Module 1
Hoofdstuk 1 E&M The Nature of Emotion and Motivation
What is motivation?
Aspects of emotion: subjective emotional feelings, physiological responses, observable
behaviors.
Motivation:
- summoning some sort of energy to fuel behavior and pointing that energy in a particular
direction.
- the energy manifests in activation, intensity and persistence of whatever behavior will help
you achieve your goal.
Motivation: the energy and direction underpinning human behavior and choice.
Incentives: stimuli in the environment that motivate one to engage in a behavior.
Two categories of motivation:
- intrinsic motivation: motivation that springs from internal needs, forces and desires rather
than incentives of threat or punishment.
- extrinsic motivation: motivation sourced from external incentives and threat of punishment
rather than internal forces.
Researchers Ryan and Deci suggest that they are really a continuum.
Introjected regulation: motivation based on awareness of societal norms regarding this
behavior and wish to avoid internal feelings of shame or embarrassment that might arise if
you didn’t behave in concordance with these norms.
Identified regulation: motivation based on behavior feeling like it is part of one’s identity.
Integrated regulation: motivation that began with rewards and punishments but is
transitioning to a more internalized appreciation of this behavior.
Self-determination theory: view that human beings are intrinsically motivated to determine
their own lives, shaped by the core needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness.
- Autonomy: core motive to self-direct one’s own behavior and feel in control of one’s life.
- Competence: core motive to apply one’s skills to have an impact on the world, to feel
capable of handling the demands of the world.
- Relatedness: core motive to be meaningfully socially engaged with other humans.
,Extrinsically rewarding behaviors people already enjoyed appears to decrease the original
intrinsic motivation. If there is no intrinsic motivation at all, use external rewards strategically.
Unexpected rewards are more likely to promote increased future target behavior than
expected awards. Social rewards do not seem to undermine intrinsic motivation as much as
material or financial rewards.
In addition to the extrinsic to intrinsic continuum, another core principle in motivation science
is that human beings are generally motivated to approach pleasure and reward and to avoid
punishment and pain.
Regulatory focus theory: view that it is important to consider whether a motivation is focused
on promoting a desired end state or preventing an undesired end state. These variations in
goal orientation matter because it influences aspects of motivated behavior:
- how much effort you will put into pursuing your goal.
- whether you will involve others in the process.
- which emotions you feel along the way.
One of the principal ways we are motivated to approach or avoid situations is through the
experience of emotions.
Hedonism: the tendency of human beings (and other organisms) to approach
pleasure/reward and avoid pain/punishment. Some of the earliest philosophers argued that
hedonism is one of the driving forces underlying human behavior.
What is emotion?
In science, this ambiguity in the colloquial meaning of emotion becomes a big concern.
Feeling is totally subjective and difficult to compare across people—not ideal for scientific
measurement. The observable aspects of emotion—eliciting situations, behaviors,
physiological changes—are far from perfectly correlated with each other, and with people’s
reports of their feelings
James-Lange theory: view that emotions (especially the feeling aspects of emotions) are the
labels we give to the way the body reacts to certain situations.
An early attempt (1982) to define emotion: [Emotion is] an inferred complex sequence of
reactions to a stimulus [including] cognitive evaluations, subjective changes, autonomic and
neural arousal, impulses to action, and behavior designed to have an effect upon the
stimulus that initiated the complex sequence.
- The definition proposes that emotions are functional in the sense that they are geared
toward having an effect on the world around us. That is, emotions are useful.
- According to this definition, every emotion is a reaction to a stimulus—a specific event that
takes place. Ordinarily, our experiences support this idea: we are happy about something, we
are angry at someone, or we are afraid of something out there in the world. This aspect of
the definition distinguishes emotions from purely internal drives (biological need) such as
,hunger and thirst. However, this aspect of the definition is controversial.
- This definition, like many others, proposes that emotion includes four aspects:
1. Appraisal: cognitive evaluation of what a stimulus or situation means for one’s
goals, concerns and well-being.
2. Feelings (subjective changes).
3. Physiological changes (autonomic and neural arousal)
4. Behavior.
This definition has become highly controversial, because of its implication that you need all of
these four aspects to call it an emotion.
Instead of defining emotion as a required combination of cognitions/appraisals, feelings,
physiological responses, and behaviors, some researchers have proposed that we select
one aspect of emotion as primary, and then ask how strongly and why that aspect relates to
other aspects. Researchers taking this approach have typically focused on the feeling aspect
of emotion.
