Chapter 11: Motivation and Emotion

 

BRIEF CHAPTER OUTLINE

 

Motivation

Models of Motivation

                        The Evolutionary Model

                        The Drive Reduction Model

                        The Optimal Arousal Model

                        The Hierarchical Model

            Hunger: Survival of the Individual

                        The Biology of When We Eat

                        The Psychology of What We Eat

                        The Motive to be Thin and the Tendency Toward Obesity

            Sex: Survival of the Species

                        Human Sexual Response

                        The Biology of Sexual Behavior

                        Culture and Sexual Behavior

                        Gender and the Drive for Casual Sex

                        Sexual Orientation

            The Needs to Belong and to Excel

                        The Need to Belong: Affiliation

                        The Need to Excel: Achievement

Emotion

            Defining Emotion

            Types of Affect

            Emotions, Basic Emotions, and the Dimensions of Affect

            Self-Conscious Emotions

            Emotions as Evolutionary Adaptations

Emotion as a Process

            Appraisal in the Emotion Process

                        Regulation of Emotion

                        The Emotional Response

Psychology in the Real World: Social and Emotional Learning in Schools        

Breaking New Ground: The Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion

            How Culture Impacts Emotion Expression

            Emotion and the Brain

Gender and Emotion

Making Connections in Motivation and Emotion: Living a Satisfied Life

Chapter Review

EXTENDED CHAPTER OUTLINE

 

MOTIVATION

  • Motivation is the urge to move toward one’s goals.
  • Needs, drives, and incentives all contribute to motivation.
    • Needs are states of cellular or bodily deficiency that compel drives (i.e., they are biological).
      • Examples include the needs for water, food, and oxygen.
    • Drives are the perceived states of tension that occur when our bodies are deficient in some need. The deficiency creates a drive to alleviate the state (e.g., drink, eat, or breathe).
      • In this way, needs and drives push us.
      • Motivated behaviors, therefore, result from needs and drives.
  • An incentive is any external object or event that motivates behavior.  
    • Drives come from the body, whereas incentives come from the environment.

 

Models of Motivation

            The Evolutionary Model

    • Evolutionary theory looks at internal drives to explain why people do what they do.
    • Biologically speaking, the purpose of any living organism is to reproduce.  The major motives, then, all involve basic survival and reproduction needs: hunger, thirst, body-temperature regulation, oxygen, and sex.
    • Generally, we are unaware of the reasons for behavior related to these drives. We know only that we do something because it feels good and that we stop doing something if it feels bad.

The Drive Reduction Model

    • When our physiological systems become out of balance or depleted, we are driven to reduce this depleted state (Hull, 1943; Weisinger et al., 1993; McKinley et al., 2004).
    • We are driven to maintain homeostasis—psychological balance—around an optimal set point (the ideal fixed setting of a particular physiological system)
    • Sensory detectors tell the brain about the body’s current state and any changes that cause it to deviate from the set point. If our bodily states move too far from the set point, these mechanisms motivate us to take action.

The Optimal Arousal Model

    • We seek out stimulation and function best at an “optimal level of arousal.” The Yerkes-Dodson law states that both low arousal and high arousal lead to poor performance, whereas moderate levels of arousal lead to optimal performance (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908).
    • Humans are motivated to be in situations that are optimally arousing.
      • Sensory deprivation research involves having a person lie down on a bed or in a sensory deprivation (salt water) tank.  Findings indicate that people cannot remain in sensory deprivation for more than 2 to 3 days.  When people stayed for only a few days, “pathology of boredom” developed (Heron, 1957). People began to hallucinate, their cognitive ability and concentration suffered, and they developed childish emotional responses (Cheetham et al., 2007; Finnerty et al., 1999).
      • Nature-Nurture Pointer: When the brain is deprived of sensory stimulation, the brain region that processes that kind of sensory information shrinks.
    • Psychologists argue that needs such as curiosity, learning, interest, beauty-aesthetics, competence, challenge, flow states, and optimal experiences are motivated by the desire to be optimally aroused (Berlyne, 1960; Csikszentmihalyi, 1991; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Silvia, 2006).

The Hierarchical Model

    • The essence of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is that needs range from the most basic physiological necessities to the highest, most psychological need for growth and fulfillment.
      • At the lowest level are physiological needs (e.g., food, water, oxygen, and adequate body temperature).
      • The next level are safety needs (e.g., physical security, stability, dependency, protection, and freedom from threats such as war, assault, and terrorism).
      • At the third level are the love and belongingness needs (e.g., desire for friendship, sex, a mate and children, and to belong to a family or social group).
      • The fourth level is the need for esteem – to appreciate oneself and one’s worth and to be appreciated and respected by others.
      • The top level in the hierarchy is the need for self-actualization – the full realization of one’s potentials and abilities in life.
        • CONNECTION: What are some of the qualities of self actualizing people (see Chapter 15)?

 

Hunger: Survival of the Individual

  • The rate at which we consume energy is our metabolism. When our energy has been depleted, hunger drives us to replenish our store of energy by eating.
  • Nature-Nurture Pointer: Hunger involves internal biological processes interacting with external, environmental ones.

The Biology of When We Eat

    • Internal signals from the body control when we have the desire to eat or stop eating.
    • Drive reduction perspective: being hungry depends on how much food we have consumed recently and how much energy is available for organ function.
    • Four biological components: the stomach, the blood, the brain, and hormones and neurochemicals.
      • Stomach “growling” results from gastric secretions that are activated by the brain when we think of, see, or smell food. Hunger can also cause the stomach to contract. These contractions correspond with hunger pangs but they do not cause hunger.
      • The most important source of energy for the body is cellular glucose (a simple sugar in the blood that provides energy for cells throughout the body and brain). Our glucose level is monitored by the hypothalamus and, when it drops, the hypothalamus triggers the need to obtain food.
      • In fact, the hypothalamus regulates all basic physiological needs, including hunger.
      • At least four major hormones stimulate appetite: neuropeptide Y (NPY), orexin, ghrelin, and melanin (Williams et al., 2004).
      • At least four hormones suppress appetite: insulin, leptin, peptide YY (PYY), and cholecystokinin (CCK; Williams et al., 2004).
        • CONNECTION: Endocannabinoids and its relative, marijuana, are used medically to treat cancer patients who are on chemotherapy, because they stimulate appetite (see Chapter 6).

