Motivation, Emotion, and Cognition

Integrative Perspectives on Intellectual Functioning and Development

David Yun Dai, Robert J. Sternberg, David Yun Dai, Robert J. Sternberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135624484
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The central argument of this book is that cognition is not the whole story in understanding intellectual functioning and development. To account for inter-individual, intra-individual, and developmental variability in actual intellectual performance, it is necessary to treat cognition, emotion, and motivation as inextricably related.

Motivation, Emotion, and Cognition: Integrative Perspectives on Intellectual Functioning and Development:
*represents a new direction in theory and research on intellectual functioning and development;
*portrays human intelligence as fundamentally constrained by biology and adaptive needs but modulated by social and cultural forces; and
*encompasses and integrates a broad range of scientific findings and advances, from cognitive and affective neurosciences to cultural psychology, addressing fundamental issues of individual differences, developmental variability, and cross-cultural differences with respect to intellectual functioning and development.

By presenting current knowledge regarding integrated understanding of intellectual functioning and development, this volume promotes exchanges among researchers concerned with provoking new ideas for research and provides educators and other practitioners with a framework that will enrich understanding and guide practice.

IV
DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLECTUAL COMPETENCIES

8

Affect, Self-Motivation, and Cognitive Development: A Dialectical Constructivist View

Juan Pascual-Leone
Janice Johnson
York University

However, a person who has just cut his finger on a knife and watches the blood ooze over his palm has no uncertainty about the existence of objects that can cause blood to flow, and is certain that he feels different than he did moments earlier.

—Kagan (2002, p. 72)

The energy for initiating an intended action can come from the situation encountered . . . or it can be self-generated through a volitional process called self-motivation.

—Kuhl (2000, p. 191)

The field of motivation addresses the issue of what determines–induces a person to act or behave in a particular way. A dialectical-constructivist approach to motivation should add to this a causal account of how–why the organism synthesizes performances vis-à-vis situations. This integrative perspective has not always been there. Research in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and even 1970s often construed motivation as the cognitive–behavioral manifestation of instinctual–innate drives such as hunger, sex, fear, attachment, and other positive or negative affects. Research in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was dominated by an emphasis on social-learning determinants of motivation; and by a growing awareness that human motivation results from complex structural learning processes that synthesize and adapt organismic functional structures to constitute people’s plans–projects for action within situations. Although the current literature on human motivation offers extensive discussions of relevant issues and constructs, it lacks an adequate, explicit, dynamic, and unified organismic theory or framework that can explain the ontogenetic evolution of motivation. By the term organismic we mean compatible with and interpretable into what is now known about brain and biological processes of the human organism. Our aim is to contribute new clear ideas and some tentative unifying models that might be useful to the theory-building enterprise.

In this chapter, we sketch our idea of an organismic general model (or framework) that can serve to address the analysis of human motivation from a developmental organismic perspective. To this end, we describe some plausible organismic processes and resources, we define with their help basic concepts such as motive and specific interests, and use analytical methods that can serve to clarify developmental timetables of many motivational constructs, as well as sources of individual differences. We illustrate some of these ideas with our own and others’ data.

THE CAUSAL TEXTURE OF THE ENVIRONMENT: ORGANISMIC SCHEMES

We focus first on epistemological problems relevant to motivational theory, such as the nature of reality and of human activity (understood as goaldirected interaction with situations, aimed to control or understand the objects, persons, or both therein; Leontiev, 1981). The question of motivation concerns mechanisms and processes that can bridge the gap between a person’s makeup (his or her psychological organism) and the actual situation out there, in order to explain the person’s agency and his or her implicit construal of tasks and obligations. Kant (1965; Pascual-Leone, 1998) saw the schema as the organism’s way of bridging the gap between the organism and its situational context as such, that is, the constraints–resistances of the actual situation. However schemas or schemes of Kant or Piaget are neither organismic (i.e., embodied) nor situated (i.e., contextualized) enough to serve as tools in motivational process analysis.