An alternative is to arrange feelings along dimensions. To determine what these dimensions
are, researchers have shown people various feeling words and asked them to rate the
similarity for each pair of words, or asked people to report how strong their emotions are at
various moments and note which emotions tend to co-occur. These data can be analyzed
with a method called multidimensional scaling that allows us to see what dimensions emerge
statistically from peoples’ ratings of their experience. Based on the results, Russell has
proposed the circumplex model: a model in which emotional feelings form a circle, emotions
close to each other on the circle are similar or likely to be experienced at the same time.
Keep in mind that this model includes an emphasis on the feeling aspect of emotion, not
cognitive, physiological, or behavioral aspects.
Core affect: a model for describing the feeling aspect of emotion, emphasizing dimensions of
pleasantness and arousal.
Other researchers, starting from a different theoretical basis and emphasizing the evaluation
of external stimuli rather than the valence of subjective feelings, have proposed a different
pair of dimensions. According to the circumplex model of emotion, an emotional feeling is
good or bad or somewhere in between, so it should not be possible to feel strong positive
emotion and strong negative emotion at the same time.
, Evaluative space model: a model of attitudes, proposing that evaluations of some target’s
goodness and badness are independent rather than opposites. As a result, positive and
negative affect should be independent dimensions of feeling, rather than opposite ends of a
single dimension.
Consider the model shown in Figure 1.10. This model includes the possibility that positive
and negative feelings are independent and can co-occur. Rather than dimensions of valence
and arousal, the two dimensions are for positive and negative affect. Each dimension
includes a built-in arousal or activation scale, so that being high on either positive or negative
affect is very activated, and being low on both positive and negative affect means low
activation. Unlike the circumplex model, however, being low on positive activation is not the
same as being low on negative activation. As a result, calm is distant from sleepy.
There are a few key points of agreement among the various dimensional models:
1. they emphasize the feeling aspect of emotions, rather than cognitive or behavioral
aspects;
2. they agree that emotional feelings are best described in terms of continuous dimensions,
rather than discrete categories;
3. they emphasize that feelings are mainly defined in terms of valence (positive and
negative) and degree of arousal or activation.
There is another dimension we need to consider that relates primarily to time: emotions
versus moods.
Mood: a diffuse, longer-lasting affective state of being, not tied to a particular stimulus.
There is some consensus on the ways in which emotion and mood differ:
1. Emotions tend to be short-lived phenomena, measured in minutes, whereas moods can
linger over hours or days.
2. Emotions and moods differ in terms of their causes. Emotions are reactions to some
stimulus or event. Moods are diffuse and the cause is hard to identify.
Hoofdstuk 1 E&M The Nature of Emotion and Motivation
What is motivation?
Aspects of emotion: subjective emotional feelings, physiological responses, observable
behaviors.
Motivation:
- summoning some sort of energy to fuel behavior and pointing that energy in a particular
direction.
- the energy manifests in activation, intensity and persistence of whatever behavior will help
you achieve your goal.
Motivation: the energy and direction underpinning human behavior and choice.
Incentives: stimuli in the environment that motivate one to engage in a behavior.
Two categories of motivation:
- intrinsic motivation: motivation that springs from internal needs, forces and desires rather
than incentives of threat or punishment.
- extrinsic motivation: motivation sourced from external incentives and threat of punishment
rather than internal forces.
Researchers Ryan and Deci suggest that they are really a continuum.
Introjected regulation: motivation based on awareness of societal norms regarding this
behavior and wish to avoid internal feelings of shame or embarrassment that might arise if
you didn’t behave in concordance with these norms.
Identified regulation: motivation based on behavior feeling like it is part of one’s identity.
Integrated regulation: motivation that began with rewards and punishments but is
transitioning to a more internalized appreciation of this behavior.
Self-determination theory: view that human beings are intrinsically motivated to determine
their own lives, shaped by the core needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness.
- Autonomy: core motive to self-direct one’s own behavior and feel in control of one’s life.
- Competence: core motive to apply one’s skills to have an impact on the world, to feel
capable of handling the demands of the world.
- Relatedness: core motive to be meaningfully socially engaged with other humans.
,Extrinsically rewarding behaviors people already enjoyed appears to decrease the original
intrinsic motivation. If there is no intrinsic motivation at all, use external rewards strategically.
Unexpected rewards are more likely to promote increased future target behavior than
expected awards. Social rewards do not seem to undermine intrinsic motivation as much as
material or financial rewards.
In addition to the extrinsic to intrinsic continuum, another core principle in motivation science
is that human beings are generally motivated to approach pleasure and reward and to avoid
punishment and pain.
Regulatory focus theory: view that it is important to consider whether a motivation is focused
on promoting a desired end state or preventing an undesired end state. These variations in
goal orientation matter because it influences aspects of motivated behavior:
- how much effort you will put into pursuing your goal.
- whether you will involve others in the process.
- which emotions you feel along the way.
