations from the ideal state occur, the body adjusts in an effort to return to an optimal state.

5. Arousal Approaches
Arousal approaches to motivation: we try to maintain certain levels of stimulation and activity, increasing or reducing them as necessary
Arousal approaches suggest that we try to maintain a particular level of stimulation and activity.

6. Incentive Approaches
Incentive approaches to motivation: motivation stems from the desire to obtain valued external goals, or incentives

7. Cognitive Approaches
Cognitive approaches to motivation: motivation is a product of cognitions (thoughts and expectations)
Intrinsic motivation: motivated by your own enjoyment rather than by any concrete reward; intrinsic = internal to you
Extrinsic motivation: doing something for a concrete reward; extrinsic = external to you
Cognitive approaches focus on the role of thoughts, expectations, and understanding of the world in producing motivation.

8. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s model: motivational needs are in a hierarchy; primary needs must be met before higher-order needs can be satisfied
Level 1, Physiological needs/primary drives: needs for water, food, sleep, sex, etc.
Level 2, Safety needs: the need for a safe, secure environment
Level 3, Love and belongingness: the need to obtain and give affection & to be a contributing member of a group or society
The basic needs are primary drives: needs for water, food, sleep, sex, etc. To move up the hierarchy, a person must first meet these basic physiological needs.
Only after meeting the basic lower-order needs can a person consider fulfilling higher-order needs such as the needs for love and a sense of belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

9. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s Hierarchy (cont’d)
Level 4, Esteem: the need to develop a sense of self-worth from others knowing and valuing your competence
Level 5, Self-actualization: a state of self-fulfillment in which people realize their highest potential, each in his or her own unique way
Once the first four sets of needs are fulfilled – no easy task – a person is able to strive for the highest-level need: self-actualization.
The important thing is that people feel at ease with themselves and satisfied that they are using their talents to the fullest.
In a sense, achieving self-actualization reduces the striving and yearning for greater fulfillment that mark most people’s lives and instead provides a sense of satisfaction with the current state of affairs.

10. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

11. Applying Approaches to Motivation
Which approach best explains motivation?
Any or all of them! Applying multiple approaches in a given situation provides a broader understanding than if we use just one approach alone.

12. Human Needs and Motivation
Learning Outcomes
Describe the biological and social factors that underlie hunger
Summarize the varieties of sexual behavior
Explain how needs related to achievement, affiliation, and power are exhibited

13. The Motivation Behind Hunger
Obesity: body weight that is more than 20 percent above the average weight for a person of a particular height
Body mass index (BMI): based on a ratio of weight to height; BMI > 30 considered obese, BMI between 25 and 30 are overweight
Weight set point: particular level of weight that the body strives to maintain; may be affected by injury to the hypothalamus
Two-thirds of Americans are overweight and almost a quarter are so heavy that they have obesity, body weight that is more than 20% above the average weight for a person of a particular height.
The World Health Organization has said that world-wide obesity has reached epidemic proportions, producing an increase in heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and premature deaths.
People with a BMI greater than 30 are considered obese, whereas those with a BMI between 25 and 30 are overweight.

14. The Motivation Behind Hunger
Metabolism: the rate at which food is converted to energy and expended by the body
Social factors (such as cultural influences), along with biology, play an important role in eating and hunger
Internal biological factors do not fully explain our eating behavior. External social factors, based on societal rules and on what we have learned about appropriate eating habits, also play an important role.
Because we tend to eat on schedule every day, we feel hungry as the usual hour approaches, sometimes quite independently of what our internal cues are telling us.
Similarly, we put roughly the same amount of food on our plates every day, even though the amount of exercise we may have had varies from day to day.

15. Eating Disorders
Anorexia nervosa: a severe eating disorder; people may refuse to eat while denying that their behavior and appearance (which can become skeleton-like) are unusual
Mainly afflicts females between 12 and 40, but can affect men and women of any age
Typically stable background
Can happen when serious dieting gets out of control
About 10% of people with anorexia starve themselves to death

16. Eating Disorders
Bulimia: disorder in which people binge on large quantities of food, followed by efforts to purge the food by vomiting or other means, such as taking laxatives
Causes of eating disorders
Biological: chemical imbalance in hypothalamus or pituitary gland; differences in how the brain processes info about food
Social: society values slenderness and obesity is undesirable; overly demanding parents or other family problems

17. Sexual Motivation
Estrogens and progesterone: female sex hormones produced by the ovaries; greatest production during ovulation (when an egg is released from the ovaries)
Androgens: male sex hormones secreted by the testes
Both biological and social/environmental factors motivate sexual behavior. Human sexual behavior is more complicated than that of other animals although the underlying biology is not all that different from related species.
Though biological factors “prime” people for sex, it takes more than hormones to motivate and produce sexual behavior. Not only do people have fantasies of a sexual nature during their everyday activities, about 60% of people have fantasies during sexual intercourse.

