EMOTION AND MOTIVATION
I Emotional Experience: The Feeling Machine
A. What is Emotion? - a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of
physiological activity
1. Multidimensional scaling
2. Arousal (High - Low)
3. Valence (Negative - Positive)
B. The Emotional Body
1. James-Lange Theory of Emotion - Stimuli trigger activity in the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which in turn produces an emotional experience in the brain
2. Cannon-Bard Theory - a stimulus simultaneously triggers activity in the ANS and emotional experience in the brain
a. Support: ANS too slow to trigger emotional experience
b. Support: People cannot detect changes in activation of their ANS
c. Support: Nonemotional stimuli produce same activation of ANS
3. Schachter and Singer's Two-factor Theory
a. Inferences about undifferentiated psychological arousal
b. Support: Emotions related to the situational specificity of arousal
c. Weakness: Some emotions produce unique physiological responses
C. The Emotional Brain
1. Klüver-Bucy Syndrome ("temporal lobe syndrome")
a. Inappropriate eating
b. Inappropriate sexual behavior
c. Lack of fear
d. Damage to limbic system
2. The Amygdala
a. Appraisal - an evaluation of the emotion-relevant aspects of a stimulus
b. The Fast Pathway of Fear (Thalamus-Amygdala)
c. The Slow Pathway of Fear (Thalamus-Cortex-Amygdala)
D. The Regulation of Emotion - cognitive and behavioral strategies people use to influence their own emotional experience
1. Reappraisal - changing one's emotional experience by changing the meaning of the emotioneliciting
stimulus
II Emotional Communication: Msgs w/o Wrds
A. Communicative Expression
1. recognition of nonverbal language
2. The Universality of Expression
a. Darwin's universality hypothesis
i. Cross-cultural agreement of emotional interpretation
ii. Emotional expression does not need sight
3. The Cause and Effect of Expression
a. Facial expressions are signs, not symbols, of emotion
b. Facial feedback hypothesis
B. Deceptive Expression
1. Display Rules - norms for the control of emotional expression
a. Intensification - involves exaggeration the expression of one's emotion, as when a person pretends to be more surprised by a gift that she really is
b. Deintensification - involves muting the expression of one's emotion, as when a loser of a contest tires to look less distressed that he really is
c. Masking - involves expressing one emotion while feeling another, as when a poker player tries to look distressed rather than delighted as she examines a hand with four aces
d. Neutralizing - involves feeling an emotion but displaying no expression, as when a judge tries not to betray his leanings while lawyers are making their arguments
2. Breaking the Display Rules - when our face gives us away
a. Morphology - certain facial muscles tend to resist conscious control, and for a trained
observer, these so-called reliable muscles are quite revealing
b. Symmetry - sincere expressions are a bit more symmetrical than insincere ones
c. Duration - expressions tend to last between a half second and 5 seconds; expressions that
last for shorter or longer are more likely to be insincere
d. Temporal patterning - sincere expressions appear and disappear smoothly over a few seconds, whereas insincere ones tend to have more abrupt onsets and offsets
3. Jobs and Lie Detection - Human lie detection is pretty dreadful, but trained professionals can do fairly well.
4. The polygraph is better than chance, but its error rate is still quite high.
III Motivation: Getting Moved
A. The Function of Emotion
1. Capgras Syndrome
2. Hedonic Principle
B. The Conceptualization of Motivation
1. Instincts - Seek and strive toward a limited number of goals, independent of experience
a. Tautologies of Aristotelian proportion
b. Behaviorism rejected instincts
2. Drives
a. Internal states
b. Homeostasis - the tendency for a system to take action to keep itself in a particular state
c. Hull and Spence
i. suggested that rats, people, and thermostats are all homeostatic
ii. drives motivate behavior
C. Basic Motivations
1. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
a. Organization of human urges or needs
b. Lower order needs form base
c. Self-actualizing needs form pinnacle
2. Motivation for Food
a. Orexigenic signal - tells your brain to switch hunger on
b. Anorexigenic signal - tells your brain to switch hunger off
c. Leptin - a chemical secreted by fat cells that appears to be a signal that tells the brain to switch hunger off
d. Ghrelin - a hormone that is produces in the stomach and appears to be a signal to switch hunger on
e. Lateral hypothalamus - receives orexigenic signals
f. Ventromedial hypothalamus - receives anorexigenic signals
3. Eating Disorders
a. Bulimia nervosa
b. Anorexia nervosa
c. Obesity
d. Body mass index
e. Resistance of weight loss
f. Metabolism
4. Motivation for Sex
a. Hormones (DHEA, testosterone, estrogen)
b. Puberty
c. "In heat"
d. Sex drive and gender differences
5. Sexual Activity
a. Masters and Johnson - Human Sexual Response Cycle
b. Excitement phase - muscle tension and blood flow increase in and around the sexual organs, heart and respiration rates increase, and blood pressure rises
c. Plateau Phase - heart rate and muscles tension increase further
d. Orgasm Phase - breathing becomes extremely rapid and pelvic muscles begin a series of rhythmic contractions
e. Resolution Phase - muscles relax, blood pressure drops, and the body returns to its resting state
f. Each phase has differences and similarities for men and women
6. Psychological Motivations
a. Mortality-Salience Hypothesis - prediction that people who are reminded of their own mortality will work to reinforce their cultural worldviews
D. Kinds of Motivation
1. Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic
a. Intrinsic Motivation - to take actions that are themselves rewarding
b. Extrinsic Motivation - to take actions that are not themselves rewarding but lead to reward
c. Rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation
d. Punishments can create intrinsic motivation
e. Threats can backfire
2. Conscious vs. Unconscious
a. Conscious Motivation - motivation of which one is aware
b. Unconscious Motivation - motivation of which one is not aware
c. Need for achievement
3. Approach vs. Avoidance
a. Approach Motivation - a motivation to experience a positive outcome
b. Avoidance Motivation - a motivation not to experience a negative outcome
c. Avoidance motivation is stronger than approach motivation
d. Promotion focus - tend to think in terms of achieving gains
e. Prevention focus - tend to think in terms of avoiding losses