The Psychology of What We Eat

    • Nature-Nurture Pointer: Our preferences for particular foods have a biological basis, but are shaped by experience and cultural preferences and become psychological in nature.
    • Different cultures expose children to different flavors but exposure does not dictate preference. It takes about 8 to 10 exposures to a food before children will begin to like a food they initially disliked (Birch & Fischer, 1996; Birch & Marlin, 1982).
    • Cultures shape food preferences while people are young. Once a person develops a preference for a kind of food, she/he is motivated and even driven to eat that kind of food.

The Motive to Be Thin and the Tendency Toward Obesity

    • Fat provides a store of energy for future use. Evolutionarily this was very important because, in hunter-gatherer societies, you never knew where the next meal was coming from.  In modern industrialized societies this is not so much a problem. 
      • Discussion: Ask students why this change is related to obesity.  You can lead them by asking if they think fatty foods are hard to find, how portion sizes have changed in recent times, about the cost of fatty foods in comparison to healthy alternatives (even at local fast-food stops), and about lifestyle changes between “then” and “now.”
    • Ideas about beauty have also been changed as a result of having more food available than is needed.
      • Thinness defines attractiveness in most societies (75% of 14- to 21-year-old girls in the U.S. claim to be on a diet). This obsession with thinness can leads to eating disorders.
      • CONNECTION: Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are the most common eating disorders in the industrialized nations (see Chapter 12).
    • Body mass index (BMI) is determined by dividing weight by height to yield a weight-to-height ratio.
      • The ideal BMI range is between 20 and 25
      • Overweight individuals have a BMI between 26 and 29.
      • People who are obese have a BMI above 30.
    • Genes appear to be responsible for about 70% of adult weight (Allison et al., 1994; Hamer & Copland, 1998).
      • In some obese people, the gene that produces leptin is not functioning properly (Hamer & Copeland, 1998).
      • Genes also control the number of fat cells a person has. This number is set by childhood and adolescence, and does not change much after that (Spalding et al., 2008). Dieting does not change the number of fat cells we have – it reduces how much fat each cell stores.

 

Sex: Survival of the Species

  • At a species level, we have sex to propagate the species.  At the individual level, we have sex because it feels good.

Human Sexual Response

    • Sexual behavior is any action and/or arousal involving stimulation of the genitals, which may or may not involve orgasm.
    • Masters and Johnson (1966) were the first scientists to study the human sexual response systematically and directly.
      • Men and women go through four phases of sexual arousal but do so somewhat differently.
      • The four phases are excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
        • The major signs of the initial excitement phase are vaginal lubrication in the female and erection in the male.
        • In the second phase, plateau, excitement level remains high but is pre-orgasmic. In men, the plateau phase might be rather short, but orgasm almost always follows. In women, the plateau phase often lasts longer than in men and is not necessarily followed by orgasm.
        • An even more striking gender difference is the ability of women to have multiple orgasms. Men always have a refractory period immediately following orgasm, in which erection is lost and orgasm is not possible, but women may go on to have multiple orgasms.
    • More recent models of female sexual arousal point out that the initial sexual response in women involves more psychological processes than simply arousal and desire (Basson, 2001).
      • Desire and arousal do not happen spontaneously in many women, who often require the right balance of thoughts and feelings. These thoughts and feelings play off and feed arousal, which in turn lead to deeper feelings of intimacy and closeness.
      • Arousal continues to increase and may or may not lead to orgasm, but arousal and excitement are still important and meaningful even without orgasm (Basson, 2001).

The Biology of Sexual Behavior

    • Many brain regions involved in emotion are required for the earlier stages of sexual arousal, prior to orgasm.
    • The hypothalamus plays a crucial role in sexual behavior. The part of the hypothalamus involved in sexual behavior is larger in men than in women (Allen & Gorski, 2007).
    • Brain activity changes during orgasm. In fact, certain brain regions actually shut down.
      • In women, achieving a real orgasm always involves deactivation of brain regions involved with fear and anxiety in the amygdala and hippocampus, as well as parts of the cortex involved in consciousness.
      • Men show brain deactivation during orgasm but to the left amygdale (a smaller emotional region of the brain).
    • Testosterone, the major male sex hormone produced by the adrenal gland, controls sex drive in both men and women (Morris, Udry, Khandawood, & Dawood, 1987; Persky et al., 1978).
    • In women, there is some regular cyclical activity and interest in the course of the 28-day menstrual cycle.
      • Female-initiated sexual behavior peaks around ovulation and again before and after menstruation (Bullivant et al., 2004; Ford & Beach, 1951; Udry, Morris, & Waller, 1973).
      • The strongest cyclical effect for women occurs in relation to their fantasies involving men other than their regular sex partner (Buss, 2003). As women approach ovulation, the frequency and intensity of their fantasies involving sex with men other than their partner increase (Bullivant et al., 2004).

Culture and Sexual Behavior

    • Ford and Beach (1951) identified three kinds of societies in terms of sexual attitudes:
      • Restrictive societies restrict sex before and outside of marriage.
      • Semi-restrictive societies have formal prohibitions on pre- and extramarital sex that are not strictly enforced.
      • Permissive societies place few restrictions on sex.
    • Thirty years later, Broude and Greene (1980) conducted a similar study of non-Western cultures and found that for women, premarital sex was mildly to moderately disapproved of in 30% of the societies and strongly disapproved of in 26%. Extramarital sex was common among men in 69% of the cultures and among women in 57% of the cultures.

