Experimental Psychology Its Scope and Method: Volume V (Psychology Revivals)

Motivation, Emotion and Personality

Joseph Nuttin, Paul Fraisse, Richard Meili

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317630517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in English in 1968, Joseph Nuttin contributes the first chapter, on Motivation. He discusses various aspects of the motivational process. Such as incentives, conflict, social motivation, and negative motivation, and describes the mechanism of the process. The second chapter, by Paul Fraisse, is on the Emotions. Fraisse examines the nature of the emotions, both on the behavioural and on the neurophysiological levels, and goes on to define and discuss moving situations. He shows the different types of expression an emotional reaction may take, and discusses the causes of hyper-emotionality.

Richard Meili writes on the Structure of the Personality, showing the importance of the idea of trait in the psychology of personality. He describes the use of the factorial method in the analysis of personality, and gives an account of the beginnings of personality, as well as the different parts, known as instances, of the total organization of personality.

Chapter 15

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Motivation

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Joseph Nuttin

1 Behaviour and motivation

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Psychologists are far from agreeing on the importance of motivation in the study and explanation of behaviour. Some consider motivation a superfluous idea destined to disappear from the vocabulary of experimental psychology, while others regard it as the crucial principle of psychology and the key to understanding behaviour. The source of this disagreement arises out of the confusion surrounding the concept of motivation. To clarify the subject under discussion it is necessary to elucidate some of the negative concepts and thus extract those behavioural characteristics which we believe require the use of that ‘intermediary variable’, namely the motivational process.

1 Negative positions

A) It is true that under the heading of motivation experimental psychology concentrated mainly on needs and drives which were primarily of a physiological origin, such as hunger, thirst, sexuality, the need for oxygen, sleep, evacuation etc. The principal object of this kind of research is the study of the influence of certain physiological conditions of the organism on behaviour. So motivation in the eyes of certain behaviourist writers is no more than a global term of little scientific significance used to designate the influence on behaviour of a variety of physiological states. We do not yet know enough about the effect on behaviour of sexuality and hunger, for example, to be able to group them under the common heading of ‘motivational process’ thereby distinguishing them from other physiological so-called non-motivational influences which are equally unknown. These authors propose that psychology should study all the determinants of behaviour without isolating or grouping any of them under the heading of ‘motivation’, a term borrowed from pre-scientific vocabulary.

B) Within the stimulus-response framework, the excitation is considered as the actual start of the organism’s reaction. With reflexes, for example, the stimulus may be considered sufficient to start a reaction. This led several authors to neglect or even to deny the problem of motivation. They recognize that the living organism is essentially reactive, that is to say, it reacts in a specific way to excitation it receives. This fundamental characteristic, combined with the action of the stimulus, would provide a sufficiently dynamic explanation of behaviour. However, the need for a motivational factor soon became evident to certain experimenters who observed that the organism does not always react to the excitation produced by the environment. The sexual object or food which, under certain circumstances, provokes a reaction, may sometimes have no effect. It seems indispensable to introduce a factor to explain this difference of reactivity. This factor could be considered in terms of the difference of threshold in receptivity, or of the sensitivity of the organism towards a particular excitation. That is what some contemporary psychologists mean by motivation: a factor which sensitizes and activates the organism towards an excitation. In other words, motivation is a state of the organism whose function is to lower the threshold of reactivity to certain excitations. Motivation is then referred to as an energizer or a sensitizer (vide inter alios Nissen, 1954). The process of learning or conditioning is utilized to explain the changes which take place in the form of reactions to various stimuli. Thus the idea of motivation seems almost superfluous here also; the process of stimulation and learning seem sufficient as an explanation of behaviour.

