Theories of Motivation

Instinct/Evolutionary Theory

• Instincts: are complex, inherited behavior patterns characteristic of a species.

• To be considered a true instinct, the behavior must be stereotypical, performed automatically in the same way by all members of a species in response to a specific stimulus.

• Ethologist: (animal behaviorist) Konrad Lorenz, who worked with baby ducks and geese, investigated an example considered an instinct.

• Imprinting:  Ducks and geese form a social attachment to the first moving object they see or hear at a critical period soon after birth by following that object, which is usually their mother.

• Sociobiology: which tries to relate social behaviors to evolutionary biology.

Drive Reduction Theory

• Drive reduction theory: behavior is motivated by the need to reduce drives such as hunger, thirst, or sex.

• The need is a motivated state caused by a physiological deficit, such as a lack of food or water.

• This need activates a drive, a state of psychological tension induced by a need, which motivates us to eat or drink, for example.

• Homeostasis: is the body’s tendency to maintain an internal steady state of metabolism, to stay in balance.

• Metabolism: is the sum total of all chemical processes that occur in our bodies and are necessary to keep us alive.

Incentive Theory

• Incentive: is a positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates behavior, pulling us toward a goal.

• Secondary motives: motives we learn to desire, are learned through society’s pull.

Arousal Theory

• Arousal: is the level of alertness, wakefulness, and activation caused by activity in the central nervous system.

  • The optimal level of arousal varies with the person and the activity.

• Yerkes–Dodson rule: states that we usually perform most activities best when moderately aroused, and efficiency of performance is usually lower when arousal is either low or high.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

• According to Maslow, few people reach the highest levels of self-actualization, which is achievement of all of our potentials, and transcendence, which is spiritual fulfillment.

• Although this theory is attractive, we do not always place our highest priority on meeting lower-level needs.

Physiological Motives

• Hunger: Early research indicated that stomach contractions caused hunger.

  • Yet even people and other animals who have had their stomachs removed still experience hunger.

• Hunger and Hormones: The hypothalamus reduces hunger by stimulating the small intestine to release cholecystokinin when food enters.

  • Sugars from the small intestine raise blood sugar. When blood sugar rises, the pancreas releases insulin.

Hunger and the Hypothalamus

• Lateral hypothalamus (LH): was originally called the “on” button for hunger.

• Ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH): was called the satiety center, or “off” button, for hunger.

Obesity

• Obesity and diabetes/hypertension risks are growing concerns in our population.

• Obese people respond to short-term external cues like smell, food attractiveness, and mealtime, while normal-weight people respond to long-term internal cues like stomach contractions and glucose–insulin levels.

• Many people also eat when stressed.

Eating Disorders

• Underweight people who weigh less than 85 percent of their normal body weight, but are still terrified of being fat, suffer from anorexia nervosa.

• Bulimia nervosa is a more common eating disorder characterized by eating binges involving the intake of thousands of calories, followed by purging either by vomiting or using laxatives.

Sex

• Sexual orientation: refers to the direction of an individual’s sexual interest.

• Homosexuality: is a tendency to direct sexual desire toward another person of the same sex, and bisexuality is a tendency to direct sexual desire toward people of both sexes.

• Heterosexuality: is a tendency to direct sexual desire toward people of the opposite sex.

Social Motivation

Achievement

• Achievement motive: is a desire to meet some internalized standard of excellence.

• McClelland used responses to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to measure achievement motivation.

• Affiliation motive: is the need to be with others.

• Intrinsic motivation: is a desire to perform an activity for its own sake rather than an external reward.

• Extrinsic motivation: is a desire to perform an activity to obtain a reward from outside the individual, such as money and other material goods we have learned to enjoy, such as applause or attention.

• Conflict: involves being torn in different directions by opposing motives that block you from attaining a goal, leaving you feeling frustrated and stressed.

• The least stressful are approach-approach conflicts, which are situations involving two positive options, only one of which you can have.

• Avoidance-avoidance conflicts: are situations involving two negative options, one of which you must choose.

• Approach-avoidance conflicts: are situations involving whether or not to choose an option that has both a positive and negative consequence or consequences.

• Multiple approach-avoidance conflict: which involves several alternative courses. of action that have both positive and negative aspects.

• Emotion: is a conscious feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness accompanied by biological activation and expressive behavior; emotion has cognitive, physiological, and behavioral components.

James-Lange Theory

• American psychologist William James, a founder of the school of functionalism, and Danish physiologist Karl Lange proposed that our awareness of our physiological arousal leads to our conscious experience of emotion.

