Motivation and Emotion
Motivation explains why behaviour starts, persists and stops; emotion explains the arousal and feeling accompanying it. Questions pair each theory with its author and then ask you to apply it to a realistic situation.
Motivation concepts
- Cycle: need → drive → behaviour → goal → need reduction.
- Intrinsic motivation (interest in the activity itself) versus extrinsic (external reward); heavy external reward can undercut intrinsic interest.
- Types: physiological (hunger, thirst, sleep) and psychological (achievement, affiliation, power, curiosity).
Theories
- Instinct - McDougall; drive-reduction - Hull, homeostasis.
- Arousal - Yerkes–Dodson: moderate arousal is optimal for complex tasks, higher arousal for simple ones.
- Maslow's hierarchy: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualisation (later self-transcendence); order is flexible in practice.
- Achievement motivation - McClelland's nAch; high scorers prefer moderately difficult tasks.
- Self-determination - autonomy, competence, relatedness.
Emotion
- Components: physiological arousal, subjective feeling, cognitive appraisal, expressive behaviour.
- James–Lange: bodily change first, feeling follows. Cannon–Bard: arousal and emotion occur together. Schachter–Singer two-factor: arousal plus a cognitive label. Lazarus: appraisal precedes emotion. Facial feedback: expressions shape feelings; Ekman reports universal basic emotions.
Worked example
Before a board exam your heart races and you think, “I am going to fail.” The same unexplained arousal, labelled negatively, becomes anxiety - the two-factor account. Relabelling it as “I am ready” or slowing breathing changes the label and the arousal, and so changes the emotion experienced.
Traps
- James–Lange runs “I tremble, therefore I am afraid”, not the reverse.
- Maslow's hierarchy is not a rigid ladder; needs operate together.
- Emotion and motivation overlap but are not identical.