CHAPTER 12
Motivation and Emotion
Theme: Our behavior is energized and directed by motives and emotions.
Preview
Flight of the Gossamer Albatross
What would it feel like to pedal an airplane over the English Channel? Bryan Allen found out the hard way as he fought head winds, searing thirst, leg cramps, and exhaustion.
Allen was the pilot and “engine” for the first human-powered flight from England to France. Bryan’s 3-hour ordeal in the Gossamer Albatross, a delicate aircraft, took him to the limits of human endurance. The following excerpts are from his (1979) personal account:
6:59 A.M. At last,word comes over the radio. . . .“We have France in sight—four miles to go. . . .“ Four miles or four hundred.I’m fading now and know it.Gradually the head winds have been building up . . . I talk to myself . . . Don’t give up now, you can
do it! As I waver between hope and despair, the radio crackles again: “Altitude six inches, six inches; get it up, you’ve got to get it up!” 7:29 A.M. One mile. Less distance than I had flown Gossamer Condor two years before for the original Kremer prize. Then, however, there were no head winds or turbulence, no thirst, no cramps....Despite the cramps, I struggle back up to five feet.“Against all hope,” I repeat to myself,“against all hope.” 7:36 A.M. Four hundred yards to shore....One hundred yards now.I am running on reserves I never knew I had. . . .
This chapter is about the motives and emotions underlying Bryan Allen’s behavior—and your own. Bryan’s final burst of effort (“I am running on reserves I never knew I had”) is but one example of the many links between emotion and motivation. Let’s begin with basic motives, such as hunger and thirst, and then explore how emotions affect us.
Although emotions can be the spice of life, they are sometimes the spice of death as well. Read on to find out why.
¡ Motives and goals greatly influence what we do and how we use our energies.
¡ Basic motives, such as hunger and thirst, are controlled by internal signals monitored within the brain.
¡ The most effective “diet” is one that changes eating habits and activity levels.
¡ Motivated behavior is also influenced by learned habits, external cues, and cultural values.
¡ Numerous activities are related to our needs for stimulation and our efforts to maintain comfortable levels of arousal.
¡ Many needs and motives are learned.
¡ Emotions can be disruptive, but overall they help us adapt to environmental challenges.
¡ People who are “smart” emotionally are self-aware and empathetic.They understand emotions; can manage their feelings; and use emotions to enhance thinking, decision making, and relationships.
¡ In its ideal form, romantic love is a combination of passion, intimacy, and commitment. However, many longterm relationships are built on companionship, intimacy, mutual respect, shared interests, and firm friendship.
Gateways to Motivation and Emotion
What is motivation? Are there different types of motives?
What causes hunger? Overeating? Eating disorders?
Is there more than one type of thirst?
In what ways are pain avoidance and the sex drive unusual?
How does arousal relate to motivation?
What are social motives? Why are they important?
Are some motives more basic than others?
What happens during emotion?
Can “lie detectors” really detect lies?
How accurately are emotions expressed by “body language” and the face?
How do psychologists explain emotions?
What does it mean to have “emotional intelligence”?
What is the nature of love?
Key Questions
Motivation—Forces That Push and Pull
What do you plan to do today? What are your goals? Why do you pursue them? How vigorously do you try to reach them? When are you satisfied? When do you give up? These are all questions about motivation, or why we act as we do. Let’s begin with a basic model of motivation and an overview of types of motives.
Motivation refers to the dynamics of behavior—the ways in which our actions are initiated, sustained, directed, and terminated
(Petri, 1996). Imagine that a student named Marcy is studying psychology in the library. She begins to feel hungry and can’t concentrate. Her stomach growls. She grows restless and decides to buy an apple from a vending machine. The machine is empty, so she goes to the cafeteria. Closed.Marcy drives home, where she cooks a meal and eats it. At last her hunger is satisfied, and she resumes studying. Notice how Marcy’s food seeking was initiated by a bodily need. Her search was sustained
because her need was not immediately met, and her actions were directed by possible sources of food. Finally, her food seeking was terminated by achieving her goal.