Gender and the Drive For Casual Sex

    • Research consistently shows that men are more willing and interested in casual sex than are women.
      • Clark and Hatfield (1989, 2003) had student assistants simply approach attractive members of the opposite sex on campus and ask them one of three questions: “Would you go out with me tonight?”; “Would you come back to my apartment tonight?”; and “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Three-quarters of the men responded that they were willing to have sex with a stranger of the opposite sex, but not one woman was willing to do so!
    • Parental investment theory argues that the cost of having sex is different for men and women. For men, the only assured contribution to parenthood is the act of sex itself. If a woman becomes pregnant, however, her contribution includes nine months of carrying the fetus, a good portion of which might involve pregnancy sickness; then there is the painful labor and delivery; and finally, there is approximately 18 years of caring for the child.

Sexual Orientation

    • Sexual orientation is our disposition to be attracted to either the opposite sex (heterosexual), the same sex (homosexual), or both sexes (bisexual).
    • Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin (1948) argued that sexual orientation exists on a continuum, from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual.
    • Between 1% to 5% of the adult male population and 1% to 3.5% of the adult female population classify themselves as predominantly homosexual (LeVay & Hamer, 1994; Tarmann, 2002).
    • For men, sexual orientation tends to be “either/or,” producing a dip between 2 and 4 on Kinsey’s 7-point scale (the “bisexual” range). For women, however, there is a more gradual decrease from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual, with more women identifying themselves as bisexual than men (Diamond, 2008; Hamer & Copeland, 1998; Rahman, 2005).
    • Nature-Nurture Pointer: Sexual orientation depends on both biological and social factors.
      • Research has revealed that individuals exposed to relatively high levels of testosterone in the womb are more likely to be attracted to women, whereas those exposed to relatively low levels of testosterone are more likely to be attracted to men.
      • The hypothalamus is substantially smaller in gay men than in straight men – it’s about the size of women’s.
      • Genetic studies of identical and fraternal twins indicate that, in men, 50% of sexual orientation is determined by genetics. For women, environmental factors such as being raised in the same household seem to have a strong influence on sexual orientation.
      • Social-environmental theories argue that sexual orientation is a social construction.  For example, child play, early peer relations, differences in how parents treat boys and girls, and gender identity are important factors in the development of sexual orientation.
      • Environmental theories are consistent with biological ones. Biology could start the development of sexual orientation, which in turn would be strengthened or discouraged by environmental factors.

 

The Needs to Belong and to Excel

  • Need for affiliation is the need for social contact and belonging.
  • Need for achievement is the need to excel, achieve, and to be competitive with others.

The Need to Belong: Affiliation

    • Humans are inherently social creatures who depend on others (most clearly at the beginning and ends of life).
    • Being rejected can be one of the more painful experiences in life. Baumeister and Leary (1995) reviewed evidence that lack of belongingness and being rejected can lead to health problems, developing eating disorders, depression, and aggression.  It can also lead to physical pain.
    • CONNECTIONS:  Humans need to connect. Infant attachment with a caregiver is crucial to healthy development (see Chapter 5).
    • CONNECTIONS: Connecting with others in our social world is so important that social exclusion physically hurts and activates pain regions in the brain involved in physical pain (see Chapter 14).

The Need to Excel: Achievement

    • Some people compete with other people and others compete more with themselves simply to do the best they can.
    • McClelland and Atkinson (1985) emphasized that achievement motivation is a desire to do things well and overcome difficulties and obstacles.  Those obstacles can only be measured in terms of one’s goals.
    • Atkinson (1964) argued that the tendency to achieve success is a function of three things:
      • Motivation to succeed is the extent to which you really want to be successful.
      • Expectation of success is an individual’s evaluation of the likelihood of succeeding at a task.
      • Incentive value of the success.  This stems from two factors.
        • Success at the task has to be important to you.
        • The more difficult the task and the lower the odds of succeeding at it, the more it will mean to you if you do succeed.

 

EMOTION

  • Basic drives differ from emotions in important ways.
    • Drives are linked with very specific needs; emotions are not (Tomkins, 1962; 1981).
    • Emotions can override biological drives (Tomkins, 1962).

 

Defining Emotion

  • Emotions are triggered by situations that are relevant to our personal goals, physical safety, or well-being.

Types of Affect

    • Affect refers to a variety of emotional phenomena, including emotions, moods, and affective traits.
      • Emotions are brief, acute changes to experience and physiology that result from a response to a meaningful situation in the person’s environment.
        • CONNECTION: We tend to remember emotional events better than non-emotional events (see Chapter 7).
      • Moods are transient changes in affect that fluctuate throughout the day or over several days. They are experienced physiologically and psychologically and they tend to last longer than most emotions (Ekman, 1984; Davidson, 1994; Hedges, Jandorf, & Stone, 1985).
      • Affective traits are enduring aspects of our personalities, which set the threshold for the occurrence of particular emotional states (Ekman, 1984; Lazarus, 1991; Rosenberg, 1998).

Emotions, Basic Emotions, and the Dimensions of Affect

    • Basic emotions are emotions common to all humans and a product of our evolutionary past.  They are anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
    • Basic emotions are categories or groups of related emotions (they are an emotion family).
    • Emotions can also be considered states that vary in their degree of pleasantness and arousal.

Self-Conscious Emotions

    • Self-conscious emotions (e.g., pride, humiliation, embarrassment, etc.) are emotions that occur as a function of how well we live up to our expectations, the expectations of others, or the rules set by society.
    • Pride
      • Two kinds of pride:
        • Authentic pride is the pride we feel in some sense of accomplishment. 
        • Hubristic pride is a more general sense of pride in oneself.
      • Pride’s expression involves body movements, a low intensity smile, and head tilted upward with slightly expanded chest.
    • Embarrassment
      • Embarrassment involves some laying bare of the self or aspect of the self, without intending to let others in.
      • There is a distinct self-consciousness to embarrassment, as if people have violated some social rule and been caught in the act.
      • People often get giggly when embarrassed, and act as if they want to make amends for some sort of social transgression (Keltner, 1995; Tangney et al., 1996).
      • The facial expression of embarrassment serves to appease and placate those who have seen one’s mistake.