C) Certain psychologists use the idea of motivation principally to study the reason why the organism enters a state of general activity (vide infra, p. 8). Motivation is then referred to in terms of mobilization of energy. Some psychologists have protested recently against this concept (Kelly, 1958), claiming that it originates from a static conception of the organism: inactivity appearing to be the ‘natural’ state of living creatures, requiring a special stimulus to explain its activity. If the living organism is considered as intrinsically active, the idea of motivation becomes superfluous. Nowadays more and more emphasis is placed on the spontaneous activity of the nervous system and it is considered, moreover, that behavioural activity is linked to the very life of the organism in the same way as physiological activity. Hebb (1949), for example, formulated a hypothesis based, not on reactivity, but on the natural activity of the nervous system. Contrary to what was believed up to thirty years ago, the nerve-cell has no need for external excitation to become active; it is not physiologically inert and its natural activity constitutes a system of automotivation. More recently, Hebb proposed that it was necessary to relate the general motivational state to the arousal function of the reticular structure of the brain stem. This idea is more or less ismilar to that which regards the stimulus as initiating activity, since Hebb sees the ‘arousal system’ (reticular formation) as a secondary medium through which all sensory excitation reaches the cortex (Hebb, 1955, p. 248–9).

2 The motivational phenomenon

A) It is obvious that the formulation of the organism’s behaviour in terms of stimulus-response in experimental psychology partly conceals the problematical question of motivation. In daily life, however, human conduct is normally considered to be guided and ordered according to a plan and it is an attempt to achieve or attain an objective. This second schema may also correspond to a psychic reality and must therefore have a scientific value. Whereas the first takes the elementary reaction of reflex as a model, the subject matter of the second is the complex reality of human conduct. However, it seems that the effort or tendency to strive for something is to be found, in very varying degrees, in many examples of subordinate conduct. Indeed we must not forget that what we call an unconditioned stimulus in a classical conditioning experiment, as in the general psychology of behaviour, is in fact something which the animal is constantly seeking after in normal life. Food is regarded as a stimulus by the experimenter who applies it to the gustatory organ of the animal in the laboratory in order to study the physiological secretions released, but it is considered the object of extensive motivated activity by those who study the animal’s behaviour in its natural environment. Because of this the very varied meanings which are attributed to the term ‘stimulus’ do not make the problem of motivation any simpler. Our study will therefore be facilitated if, in addition to conditioning and S-R theory, we also regard behaviour as the search for a situation or object, either absent or as yet non-existent. It must be apparent that this latter concept forms the fundamental belief of yet another group of psychologists for whom motivation provides a key to the understanding of human conduct.

B) What aspects of behaviour are connected with motivation? Fundamentally, the organism or the individual is characterized by his preferential or selective relations with regard to the objects or situations of his environment. Faced with a certain number of objects, he covets or prefers some while rejecting others; with regard to non-existent objects and situations, he craves, seeks and pursues some and fears others. This orientation is shown by the fact that the conduct persists until a well-defined objective is reached; this puts an end—provisionally or finally—to the subject’s activity. This selective orientation towards a preferred or chosen object gives its intrinsic direction and organization to behaviour. The object sought by the organism may be unknown to the individual himself, whereas in other cases an innate or acquired behaviour may guide him to the desired object. It should be added that the more or less continual pursuit of an absent or as yet non-existent objective is of capital importance to man. What is more, his cognitive and imaginative functions allow him to construct the missing object in anticipatory or compensatory fashion; hence the importance ascribed to imaginative construction in certain researches into human motivation (vide infra, p. 24).

This active, persistent and selective purposiveness which characterizes behaviour is the basic motivational phenomenon which appears in many forms according to the kind of conduct (innate or acquired, for example) and the level of development of the organism. This conception implies that motivation is at the same time a source of activity and of direction; or, more precisely, it defines conduct as a directed activity. These two aspects, the dynamic and the proposive, have too often been separated in the study of motivation, as will be shown regarding the general activity of the organism and the learning process in connexion with motivation.

C) For more accurate delimitation of the field of motivation, Woodworth (1918, pp. 36–7) distinguishes between the ‘mechanism’ of behaviour and the factors which set it in motion. The first problem is the how of the behaviour process, the second asks why the man or the animal does something. The study of motivation is closely connected with this question of why. In this context, motives, incentives, drives, tendencies and needs are referred to; others speak of tension, force or even energy. It would obviously be incorrect to use the two latter terms in the precise sense they have in either mechanics or physics. It is often impossible to distinguish in psychology between the two ideas of force and energy. The old physical concept which justifies, for some people, its use in the study of behaviour, maintains that in psychology, as in physics, we need to explain the movement from a stage of inertia to that of action, or from one form of ‘movement’ to another (force); so that one likes to imagine that there is a certain capacity (energy) for producing work which exists. That is why the occasionally very sharp criticisms of the use of these terms in psycho...