A Model of Motivation
Many motivated activities begin with a need, or internal defi- ciency. The need that initiated Marcy’s search was a depletion of key substances in her body.Needs cause a drive (an energized motivational state) to develop. The drive was hunger, in Marcy’s case.
Drives activate a response (an action or series of actions) designed to attain a goal (the “target” of motivated behavior). Reaching a goal that satisfies the need will end the chain of events. Thus, a simple model of motivation can be shown in this way:
Aren’t needs and drives the same thing? No, because the strength of needs and drives can differ. If you begin fasting today, your bodily need for food will increase every day. However, you would probably feel less “hungry” on the seventh day of fasting than you did on the first. Although your need for food steadily increases, the hunger drive comes and goes.
Now let’s observe Marcy again. It’s Saturday night: For dinner, Marcy has soup, salad, a large steak, a baked potato, four pieces of bread, two pieces of cheesecake, and three cups of cof-
NEED DRIVE RESPONSE GOAL (NEED REDUCTION)
Motivation Internal processes that initiate, sustain, and direct activities.
Need An internal deficiency that may energize behavior.
Drive The psychological expression of internal needs or valued goals. For example, hunger, thirst, or a drive for success.
Response Any action, glandular activity, or other identifiable behavior.
Goal The target or objective of motivated behavior.
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fee. After dinner, she complains that she is “too full to move.” Soon after, Marcy’s roommate arrives with a strawberry pie.
Marcy exclaims that strawberry pie is her favorite dessert and eats three large pieces! Is this hunger? Certainly,Marcy’s dinner satisfied her biological needs for food.
How does that change the model of motivation? Marcy’s “pie lust” illustrates that motivated behavior can be energized by the “pull” of external stimuli, as well as by the “push” of internal needs.
Incentives
The “pull” of a goal is called its incentive value (the goal’s appeal beyond its ability to fill a need). Some goals are so desirable (strawberry pie, for example) that they can motivate behavior in the absence of an internal need. Other goals are so low in incentive value that they may be rejected even if they meet the internal need. Fresh, live grubworms, for instance, are highly nutritious.
However, it is doubtful that you would eat one no matter how hungry you might be.
Usually, our actions are energized by a mixture of internal needs and external incentives. That’s why a strong need may change an unpleasant incentive into a desired goal. Perhaps you’ve never eaten a grubworm, but I’ll bet you’ve eaten some pretty horrible leftovers when the refrigerator was bare. The incentive value of goals also helps explain motives that don’t seem to come from internal needs, such as drives for success, status, or approval (œFig. 12.1).
Types of Motives
For our purposes, motives can be divided into three major categories: 1. Primary motives are based on biological needs that must be met for survival. The most important primary motives are hunger; thirst; pain avoidance; and needs for air, sleep, elimination of wastes, and regulation of body temperature. Primary motives are innate.
2. Stimulus motives express our needs for stimulation and information.
Examples include activity, curiosity, exploration, manipulation, and physical contact. Although such motives also appear to be innate, they are not strictly necessary for survival.
3. Secondary motives are based on learned needs, drives, and goals. Learned motives help explain many human activities, such as making music, creating a Web page, or trying to win the skateboarding finals in the X Games. Many secondary motives are related to learned needs for power, affiliation (the need to be with others), approval, status, security, and achievement. Fear and aggression also appear to be greatly affected by learning.
Primary Motives and Homeostasis
How important is food in your life? Water? Sleep? Air? Temperature regulation? Finding a public rest room? For most of us, satisfying our biological needs is so routine that we tend to overlook how much of our behavior they direct. But exaggerate any of these needs through famine, shipwreck, poverty, neardrowning, bitter cold, or drinking ten cups of coffee, and their powerful grip on behavior becomes evident. We are, after all, still animals in many ways.