Emotions as Evolutionary Adaptations

    • From an evolutionary perspective, emotions are adaptations.
    • Emotions bring our physiological systems together to help us deal efficiently with critical situations (Levenson, 1988; Mauss et al., 2005; Rosenberg & Ekman, 1994).
    • The broaden and build model postulates that positive emotions broaden our cognitive perspective, making our thinking more expansive and enabling the acquisition of new skills.  Negative emotions promote a narrow, vigilant way of looking at the world.
      • Support
        • When people are in positive moods they perform poorly on tasks of selective attention that require a narrow focus compared to people in sad or neutral moods, and they perform better on tasks that require a broader attentional focus (Rowe, Hirsch, & Anderson, 2007).
        • Positive emotions also enhance attention to visual information in the outer edges of a visual display, compared to the center (Wadlinger & Isaacowitz, 2006).

 

Emotion as a Process

  • Emotions create changes in experience, thought, physiology, and behavior.
  • An emotion begins with an antecedent event, a situation that may lead to an emotional response.
  • The person evaluates the event to determine whether it is potentially harmful or beneficial. Depending on the results of that appraisal, he or she may experience an emotional response.
  • The emotional response, in turn, produces changes in physiology, behavior and expressions, and subjective experience of the event.
  • Once we generate emotions, we sometimes attempt to modify them, regulate them, or make them go away, which in turn involves new appraisals and new responses.
  • Nature-Nurture Pointer: Our appraisal of events leads to emotional experiences, which in turn influence how we respond to new situations.

Appraisal in the Emotion Process

    • Appraisal is the evaluation of a situation with respect to how relevant it is to one’s own welfare (Lazarus, 1991).   Most of the time it occurs outside of awareness.
    • Emotions occur only in response to events that have relevance to us at that moment.
    • The type of appraisal that occurs determines the type of the emotion generated.

 

 

Regulation of Emotion

    • Emotion regulation refers to the cognitive and behavioral efforts people use to modify their emotions.
    • One example of emotion regulation is reappraisal, in which people reevaluate their views of an event so that a different emotion results.
    • Expressive-suppression is the deliberate attempt to inhibit the outward manifestation of an emotion.

 

Psychology in the Real World:  Social and Emotional Learning in Schools

  • Psychologists and educators argue that the development of skills for recognizing and regulating emotions is just as important to success in life as is academic achievement.
  • These social-emotional learning (SEL) programs constitute an important application of the psychology of emotion to the real world.
  • PATHS (Providing Alternative THinking Strategies), a program developed by Greenberg and Kusché (1998), gives teachers a detailed curriculum for improving children’s emotional awareness and regulation skills and enhancing their social competence.
    • Example exercise:  Children are told about a turtle that gets into trouble with other turtles in interpersonal and academic situations because he does not stop to think. He gets some help from “wise old turtle,” who tells him that when he just can’t handle his anger and feels aggressive, he should go into his shell and consider what the best way to respond might be.
      • Children learn to time themselves out when they get upset by “playing turtle” and thinking about what to do next.
  • PATHS leads to improvements in social and emotional skills in high-risk children, reduction of aggressive behaviors in both normal and special-needs children, fewer depressive symptoms in special-needs kids, and improvements in classroom functioning (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 1999a, 1999b; Kam, Greenberg, & Kusché, 2004).
  • Head Start has also applied the theory and methods of emotion research to decrease behavior problems in schools, and initial results are promising (Izard, Trentacosta, King, & Mostow, 2004).
  • A large-scale meta-analysis of more than 300 studies shows that SEL programs significantly improve children’s academic performance (Weissberg & Durlak, 2005). Specifically, children who participate in these programs have better attendance, less disruptive classroom behavior, like school more, and have higher GPAs.

 

The Emotional Response

    • Emotional responses include physiological, behavioral/expressive, and subjective changes.
      • Physiological Changes
        • Emotions create physiological changes (e.g., increases in heart rate and rate of respiration).
        • CONNECTION: The autonomic nervous system both activates and relaxes physiological systems (see Chapter 3).
        • Once elicited, emotions engage the ANS almost immediately.
          • For emotions that are concerned with survival and protection from harm, such as fear, the sympathetic branch of the ANS is activated.
          • Positive emotions engage the parasympathetic branch of the ANS. They apparently serve to return the body to a more relaxed, responsive state (Levenson, 2003).
      • Behavioral-Expressive Changes
        • Emotions create expressive changes, such as facial expressions and changes in vocal intonation and volume, as well as behavioral tendencies toward particular types of action (Frijda, 1986).
        • Humans are predisposed to respond to faces.
          • Newborn babies mimic the facial expressions of adults.
          • At 5 months, babies can discriminate between different types of facial expressions of emotion.
          • By one year of age, infants rely on the faces of their caregivers to convey important information about how they might act.
        • The facial action coding system (FACS) is a widely used method by which coders score all observable muscular movements that are possible in the human face (Ekman & Friesen, 1978).
        • The most recognizable facial expression of emotion is the smile of genuine happiness.
          • A smile that both pulls up the lip corners diagonally and contracts the band of muscles that circle the eye to create crow’s feet and raise the cheeks is known as a Duchenne smile. A Duchenne smile is a genuine smile that expresses true enjoyment.
        • The voice is very sensitive to emotional fluctuations because the vocal cords are innervated by the autonomic nervous system.
          • The major vocal indicators of emotional arousal are changes in the frequency of vocal sounds (pitch) and vocal fold vibration (quivering).
      • Subjective Changes in Emotion
        • Subjective experience of emotion is the quality of our conscious experience during an emotional response.
          • This is what we refer to when we talk about how an emotion “feels.” It draws from the experience of body changes as well as the numerous effects of emotions on cognitions, as emotions can activate associations with images and memories of significant events.
          • The James-Lange theory of emotion says that it is our perception of the physiological changes that accompany emotions that creates the subjective emotional experience.