One of the principal ways we are motivated to approach or avoid situations is through the
experience of emotions.
Hedonism: the tendency of human beings (and other organisms) to approach
pleasure/reward and avoid pain/punishment. Some of the earliest philosophers argued that
hedonism is one of the driving forces underlying human behavior.
What is emotion?
In science, this ambiguity in the colloquial meaning of emotion becomes a big concern.
Feeling is totally subjective and difficult to compare across people—not ideal for scientific
measurement. The observable aspects of emotion—eliciting situations, behaviors,
physiological changes—are far from perfectly correlated with each other, and with people’s
reports of their feelings
James-Lange theory: view that emotions (especially the feeling aspects of emotions) are the
labels we give to the way the body reacts to certain situations.
An early attempt (1982) to define emotion: [Emotion is] an inferred complex sequence of
reactions to a stimulus [including] cognitive evaluations, subjective changes, autonomic and
neural arousal, impulses to action, and behavior designed to have an effect upon the
stimulus that initiated the complex sequence.
- The definition proposes that emotions are functional in the sense that they are geared
toward having an effect on the world around us. That is, emotions are useful.
- According to this definition, every emotion is a reaction to a stimulus—a specific event that
takes place. Ordinarily, our experiences support this idea: we are happy about something, we
are angry at someone, or we are afraid of something out there in the world. This aspect of
the definition distinguishes emotions from purely internal drives (biological need) such as
,hunger and thirst. However, this aspect of the definition is controversial.
- This definition, like many others, proposes that emotion includes four aspects:
1. Appraisal: cognitive evaluation of what a stimulus or situation means for one’s
goals, concerns and well-being.
2. Feelings (subjective changes).
3. Physiological changes (autonomic and neural arousal)
4. Behavior.
This definition has become highly controversial, because of its implication that you need all of
these four aspects to call it an emotion.
Instead of defining emotion as a required combination of cognitions/appraisals, feelings,
physiological responses, and behaviors, some researchers have proposed that we select
one aspect of emotion as primary, and then ask how strongly and why that aspect relates to
other aspects. Researchers taking this approach have typically focused on the feeling aspect
of emotion.
An alternative is to arrange feelings along dimensions. To determine what these dimensions
are, researchers have shown people various feeling words and asked them to rate the
similarity for each pair of words, or asked people to report how strong their emotions are at
various moments and note which emotions tend to co-occur. These data can be analyzed
with a method called multidimensional scaling that allows us to see what dimensions emerge
statistically from peoples’ ratings of their experience. Based on the results, Russell has
proposed the circumplex model: a model in which emotional feelings form a circle, emotions
close to each other on the circle are similar or likely to be experienced at the same time.
Keep in mind that this model includes an emphasis on the feeling aspect of emotion, not
cognitive, physiological, or behavioral aspects.
Core affect: a model for describing the feeling aspect of emotion, emphasizing dimensions of
pleasantness and arousal.
Other researchers, starting from a different theoretical basis and emphasizing the evaluation
of external stimuli rather than the valence of subjective feelings, have proposed a different
pair of dimensions. According to the circumplex model of emotion, an emotional feeling is
good or bad or somewhere in between, so it should not be possible to feel strong positive
emotion and strong negative emotion at the same time.
, Evaluative space model: a model of attitudes, proposing that evaluations of some target’s
goodness and badness are independent rather than opposites. As a result, positive and
negative affect should be independent dimensions of feeling, rather than opposite ends of a
single dimension.
Consider the model shown in Figure 1.10. This model includes the possibility that positive
and negative feelings are independent and can co-occur. Rather than dimensions of valence
and arousal, the two dimensions are for positive and negative affect. Each dimension
includes a built-in arousal or activation scale, so that being high on either positive or negative
affect is very activated, and being low on both positive and negative affect means low
activation. Unlike the circumplex model, however, being low on positive activation is not the
same as being low on negative activation. As a result, calm is distant from sleepy.
There are a few key points of agreement among the various dimensional models:
1. they emphasize the feeling aspect of emotions, rather than cognitive or behavioral
aspects;
2. they agree that emotional feelings are best described in terms of continuous dimensions,
rather than discrete categories;
3. they emphasize that feelings are mainly defined in terms of valence (positive and
negative) and degree of arousal or activation.
There is another dimension we need to consider that relates primarily to time: emotions
versus moods.
Mood: a diffuse, longer-lasting affective state of being, not tied to a particular stimulus.
There is some consensus on the ways in which emotion and mood differ:
1. Emotions tend to be short-lived phenomena, measured in minutes, whereas moods can
linger over hours or days.
2. Emotions and moods differ in terms of their causes. Emotions are reactions to some
stimulus or event. Moods are diffuse and the cause is hard to identify.