Biological drives are essential because they maintain homeostasis
(HOE-me-oh-STAY-sis), or bodily equilibrium (Cannon, 1932).
What is homeostasis? The term homeostasis means “standing steady,” or “steady state.”Optimal levels exist for body temperature, for chemicals in the blood, for blood pressure, and so forth. When the body deviates from these “ideal” levels, automatic reactions begin to restore equilibrium. Thus, it might
© David Austen/Woodfin Camp & Associates
(a) High-incentive value goal (b) Low-incentive value goal
Need Drive Response Need Drive Response
œ Figure 12.1 Needs and incentives interact to determine drive strength (top).
(a) Moderate need combined with a high-incentive goal produces a strong drive.
(b) Even when a strong need exists, drive strength may be moderate if a goal’s incentive value is low. It is important to remember, however, that incentive value lies “in the eye of the beholder” (photo). No matter how hungry, few people would be able to eat the pictured grubworms.
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help to think of homeostasis as being similar to a thermostat set at a particular temperature.
A (Very) Short Course on Thermostats
When room temperature falls below the level set on a thermostat, the heat is automatically turned on to warm the room.When the heat equals or slightly exceeds the ideal temperature, it is automatically turned off. In this way room temperature is kept in a state of equilibrium hovering around the ideal level.
The first reactions to disequilibrium in the human body are also automatic. For example, if you become too hot, more blood will flow through your skin and you will begin to perspire, thus lowering body temperature. Usually, we are not aware of such changes, unless continued disequilibrium drives us to seek shade, warmth, food, or water.
Hunger—Pardon Me, That’s Just My Hypothalamus Growling
You get hungry, you find food, you eat: Hunger might seem like a “simple” motive, but only recently have we begun to understand it.Hunger provides a good model of how internal and external factors direct our behavior.And, as we will see later, many of the principles that explain hunger also apply to thirst.
What causes hunger? When you feel hungry, you probably think of your stomach. That’s why Walter Cannon and A. L.
Washburn decided to see if stomach contractions cause hunger.
In an early study, Washburn trained himself to swallow a balloon, which could be inflated through an attached tube. This allowed Cannon to record the movements of Washburn’s stomach (œFig. 12.2). When Washburn’s stomach contracted, he reported that he felt “hunger pangs.” In view of this, the two scientists concluded that hunger is nothing more than the contractions of an empty stomach (Cannon & Washburn, 1912).
(Unfortunately, this proved to be an inflated conclusion.)
Perhaps you already guessed that something more than the stomach is involved in hunger. For many people, hunger produces an overall feeling of weakness or shakiness, rather than a “growling” stomach. Of course, eating is limited when the stomach is stretched or distended (full). (Remember last Thanksgiving?)
However, we now know that the stomach is not essential for feeling hunger. For medical reasons, many people have had their stomachs removed. Despite this, they continue to feel hungry and eat regularly (Woods et al., 2000).
It would seem that some central factor must cause hunger.
One important element appears to be the level of glucose (sugar) in the blood (Campfield et al., 1996). If a person is injected with insulin, it causes hypoglycemia (HI-po-gly-SEEme- ah: low blood sugar) and stimulates feelings of hunger and stomach contractions. Strange as it may seem, the liver also affects hunger.
The liver? Yes, the liver responds to a lack of bodily “fuel” by sending nerve impulses to the brain, which contribute to a desire to eat (Woods et al., 2000).
Brain Mechanisms
What part of the brain controls hunger? When you are hungry, many parts of the brain are affected, so no single “hunger center” exists. However, a small area called the hypothalamus (HIpo- THAL-ah-mus) does regulate many aspects of motivation
Incentive value The value of a goal above and beyond its ability to fill a need.
Primary motives Innate motives based on biological needs.
Stimulus motives Innate needs for stimulation and information.