• According to this theory, external stimuli activate our autonomic nervous systems, producing specific patterns of physiological changes for different emotions that evoke specific emotional experiences.

Cannon-Bard Theory

• Walter Cannon and Philip Bard disagreed with the James-Lange theory.

• According to the Cannon-Bard theory, conscious experience of emotion accompanies physiological responses.

• Cannon and Bard theorized that the thalamus (the processor of all sensory information but smell in the brain) simultaneously sends information to both the limbic system (emotional center) and the frontal lobes (cognitive center) about an event.

  • When we see the vicious growling dog, our bodily arousal and our recognition of the fear we feel occur at the same time.

Opponent-Process Theory

• According to opponent-process theory, when we experience an emotion, an opposing emotion will counter the first emotion, lessening the experience of that emotion.

• When we experience the first emotion on repeated occasions, the opposing emotion becomes stronger and the first emotion becomes weaker, leading to an even weaker experience of the first emotion.

Cognitive-Appraisal Theory

• Different people on an amusement park ride experience different emotions.

• According to Richard Lazarus's cognitive-appraisal theory, our emotional experience depends on our interpretation of the situation we are in.

Stress and Coping

Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome

• Stress: is the process by which we appraise and respond to environmental threats.

• Hans Selye, we react similarly to both physical and psychological stressors. Stressors are stimuli such as heat, cold, pain, mild shock,restraint, etc., that we perceive as endangering our well-being.

• Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): three-stage theory of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion describes our body's reaction to stress.

Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Theories

Sigmund Freud

• Although Sigmund Freud was a Viennese physician who practiced as a neurologist in the late 1800s and early 1900s, he was unable to account for personality in terms of anatomy.

  • He and other psychoanalysts believed that people have an inborn nature that shapes personality.

• The conscious includes everything of which we are aware at a particular moment.

• Just below the level of conscious awareness, the preconscious contains thoughts, memories, feelings, and images that we can easily recall.

• Generally inaccessible to our conscious, the largest part of the mind, the unconscious, teems with wishes, impulses, memories, and feelings.

• id: which consists of everything psychological that is inherited, and psychic energy that powers all three systems.

• ego: mediates between our instinctual needs and the conditions of the surrounding environment in order to maintain our life and see that our species lives on.

• superego: which is composed of the conscience and the ego-ideal.

• Defense mechanisms: operate unconsciously and deny, falsify, or distort reality.

• Repression: is the pushing away of threatening thoughts, feelings, and memories into the unconscious mind: unconscious forgetting.

• Regression: is the retreat to an earlier level of development characterized by more immature, pleasurable behavior.

• Rationalization: is offering socially acceptable reasons for our inappropriate behavior: making unconscious excuses.

• Projection: is attributing our own undesirable thoughts, feelings, or actions to others.

• Displacement is shifting unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or actions from a more threatening person or object to another, less threatening person or object.

• Reaction formation: is acting in a manner exactly opposite to our true feelings.

• Sublimation: is the redirection of unacceptable sexual or aggressive impulses into more socially acceptable behaviors.

Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development

Carl Jung's Analytic Theory of Personality

• Personal unconscious: is similar to Freud's preconscious and unconscious, a storehouse of all our own past memories, hidden instincts, and urges unique to us.

• Collective unconscious: is the powerful and influential system of the psyche that contains universal memories and ideas that all people have inherited from our ancestors over the course of evolution.

• Archetypes: or common themes found in all cultures, religions, and literature, both ancient and modern.

• Individuation: is the psychological process by which a person becomes an individual, a unified whole, including conscious and unconscious processes.

Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory

• Reciprocal determinism: which states that the characteristics of the person, the person's behavior, and the environment all affect one another in two-way causal relationships.

• Self-efficacy: is our belief that we can perform behaviors that are necessary to accomplish tasks, and that we are competent.

• Collective efficacy: is our perception that with collaborative effort, our group will obtain its desired outcome.

Gordon Allport's Trait Theory

• Cardinal trait: is a defining characteristic, in a small number of us, that dominates and shapes all of our behavior.

• Central trait: is a general characteristic, between 5 and 10 of which shape much of our behavior.

Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

• Self-concept: is our overall view of our abilities, behavior, and personality or what we know about ourselves.

• Self-esteem: is one part of our self-concept, or how we evaluate ourselves.

  • Our self-esteem is affected by our emotions and comes to mean how worthy we think we are.