 

Breaking New Ground: The Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion

·         See separate section for detailed explanation.

 

Making Connections: Living a Satisfied Life

See separate section for detailed explanation.

 

 

KEY TERMS

 

achievement motivation: a desire to do things well and overcome difficulties and obstacles.

action tendencies: particular behavioral impulses that accompany certain emotions.

affective traits: stable predispositions toward certain types of emotional responses; they are enduring aspects of our personalities that set the threshold for the occurrence of particular emotional states.

antecedent event: part of the emotion process; this is a situation that may lead to an emotional response.

appraisal: the evaluation of a situation with respect to how relevant it is to one’s own welfare; it drives the process by which emotions are elicited.

basic emotions: a set of emotions that are common to all humans; includes anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

broaden and build model: Fredrickson’s model for positive emotions, which posits that they widen our cognitive perspective and help us acquire useful life skills.

culturally relative: the idea that behavior varies across cultures and can only be understood within the social laws, rules, or norms of the culture in which they occur.

display rules: learned norms or rules, often taught very early, about when it is appropriate to show certain expressions of emotion and to whom one should show them.

drives: the perceived states of tension that occur when our bodies are deficient in some need.

Duchenne smile: a smile that expresses true enjoyment. These smiles involve both the muscles that pull up the lip corners diagonally and those that contract the band of muscles encircling the eye to create crow’s feet and raise the cheeks.

emotion regulation: the cognitive and behavioral efforts people use to modify their emotions.

emotional response: includes the physiological, behavioral/expressive, and subjective changes that occur when emotions are generated.

emotions: brief, multifaceted changes to experience and physiology that result from a response to a meaningful situation in the person’s environment.

expressive-suppression: an example of a response-focused strategy for regulating emotion involving the deliberate attempt to inhibit the outward manifestation of an emotion.

facial action coding system (FACS): a widely used method for measuring all observable muscular movements that are possible and observable in the human face.

glucose: a simple sugar in the blood that provides energy for cells throughout the body, including the brain.

homeostasis: the process by which all organisms work to maintain physiological equilibrium or balance around an optimal set point.

incentive: simply any external object or event that motivates behavior.

James-Lange theory of emotion: says that our perception of the physiological changes that accompany emotions create the subjective emotional experience.

Life satisfaction: the overall evaluation we have of our lives; it is an aspect of subjective well-being.

moods: affective states that operate in the background of consciousness, which tend to last longer than most emotions.

motivation: the urge to move toward one’s goals; it gives us an energetic push toward accomplishing tasks.

needs: states of cellular or bodily deficiency that compel drives.

neuro-cultural theory of emotion: Ekman’s theory that accounts for the fact that certain aspects of emotion, such as the facial expressions and physiological changes, are similar in all humans, whereas others, such as how people appraise situations and regulate their emotional expressions in front of others, vary from one culture to another.

reappraisal: an antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategy, in which one reevaluates how one has viewed an event so that a different emotion results.

self-actualization: the full realization of one’s potentials and abilities in life. According to Maslow, this motive sits atop the hierarchy of needs.

self-conscious emotions: occur as a function of how well we live up to our expectations, the expectations of others, or the rules set by society.

set point: the ideal fixed setting of a particular physiological system, such as internal body temperature.

sexual behavior: actions and arousal involving stimulation of the genitals, which may or may not involve orgasm.

sexual orientation: our disposition to be attracted to either the opposite sex (heterosexual), the same sex (homosexual) or both sexes (bisexual).

subjective experience of emotion: the changes in the quality of our conscious experience that occur during emotional responses.

subjective well-being: consists of life satisfaction, domain satisfactions, and positive and negative affect.

universal: we use this term to refer to a behavior that is common to all human beings and can be seen in cultures all over the world.

Yerkes-Dodson law: the idea that both low arousal and high arousal lead to poor performance, whereas moderate levels of arousal lead to optimal performance, depicted visually as a graph between performance (y-axis) and arousal (x-axis) that has an inverted-U shape.

MAKING THE CONNECTIONS

 

MOTIVATION

CONNECTION: What are some of the qualities of self actualizing people? (See Chapter 15.)

  • Suggested Site:  This site on Maslow’s theory outlines some of Maslow’s concepts of self actualizers: http://www.abraham-maslow.com/m_motivation/Self-Actualization.asp.  Have students come up with their own list and use the information on this site to help guide the discussion.  You can then ask them which people throughout history would likely be labeled as “self-actualized.”  Common examples are Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., etc.

CONNECTION: Endocannabinoids and its relative, marijuana, are used medically to treat cancer patients who are on chemotherapy because they stimulate appetite (see Chapter 6).

  • Discussion: Ask students their opinion on whether marijuana should be legalized.  Direct the conversation around the medical pros and cons of the drug (see http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/ for help).

CONNECTION: Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are the most common eating disorders in the industrialized nations (see Chapter 12).

CONNECTION:  Humans need to connect. Infant attachment with a caregiver is crucial to healthy development (see Chapter 5).

  • Discussion: Remind students about Harlow’s research on attachment (you can use this video clip as a refresher: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsA5Sec6dAI) and ask students how people with different attachment patterns might vary in their need to belong.

CONNECTION: Connecting with others in our social world is so important that social exclusion physically hurts and activates pain regions in the brain involved in physical pain (see Chapter 14).

 

EMOTION

CONNECTION: We tend to remember emotional events better than nonemotional events (see Chapter 7).

CONNECTION: The autonomic nervous system both activates and relaxes physiological systems (see Chapter 3).

  • Discussion: Students may have a hard time differentiating the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.  Tell them to imagine that they are driving down the road in a rain storm when they suddenly see break lights from the car in front of them.  Ask them to explain their reaction.  Typically, their hear rate increases, they hold their breath, their mouth gets dry.  These are all the result of their sympathetic nervous system.  Their body is having “sympathy” for their situation and preparing them to react (slam on the breaks, brace for impact, etc.).  Now, have them imagine how they would feel when they are able to avoid the accident.  Their heart rate slows, their breathing returns to normal, etc.  This is the parasympathetic nervous system.  Like a “parachute,” it calms the free fall and returns you to a normal state.