Motivation attempts to explain the “what,” “why,” and “where” of a person’s more or less conscious praxis and practice. By praxis we mean cognitive or motor goal-directed actions addressed to the environment, to satisfy central and intrinsic personal needs (i.e., affective goals). Practice is similar to a conscious or unconscious praxis that often uses automatized operations, and is enacted to satisfy marginal and predominantly extrinsic needs or affective goals. In these definitions, intrinsic (or endogenous) means stemming from processes initiated by the organism itself; extrinsic (or exogenous) refers to processes originally induced by others or by the situation. We call motivationally central those needs or affective goals that subjects address for their own sake, in a self-fulfilling manner. We call motivationally marginal those needs or affective goals that subjects address only as means for attaining something else. Affective goals correspond to organismic processes that cause the well-recognized concept of needs and stem from the activity-directing function of affects (or instincts). Spinoza called these organismic causal processes conation (conatus—Deleuze, 1990; Spinoza, 1995); and today they are called conative effects of affect (Fredrickson, 2001; Greenberg, 2002; Pascual- Leone, 1991). These distinctions are important, because praxis is often more motivating than practice, and central motives are often more motivating than marginal ones. In contrast, extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation is subject to individual and developmental differences (Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998; Koller, 2000). We shall use this terminology to emphasize that actual goals always involve an affective–emotive component that is expression of the organism’s infrastructure (essential internal constraints) and dynamism.

Motivation interfaces or intertwines the organism’s affects–emotions and knowing functions with the nature (constraints or resistances) of external–internal reality and the person’s activities in this environment. We think of the reality-out-there as a universe of species-specific resistances (i.e., kinds of relational perceptual patterning or of experiential outcomes) that emerge in the individual’s activity, both praxis and practice, within a given context–situation. These resistances often are found to have dependency relations among themselves. Thus reality is populated with packages of interdependent resistances that are relative to each species. These packages can be interpreted, without falling into empiricist excesses, as indexing real invariants (cf. Gibson, 1979; Nakayama, 1994; Nozick, 2001; Ullmo, 1967); that is, relational aspects of reality that the individual can cognize and, in a nonempiricist but constructivist way, learn to re-present to himself or herself (as alluded by Kagan in the epigraph). Furthermore, these packages maintain with each other fairly invariant interdependencies, which are exhibited by human activity (praxis–practice) and are experienced as reality supports for activity (these are Gibson’s affordances), or as hindrances that reality opposes to us (obstacles or proper resistances). Motivation (which functionally intertwines affect–emotion, cognition, and reality) leads the person to internalize (learn) these packages and their interdependencies, thus acquiring some, schematic and actively modeled, re-presentation of what Tolman and Brunswik (1966) called the causal texture of the environment.

From this bio–psychological causal perspective, it is appropriate to recognize that internalization (learning) of these reality packages, and the learning of how they change conditional to our activity, necessarily implies three distinct categories of invariant, packaged resistances: (a) those that stand for the targets of the person’s praxis or practice, which we shall call obs, to emphasize that they are not objects but are dialectical-constructivist substrata for the empiricist objects of experience; (b) those packages that stand for patterns of action or operation (praxis or practice) that are causally instrumental for changing obs, or the relations among obs, in expectable ways—these are packages that we call pros, that is, the constructivist substrata for the empiricist procedures and operative processes; and (c) those packages of resistances, simple or complex, that functionally serve to provide adjunct information about obs, pros, and the situations in which they usefully can be applied. These packages, which we call ads, can describe properties or relations pertaining to obs or situations, and can also describe conditions or parameters that pros needs to satisfy in order to be applicable to obs and situations. Adjectives, adverbs, the meaning of relative clauses, and advertisements all have this category of adjunct-information as their reality foundation.

