MAE - Motivation and Emotion Module Overview

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Motivation and Emotion

Motivation and emotionWhat makes you act the way you do? Why do you do or neglect schoolwork? Why do you obey or talk back to your parents? What makes you eat the foods you do? Your motivations and emotions influence your behaviors every moment of the day. Psychologists have developed theories to explain our motivations and emotions, but there is not a perfect consensus amongst psychologists about how these things work. This unit explains how motivation and emotion influence behavior and how our behavior can influence our emotion. A thorough understanding of these topics will serve to help you understand yourself and those around you every day, giving you a better chance of choosing your own responses to life instead of reacting blindly.

Essential Questions

  • What are the basic motivational concepts?
  • How does motivation influence your daily decisions?
  • What are the major theories related to motivation?
  • What are the major theories related to emotion?
  • What factors influence a person's emotional state?

Key Words

  1. Motivation - a need or desire that energizes and directs behavior
  2. Instinct - a complex behavior that is rigidly patterned throughout a species and is not learned
  3. Drive Reduction Theory - the theory that a psychological need creates an aroused tension state (a drive) that motivates an organism to satisfy the need
  4. Drive - an aroused state that arises from a need and motivates an organism to act to meet the need
  5. Homeostasis - a tendency to maintain a balanced or constant internal state; the regulation of any aspect of body chemistry, such as blood glucose, around a particular level
  6. Optimal Arousal Theory - humans are motivated to maintain a comfortable level of arousal
  7. Yerkes Dodson Law - notes that high arousal inhibits the ability to do well on difficult tasks and enhances the ability to do well on simple tasks
  8. Incentive Motivation - when behavior is pulled by a desire (instead of pushed by a need)
  9. Incentive - a positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates behavior
  10. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - the theory that humans must fulfill physiological needs before working on higher‐level needs that culminate in the achievement of self-actualization
  11. Extrinsic motivation - when outside rewards prompt people to act
  12. Intrinsic motivation - when internal rewards prompt people to act
  13. Glucose - the form of sugar that circulates in the blood and provides the major source of energy for body tissues; low glucose levels lead to increased feelings of hunger  
  14. Hypothalamus - the brain structure that regulates feelings of hunger and fullness
  15. Appetite Hormones - chemicals in the bloodstream that create feelings of hunger or fullness
  16. Set Point - the point at which an individual's "weight thermostat" is supposedly set; when the body falls below this weight, an increase in hunger and lowered metabolic rate may act to restore the lost weight
  17. Basal Metabolic Rate - the body's resting rate of energy expenditure
  18. Emotion - a response involving physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience
  19. James-Lange Theory - the theory that explains there is a physical response that leads to an emotional state    
  20. Cannon-Bard Theory - the theory that an emotion‐arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers physiological response and the subjective experience of emotion
  21. Two Factor Theory - Schachter‐Singer's theory that a person's physical state causes them to label arousal as a specific emotion  
  22. Spillover Effect - the tendency of one person's emotions to affect the emotions of the people around them; also refers to the way arousal from one event can affect an emotional reaction to another event
  23. Eckman's Emotional Expression - observable nonverbal behaviors that communicate an internal state
  24. Izard's 10 Basic Emotions - Interest, joy, surprise, distress, anger, disgust, and fear are all present from birth; contempt, shame, and guilt develop later when humans become self-aware
  25. Facial Feedback Hypothesis - a person's facial expression can influence his/her own emotional state
  26. Feel-good, do-good phenomenon - people are more likely to help others when in a good mood
  27. Adaptation-level phenomenon - the tendency to get used to a stimuli so that a more intense stimuli is needed to achieve the same thrill that the first stimuli originally caused  
  28. Relative deprivation - the perception that one is worse off relative to those with whom one compares oneself

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