 

Breaking New Ground: The Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion

CONNECTION: The prefrontal cortex maintains information in working memory, coordinates thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals, orchestrates future planning, regulates social behavior, and is involved in the expression of certain aspects of personality (see Chapter 3).

  • Discussion: Remind students about the case of Phineas Gage and his change in behavior following his accident with a tampering rod. 

CONNECTION: When you see another person you care about get hurt physically, it creates the same activity in the insula that you experience with feelings of your own physical pain (see Chapter 14).

 

Making Connections in Motivation and Emotion: Living a Satisfied Life

  • Life satisfaction is the overall evaluation we have of our lives.
  • Subjective well-being includes satisfaction in different domains, such as career and social networks and the balance between positive and negative affect in life.

Motivation and Happiness

  • Going back to Maslow’s hierarchical model of motivation, both basic needs and the higher-level needs contribute to life satisfaction.
    • Basic Needs and Happiness
      • Basic needs must be met for a person to be relatively satisfied with life, but more money does not lead to greater happiness.
        • Industrialized countries have higher levels of well-being than non-industrialized countries.
        • At a national level, in the early stages of a country’s development out of poverty, increased income makes people a bit happier with their lives. After a relatively modest level of income, however, money makes little difference and may even be a hindrance to happiness.
        • At the individual level, having more money does make people slightly happier, but this is only true for those driven by money.
      • Diet and weight also relate to overall happiness in various ways.
        • First, having a healthy diet is associated with high life satisfaction, but being overweight is associated with low life satisfaction.
        • Long-term weight loss is related to increases in life satisfaction.
        • Set point theory of well-being proposes that people’s overall sense of happiness and well-being is stable and more or less set by genetic and stable personality factors.
        • Having a satisfying sex life can be a source of overall happiness and well-being for people, just as problems in one’s sex life can lead to overall problems in one’s well-being.
          • Subjective well-being and sexual satisfaction were highest in European and European-based cultures.
          • For gay men, sexual satisfaction and overall life satisfaction were positively correlated, but this was not true for lesbians.
    • Higher Needs and Happiness
      • Once a person or a country crosses the $12,000/per person/year GNP, close relationships and valuing family, friends, and people matter most for overall levels of happiness (Headey, 2008).
        • People who value non-competitive goals, such as spending time with a spouse, children, and friends tend to become happier and more satisfied with life over time.
          • People who most value competitive achievement goals, such as career advancement and material gains, actually decrease in happiness over time.
        • People who are curious and interested in exploring novel and challenging situations tend to be happier than people who would rather stick with what they know and not challenge themselves with new tasks and experiences (Diener et al., 1999; Gallagher & Lopez, 2007; Headey, 2008).

Emotions, Happiness, and Meaning in Life

  • Positive emotions can act as a buffer against long-term negative emotions.
  • If we bring some degree of life satisfaction and positive emotions with us as we go through our more trying and tragic life experiences, we are more likely to emerge happier and healthier than if we don’t.
  • Similarly, people who find meaning in their lives in general and even in negative and tragic experiences are likely to be happier in life than those who do not see meaning and purpose in life’s difficult and unpleasant experiences (King et al., 2006).

 

 

NATURE-NURTURE POINTERS

 

MOTIVATION

Nature-Nurture Pointer: When the brain is deprived of sensory stimulation, the brain region that processes that kind of sensory information shrinks.

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Hunger involves internal biological processes interacting with external, environmental ones.

·         Discussion: Ask students about their experiences with their parents taking them to dinner.  Mom and Dad take them out and, chances are, they order vast quantities of food so that they can take home the leftovers.  After dinner, when they are very full, they go home and what is the first thing they do?  They look in the refrigerator to see if the “food fairy” (or their roommate) has delivered anything new.  Why does this happen?  Because that is their social, environmental cue.  Come home.  Look in the  refrigerator. 

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Our preferences for particular foods have a biological basis, but are shaped by experience and cultural preferences and become psychological in nature.

·         Discussion: Ask students about their favorite foods.  When did they first try them?  How many times did they try them before the food became a favorite?  Ask if there are any foods that they hated when they initially tried them but now they love. 

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Sexual orientation depends on both biological and social factors.

·         Discussion: Sexual orientation has been a source of discrimination for some time.  Ask students to discuss who is most likely to be prejudiced – someone who believes that sexual orientation is biological or someone who believes it is a choice.

 

EMOTION

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Our appraisal of events leads to emotional experiences, which in turn influence how we respond to new situations.

·         Discussion: Ask students to imagine they are walking down a street late at night by themselves.  Suddenly, they hear footsteps behind them.  The steps grow louder and faster.  How do they feel?  If they appraise the event as dangerous, this will lead to the emotional experience of fear, which might lead them to run away or scream.  If they then realize that it is a jogger out for a run, they may feel relief and slow their pace.

 

Breaking New Ground: The Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion

Nature-Nurture Pointer: When and how we express emotion is a function of both biological and cultural forces.

·         Discussion: Ask students how these research findings might be related to emotIcons used when IM’ing, blogging, etc.  See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070404162321.htm for more details.

 

Making Connections: Brain Injury and Consciousness

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Brain injury can affect many different aspects of consciousness.

·         Discussion: Talk to students about the case of Terri Schiavo. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8225637/) and ask them if they felt that it was right for her to be removed from life support.

 

Breaking New Ground: The Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion

·         In the late 1960s, Paul Ekman went to a remote culture to find out whether facial expressions of emotion were universal or culturally specific.

Emotion Expression: Culturally Determined or Universal?

·         Anthropologists proposed that facial expressions of emotion were culturally relative; that is, expressions varied across cultures and could only be understood within the social laws, rules, or norms of the culture in which they occurred.