18. Sexual Motivation Masturbation: sexual self-stimulation
Heterosexuality: sexual attraction and behavior directed to the other sex
Double standard: the view that premarital sex (sex before marriage) is permissible for males but not for females
Extramarital sex: sexual activity between a married person and someone who is not his or her spouse

19. Sexual Motivation
Homosexuals: those who are sexually attracted to members of their own sex (many prefer terms gay and lesbian)
Bisexuals: those who are sexually attracted to people of the same sex and the other sex
Kinsey considered sexual orientation along a continuum, from “exclusively homosexual” to “exclusively heterosexual”

20. Sexual Motivation Determinants of sexual orientation
Biological: genetics, hormones, brain structures
Parenting: research does not support the idea that sexual orientation is brought about by child-rearing practices or family dynamics
Most likely a combination of biology and environment
Some explanations for sexual orientation are biological in nature. Hormones may also play a role in determining sexual orientation and some evidence suggests that differences in brain structures may be related to sexual orientation.
Research is not conclusive because most results are based on small sample sizes, but it may be the case that inherited or biological factors predispose people toward homosexuality, if certain environmental conditions are met.

21. Sexual Motivation
Transsexuals: People who believe they were born with the body of the other gender
Transgenderism: includes transsexuals, transvestites (dress in the clothing of the other gender), and others who believe traditional male-female gender classifications do not adequately describe them

22. Need for Achievement
Need for achievement: a stable, learned characteristic in which a person obtains satisfaction by striving for and attaining a level of excellence
Measured by the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): series of ambiguous pictures, about which a person is asked to write a story
Although hunger may be one of the more potent primary drives in our day-to-day lives, powerful secondary drives that have no clear biological basis also motivate us. Among the more prominent of these is the need for achievement.
People with a high need for achievement seek out situations in which they can compete against some standard – grades, money, winning at a game – and prove themselves successful. They generally choose tasks that are of intermediate difficulty.
In contrast, people with low achievement motivation tend to be motivated primarily by a desire to avoid failure. As a consequence, they seek out easy tasks, being sure to avoid failure, or seek out very difficult tasks wherein failure has no negative implications because almost anyone faced with these tasks would fail.

23. Need for Achievement and Power
Need for affiliation: an interest in establishing and maintaining relationships with other people
Need for power: a tendency to seek impact, control, or influence over others, and to be seen as a powerful individual
People have a need for affiliation. Those with higher affiliation needs are particularly sensitive to relationships with others. They desire to be with their friends more of the time, and alone less often, compared with people who are lower in the need for affiliation.
People with strong needs for power are more apt to belong to organizations and seek office than are those low in need for power. They also tend to work in professions in which their power needs may be fulfilled. They also tend to display the trappings of power: expensive possessions, the latest electronic gear, etc.

24. Understanding Emotional Experiences
Learning Outcomes
Define the range of emotions
Explain the roots of emotions
Emotions: feelings that generally have both physiological and cognitive elements and that influence behavior
Emotions are broadly defined as feelings that may affect behavior and generally have both a physiological component and a cognitive component.

25. The Range of Emotions
One approach to organizing emotions is to use a hierarchy, which divides emotions into increasingly narrow subcategories. (Source: Adapted from Fischer, Shaver, & Carnochan, 1990.)

26. The Roots of Emotions
James-Lange theory of emotion: emotions are experienced as a reaction to bodily events occurring as a result of an external situation (bodily changes cause feeling of emotion)
Cannon-Bard theory of emotion: both physiological arousal and emotional experience are produced at the same time by the same nerve stimulus
Several theories explain emotions. The James-Lange theory suggests that emotional experience is a reaction to bodily, or visceral, changes that occur as a response to an environmental event and are interpreted as an emotional response.
In contrast, the Cannon-Bard theory contends that both physiological arousal and an emotional experience are produced simultaneously by the same nerve stimulus and that the visceral experience does not necessarily differ among differing emotions.

27. The Roots of Emotions
Schachter-Singer theory of emotion: emotions are determined jointly by a nonspecific kind of physiological arousal and its interpretation, which is based on environmental cues
Contemporary perspectives: specific patterns of biological arousal (such as activating different parts of the brain) seem to be associated with individual emotions
The Schachter-Singer theory suggests that emotions are determined jointly by a relatively nonspecific physiological arousal and the subsequent labeling of that arousal, using cues from the environment to determine how others are behaving in the same situation.