For instance, in the quote of Kagan we give in the epigraph, the finger, the knife, the blood, and the palm are each represented in the person’s brain as ob schemes. The category description “objects that can cause blood to flow” is an ad scheme that causally relates obs such as knives to parts of the body (e.g., fingers) and to blood. The brain representation of the knife’s action, which actually caused the blood to flow, is a pro scheme. Notice that at a finer, less molar level, each of these scheme units can be decomposed as constituted by finer, lower level, ads (releasing conditions), obs (intended distal–cognitive objects), pros (intended action, e.g., the procedure of cutting), or all of the above.

Although pros are correlates of people’s blueprints for actions or transformations, that is, of what Piaget and neo-Piagetians would call operative processes (essentially the procedural knowledge of cognitive science), both obs and ads are correlates of people’s descriptions of states, which Piaget and neo-Piagetians call figurative processes (related to declarative knowledge of cognitive science, but which could be either explicit or implicit). One main difference between obs and ads seems to be motivational: obs, but not ads, serve as possible targets for the person’s praxis. Notice further that abstraction and internalization (i.e., learning) of obs, ads, and pros cannot be made in a piecemeal manner. The three sorts of functional category constitute a dialectical trio. They dynamically emerge together, in the context of activity within situations, as the functional structure of this activity becomes internalized; that is, the three functional categories are abstracted together in coordinated packages, thus producing organismic schemes (i.e., collections of neurons distributed over the brain that are cofunctional and often coactivated).

These organismic schemes are situated semantic-pragmatic functional systems that carry some coherent knowledge or know-how about relevant activities. Schemes are dynamic systems, abstracted across situations for a given sort of praxis, coordinating internalized models of obs, ads, and pros in their interaction. From a structural perspective, a scheme can be understood as expressing the well-learned coordination of three components: (a) a functional system that embodies the gist (the pros or obs, and activity) of the scheme’s semantic-pragmatic organization; (b) a set of conditions (ads, obs, or pros) that release the scheme; and (c) a set of effects (pros, obs, or ads) that follow from the scheme’s application to experienced reality. Schemes must be internally consistent to be formed, and they are recursive. Conditions, effects of schemes, or both can in turn be constituted by (copies of) other schemes. These complex schemes, often called structures, could be interpreted as semantic networks (Fuster, 1995; Kagan, 2002).

Notice that schemes are self-propelling (i.e., they tend to actively assimilate or structure experience); and they are natural units of functional information processing, because the person’s intercourse with experienced reality (with praxis or practice resulting from application of schemes) is in turn internalized into schemes (i.e., repeatable semantic-pragmatic invariances) that embody components of the (external or mental) performance that satisfy the person’s affective (positive or negative) goals.

AFFECTS, EMOTIONS, AND OTHER SCHEMES OR STRUCTURES THAT INFLUENCE DEVELOPMENT OF MOTIVATION

It is well recognized that affects–emotions (see Greenberg & Pascual-Leone, 1995, 2001; Pascual-Leone, 1990, 1991; for our detailed formulation of their developmental emergence) are a set of qualitatively distinct, epigenetically evolved, functional systems (Ekman & Davidson, 1994; Fredrickson, 2001), whose function is to evaluate by way of feelings. As Damasio (2001) put it, feelings are the complex mental states that result from emotional states (i.e., from the activation–application within the organism of the person’s own affective–emotion schemes—and feelings are ads, related to experiences, brought about by these schemes as their effects). Or to say it as Merleau- Ponty (1968) preferred: Feelings are subjective–biological feedback that we receive from our “flesh.” Affects evaluate ongoing (or about to happen) experiences and the organism’s current states, as good or bad, appealing or aversive, positive or negative, etc., and then inform the psychological organization (in humans the self “hidden” in the brain) about these evaluations. This automatically sets in motion modes of processing and functioning that prepare body reactions and bias mental and behavioral functioning, in directions congruent with tacit anticipations of results. These specific action tendencies are caused by affects, as they apply within the organism. For instance, fear biases the organism toward escape, anger toward fighting, love toward tender physical contact, etc. (Beck, 1996; Edelman & Tonioni, 2001; Ekman & Davidson, 1994; Fredrickson, 2001; Frijda, 1987; Frijda, Kuipers, & Schure, 1989; Greenberg, 2002). These conative modes of processing are what we call affective goals.We interpret affects and their often-tacit goals to be affective schemes (Pascual-Leone, 1991). The affective goals are effects produced by affective schemes when they are released within and expressed– manifested in the organism. Part of this expression is the occurring physiological changes suitable for the affective tendency in question.