·         However, there was also a high level of consensus on the meaning of facial expressions of emotion across numerous cultural groups in several studies supported.  This consensus supported Darwin’s (1872) assertion that the facial expressions of certain “basic” emotions are universal; that is, common to all human beings.

o       Tomkins showed people numerous photographs of European Americans posing emotions and asked them to decide which emotion the person in the picture may have been feeling. They obtained pretty strong evidence of agreement on the emotional meaning of those expressions (Tomkins & McCarter, 1964).

o       Ekman and Friesen showed Tomkins’ pictures to people in the U.S., Japan, Argentina, and Chile, and found a high degree of consensus on the meanings of a core set of facial expressions of emotion (Ekman & Friesen, 1969).

·         One problem with these studies on emotion recognition, however, is that they each relied on people in literate, industrialized cultures. Ekman knew he needed to collect data from preliterate people, who were isolated from Western cultural influence if he wanted to show that consistency in certain facial expressions of emotion were recognized universally and not a product of culture.

Evidence of Universality in Emotion Expression

·         Ekman showed members of the Fore tribe from Papua New Guinea pictures of facial expressions of emotion and find out which emotions, if any, they saw in those faces.

·         He asked people to make up stories to explain why the person in picture would make such a face. To Ekman’s dismay, the New Guineans found it very difficult to make up stories about the pictures, so he was not able to get a large sample of data. The data were promising (and were published) but they did not yield the high consensus he’d expected (Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969).

·         Ekman returned to New Guinea and this time presented stories about emotional situations to New Guineans and showed them a set of three photographed faces per story. The participants were asked which of the three faces matched the story. When he used this method, the degree of consensus improved greatly over that in the previous study (Ekman & Friesen, 1971).

o       The one exception was that the New Guineans had some difficulty distinguishing fear when it was shown with photographs of surprise and sadness.

Emotion Research After the Findings on Universality

·         By the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, emotion became one of the most widely studied topics in all of psychology (Rosenberg, 2005).

·         Ekman and his colleagues developed the objective coding system of the face, FACS.

·         Ekman (1972) proposed the neuro-cultural theory of emotion, which accounted for both universality and cultural differences. It puts forth the fact that certain aspects of emotion, such as the facial expressions and physiological changes of basic emotions, are similar in all humans, whereas other aspects, such as how people appraise situations and regulate their emotional expressions in front of others, vary from one culture to another.

How Culture Impacts Emotion Expression

·         Display rules are learned norms or rules, often taught very early, about when it is appropriate to show certain expressions of emotion and to whom one should show them.

·         The first empirical support for display rules came from a study comparing disgust expressions in American and Japanese students (Ekman, 1972; Friesen, 1972).

o       Both groups viewed a film showing a very graphic medical procedure, but in two different conditions: one in the presence of an authority figure and the other alone. When alone, both groups felt perfectly comfortable expressing the obvious response: disgust. When in the presence of an authority figure, however, the Japanese students did not show disgust, and they masked their responses with non-Duchenne (fake) smiles. American students, however, showed about the same level of disgust in both conditions.

·         People posing with fear faces actually see better in terms of tests of peripheral vision and quickness of eye movements.

·         Nature-Nurture Pointer: When and how we express emotion is a function of both biological and cultural forces.

Emotion and the Brain

·         Affective neuroscience studies which structures and systems are involved in the emotion process.

·         There is no main emotion center in the brain, but there are some key areas for emotion processing – most notably, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.

o       The amygdala: The amygdala has connections with the hypothalamus (controls the ANS); the hippocampus (plays a crucial role in memory); the thalamus (which contains nuclei that receive information from the sense organs); and the cerebral cortex. The amygdala has a specialized function for noticing fear-relevant information (Öhman, 2002; Phelps & LeDoux, 2005).

o       People with damaged amygdalas do not show normal physiological reactions under fear conditioning. They tend to trust faces that most people find to be untrustworthy, and have trouble recognizing facial expressions of fear, especially in the eyes (Adolphs et al., 1994, 2005; Adolphs, Tranel, & Damasio, 1998; Phelps & LeDoux, 2005).

o       Other regions of the amygdale are more involved in anger and rage (Panksepp, 2000). In fact, tumors of the amygdala have been found in violent criminals, such as Charles Whitman, who climbed the tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and, in a 90-minute shooting spree, killed 19 people and wounded 38.

o       The Prefrontal Cortex: The amygdala is more involved in determining whether a situation merits an emotional response at all, while the prefrontal cortex may be more involved in determining options for response or reappraisal. The prefrontal cortex plays a role in the appraisal and reappraisal of emotion, and damage to left prefrontal cortex results in depression.

o       CONNECTION: The prefrontal cortex maintains information in working memory, coordinates thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals, orchestrates future planning, regulates social behavior, and is involved in the expression of certain aspects of personality (see Chapter 3).

o       Other Brain Regions in Emotion:

o       The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is active when people either recall or imagine emotional experiences.

o       The left prefrontal cortex is more involved in positive emotions than the right.

o       Nerve fibers that run through the hypothalamus to a nearby brain region appear to be a pleasure or reward center.

o       The insula is the brain structure most involved in interoception – the perception of sensations arising within the body.

o       CONNECTION: When you see another person you care about get hurt physically, it creates the same activity in the insula that you experience with feelings of your own physical pain (see Chapter 14).

Gender and Emotion

·         Women do outperform men in accurately recognizing facial expressions of emotion.

·         Men’s and women’s ratings of their emotional experience are very similar. The sexes differ most in how they describe their emotional experiences in words and in the frequency of smiling.

·         Women talk more about emotions than men do.

·         Studies of facial behavior during emotional experiences find no consistent differences between men and women, but women generally smile more often than men.

·         The similarities between the sexes in terms of emotion and the brain are far more impressive than the differences, but exposure to pictures of animal or human attacks provokes greater amygdala activation in men than in women.