Secondary motives Motives based on learned needs, drives, and goals.
Homeostasis A steady state of bodily equilibrium.
Hypoglycemia Below-normal blood sugar level.
Hypothalamus A small area at the base of the brain that regulates many aspects of motivation and emotion, especially hunger, thirst, and sexual behavior.
RELATE
Motives help explain why we do what we do. See if you can think of something you do that illustrates the concepts of need, drive, response, and goal.Does the goal in your example vary in incentive value? What effects do high- and lowincentive- value goals have on your behavior?
Mentally list some primary motives you have satisfied today. Some stimulus motives. Some secondary motives.How did each influence your behavior?
LEARNING CHECK
1. Motives __________________,sustain, and ________________ activities.
2. Needs provide the _______________________ of motivation, whereas incentives provide the ______________________.
Classify the following needs or motives by placing the correct letter in the blank.
A. Primary motive B. Stimulus motive C. Secondary motive
3. _____ curiosity 6. _____ thirst
4. _____ status 7. _____ achievement
5. _____ sleep 8. _____ physical contact
9. The maintenance of bodily equilibrium is called thermostasis. T or F?
10. A goal high in incentive value may create a drive in the absence of any internal need. T or F?
CRITICAL THINKING
11. There’s an old saying that “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Can you restate this in motivational terms?
12. Many people mistakenly believe that they suffer from “hypoglycemia,” which is often blamed for fatigue, difficulty concentrating, irritability, and other symptoms.Why is it unlikely that many people actually have hypoglycemia?
ANSWERS
K N O W L E D G E B U I L D E R
Overview of Motivation
1. initiate, direct 2. push, pull 3. B 4. C 5. A 6. A 7. C 8. B 9. F 10. T
11. Providing an incentive (water) will not automatically lead to drinking in the absence of an internal need for water. 12. Because of homeostasis: Blood sugar is normally maintained within narrow bounds. Although blood sugar levels fluctuate enough to affect hunger, true hypoglycemia is an infrequent medical problem.
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and emotion, including hunger, thirst, and sexual behavior (œFig. 12.3).
The hypothalamus is sensitive to levels of sugar in the blood (and other substances described in a moment). It also receives neural messages from the liver and the stomach.When combined, these signals determine whether you are hungry or not (Woods et al., 2000).
One part of the hypothalamus acts as a feeding system that initiates eating. If the lateral hypothalamus
is “turned on” with an electrified probe, even a well-fed animal will immediately begin eating. (The term lateral simply means the sides of the hypothalamus. See œFig. 12.4.) If the same area is destroyed, the animal will never eat again.
A second area within the hypothalamus seems to be part of a satiety system, or “stop mechanism” for eating. If the ventromedial
(VENT-ro-MEE-dee-al) hypothalamus is destroyed, dramatic overeating results. (Ventromedial refers to the bottom middle of the hypothalamus.) Rats with such damage will overeat until they balloon up to weights of 1,000 grams or more (œFig. 12.5). A normal rat weighs about 180 grams. To put this weight gain in human terms, picture someone you know who weighs 180 pounds growing to a weight of 1,000 pounds.
The paraventricular (PAIR-uh-ven-TRICKyou- ler) nucleus of the hypothalamus also affects hunger (Fig. 12.4). This area helps keep blood sugar levels steady. As a result, it is involved in both starting and stopping eating.
The paraventricular nucleus is very sensitive to a substance called neuropeptide Y (NPY). If NPY is present in large amounts, an animal will eat until it cannot hold another bite (Woods et al., 2000). Incidentally, the hypothalamus also re-
Gastric balloon Record of breathing Record of hunger pangs Time record in minutes Record of stomach contractions
œ Figure 12.2 In Cannon’s early study of hunger, a simple apparatus was used to simultaneously record hunger pangs and stomach contractions.
(After Cannon, 1934.)
Hypothalamus
œ Figure 12.3 ...
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