Purely affective processes, as we define them, seem to be initiated in brain activities of the limbic system, of which the amygdala plays an important role in preattentive processing of situations and in recognition of affectively salient stimuli, at least for negative affective reactions (Anderson & Phelps, 2001; Damasio, 2001; Habib, 2000; LeDoux, 1995; Rolls, 1995; Schaefer et al., 2002). In contrast, the medial orbitofrontal cortex (ventromedial prefrontal region) and the anterior cingulate cortex are important in re-presenting to consciousness pleasant or unpleasant affective values of experiences (Allman, Hakeem, Erwin, Nimchinsky, & Hop, 2001; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Lee, 1999; Davidson, 2001; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002). Cognitive expression of affective goals may be related to the orbitofrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, at least for the high cognitive functions (Albright, Jessell, Kandel, & Posner, 2001; Davidson, 2001). For low-cognitive or automatized cognition other brain structures, such as the Broca language center, the insula, or the entorhinal cortex, may play a similar role (Albright et al., 2001; Barraquer Bordas, 1995). The effortful control of affects and emotions seems to be related to the dorsal part of anterior cingulate gyrus,¹ the lateral and medial prefrontal regions, and perhaps also the basal ganglia, together with the prefrontal cortex (Albright et al., 2001; Allman et al., 2001; Ochsner et al., 2002). Interestingly, the left prefrontal hemisphere seems to be concerned with the control of positive affects–emotions, whereas the right prefrontal hemisphere deals with negative affects– emotions (Davidson, 2001; Fox, Henderson, & Marshall, 2001). We shall elaborate on this in the following.

Application–implementation of affective goals necessarily involves activation and application of cognitive schemes. In contrast to affective schemes, which only evaluate organismic states, cognitive schemes tell organisms about packages of resistances encountered outside or inside (bodily) reality; they carry factual information and not evaluation. When the affective goals are aroused and perhaps implemented, cognitive schemes must be part of it, however; and thus affective and cognitive schemes soon become coordinated within many different affective–emotion systems (Pascual-Leone, 1991). The resulting hybrid schemes (i.e., affective and cognitive) are main causal determinants of emotions and of personal–personality processes, and so we call them personal or emotion schemes (Greenberg, 2002; Greenberg & Pascual- Leone, 2001; Greenberg, Rice, & Elliot, 1993; Pascual-Leone, 1991). As the child develops, the initial innate affects (affective schemes), released by the circumstances, come to be more or less coordinated with their corresponding cognitive schemes, producing emotion schemes (causal substratum of emotions) and personal structures. Affect in consciousness is always carried by emotions, and this is possibly why many authors (e.g., Ekman & Davidson, 1994) treat affect and emotion as synonymous. In our opinion, this is an error. Primary affects (e.g., Pascual-Leone, 1991) are clearly innate, but cognitive components of emotions cannot be innate because they are situated (i.e., context specific). This error obscures the development of emotions and motivational processes.

Most of the schemes that make up the conscious or preconscious processes (the person’s ego), whether they refer to one’s own person–organism (selfschemes), to the outer world or the others (interpersonal and intersubjective schemes), are hybrids. That is, they are personal or emotion schemes, even when emotional defense mechanisms (special sorts of executive self-schemes) ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• I Introduction
• II Cognition in Motivational and Affective Contexts
• III Intelligence and Personality: From Psychometrics to Personal Dynamics
• IV Development of Intellectual Competencies
• V Intellectual Functioning and Development in Social and Cultural Contexts
• Epilogue