 

INNOVATIVE INSTRUCTION

 

Additional Discussion Topics

1. Ask students what motivates them.  Is it food? (It usually is!) Sex? Understanding? Love?  Ask them what motivates them most.  If they are having a hard time getting started, talk to them about how clubs and organizations draw new membership.  They have events that advertise free food!  How do apartments draw in new tenants?  They offer cuts in rent or a month free.  How do commercials get you to buy products?  They promise sex and love.  In other words, these organizations appeal to our basic needs. 

2. One argument against Maslow’s hierarchy is that the same behavior could serve to fulfill different needs for different people.  For example, sex.  Sex is clearly a physiological need but for some it can serve other functions: love, safety, and esteem.  Have students think of other behaviors that may fulfill multiple needs on the hierarchy.

3. Ask students to think about how mood affects daily behaviors – like helpfulness.  If they are in a good mood and someone is trying to merge into their lane, what do they do?  What about if someone yells for them to hold the elevator?  Generally, if you’re in a good mood, you are more helpful (you let people into your lane and frantically press the “open door” button or put your foot in the doorway to keep the elevator open).  If you’re in a bad mood, though, you are less helpful (speeding up to prevent the merge and actively pushing the “close door” button).

4. Ask students how they would go about applying concepts of emotional regulation to schools of different socioeconomical statuses.

5. Ask students what would make them happy.  Winning the lottery?  Finding true love?  Getting straight A’s?  Talk to them about the predictors of happiness outlined in the “Motivation and Happiness” section of their textbook.

6. Ask students if they think men and women are different when it comes to emotion.  Do women feel more than men or just differently, or is there a difference at all?

 

Activities

1.  Have students keep a journal for a day on their different needs as they relate to Maslow’s hierarchy.  Have them document which needs are most fulfilled at various times of the day (maybe every three hours from when they wake up to when they go to sleep).  Which needs are different behaviors aiming to fulfill?  Have them make a note of what happens when lower-level needs demand their attention (e.g., if they are studying and working on their esteem needs, what happens when they get hungry or tired?). 

2.   Show students the following TAT image: http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/morris3/chapter10/medialib/lgimages/MO469FD.GIF.  Have them write down a story about the image.  Ask them to share their stories with the class.  Explain that using TAT images like this one measures achievement motivation (Tuerlinckx, De Boeck, & Lens, 2002). 

3.  Ask half of the class to suck on their pencil/pen for one minute.  Ask the other half to bite on their pen (held horizontally) for one minute.  After the minute has passed, ask them to indicate their mood on a scale of 1 (highly depressed) to 10 (ecstatic). Discuss the difference.  (See Strack, Martin, and Leonard [1988]).

4.  Show students the following image: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/morris/posts/27morris_ekman_cd.jpg and ask them which person is showing a Duchenne smile.

5.  Show students the following site: http://www.jaschahoffman.com/ekmanLight.jpg.  This is from the South Fore of New Guinnea.  Ask them to identify the emotions in each face. Compare their abilities to this image: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/psychology/rmk/T7/ekman.jpg.  They should find both equally simple.  Use this to discuss universality in emotional detection.

 

Suggested Films

1.      Floatation tanks and sensory deprivation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5oRl99BEDA 

  1. Charles Whitman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTU5lPzKvjI  
  2. Good Will Hunting (1997) is a good example of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 
  3. Anger Management (2003)
  4. Anorexia help commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94c43AlwLKo

 

 

Suggested Websites

  1. National Institute of Mental Health – Eating Disorders: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/eating-disorders/complete-publication.shtml
  2. “Irish Men Becoming Gym Addicts”: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article4596896.ece  
  3. Eating Disorders.com: http://www.eating-disorder.com/
  4. Mayo Clinic – Eating Disorders: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/eating-disorders/DS00294
  5. Example of a pro-ana website: http://community.livejournal.com/proanorexia
  6. Phineas Gage: http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/phineas-gage
  7. Time Magazine: Target: Masters and Johnson: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,924383,00.html
  8. The Search for Universals in Human Emotion: Photographs from the New Guinea Expedition - http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.jaschahoffman.com/ekmanLight.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.jaschahoffman.com/&h=2100&w=1482&sz=196&hl=en&start=4&um=1&usg=__EoPntXzEkf3zl3ycdyt2veK9O00=&tbnid=a6Nw8FqbqbXpfM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=106&prev=/images%3Fq%3DEkman%26ndsp%3D20%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

 

Suggested Readings

Atkinson, J.W. (1981). Studying personality in the context of an advanced motivational

psychology. American Psychologist, 36, 117-128.

Elliot, A. J. & Church, M.A. (1997). A hierarchical model of approach and avoidance achievement motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 218-232.

Ekman, P. (1992). Are there basic emotions? Psychological Review, 99, 550-553.

Fridlund, A. J. (1991). Evolution and facial action in reflex, social motive, and paralanguage.

Biological Psychology, 32, 3-100.

Furnham, A., Kirkaldy, B.D., & Lynn, R. (1996). Attitudinal correlates of national wealth.

Personality and Individual Differences, 21, 345-353.

Harackiewicz, J.M., Barron, K.E., Carter, S.M., Lehto, A.T., & Elliot, A.J. (1997). Predictors

and consequences of achievement goals in the college classroom: Maintaining interest

and making the grade. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 1284-1295.

Izard, C. E. (1992). Basic emotions, relations among emotions, and emotion-cognition relations. Psychological Review, 99, 561-565.

Maclim, G.L. (2007).  Practitioner’s Guide to Emotional Regulation in School-Aged Children. New York: Springer.

Masters, W.H., Johnson, V.E., & Kolodny, R.C. (1986). Masters and Johnson on Sex and Human Loving. Boston: Little & Brown.

McClelland, D. C. (1985). How motives, skills, and values determine what people do. American

Psychologist, 40, 812-825.

Strack, F., Martin, L.L., & Stepper, S. (1988).  Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 545(5), 768 – 777.

Tuerlinckx, F., De Boeck, P., & Lens, W. (2002). Measuring needs with the Thematic Apperception Test: A psychometric study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 448-461.