Motivation and Emotion (PLE: Emotion)

Phil Evans

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317616337
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1989, this title provided a wide-ranging and up-to-date review of a traditional area of psychology. It will be of great interest to all those who wish to discover what governs human behaviour and feeling – in other words, what makes people tick.

Phil Evans explores the influences that determine a range of behaviour, from those with clear biological links such as eating, sleeping and sexual activity, to those specifically human concerns such as the need to achieve success or approval. He also analyses the feelings and emotions that often guide behaviour. He gives a detailed outline of various theoretical perspectives on what it is to be a human being: whether a biological organism with biological needs, a responder to environmental signals of pleasure, or a cognitively aware agent continuously processing information regarding current circumstances. His review of both cognitive and biosocial approaches conveys the liveliness of debate and argument within psychology at the time, and demonstrates that an understanding of all views is necessary to illuminate fully the complex nature of human behaviour.

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Introduction and overview

 

 

 

The area of motivation and emotion in psychology is potentially vast and has ill-defined boundaries. In order to highlight just what are the central concerns of the area, we might care to imagine the free associations an ordinary person is likely to give to the two key words of this book’s title. Probable associations would be along the lines: ‘passions’, ‘urges’, ‘instincts’, ‘goals’, ‘rewards’, ‘carrots’, ‘sticks’, and so on. In other words, and more prosaically, motivation is about specifying the reasons why an organism is, at any particular time, behaving in the way that it is. In this book, we shall principally, but not exclusively, be concerned with the human organism.

There is general acknowledgement in our culture that people do many of the things which they do because they find them pleasurable, and avoid many things because they find them painful. Such a theoretical position might be called ‘guiding hedonism’. The area of emotion involves the delineation and investigation of those same hedonic experiential states. For that reason the areas of motivation and emotion are closely linked, and not surprisingly they share the same Latin root in the verb movere: to move. We are moved to do things, and we are moved by things.

A little conceptual analysis, at this stage, may set the ground for the issues which are addressed in the substantive chapters that follow. For much of the time we shall be asking why certain kinds of activity and feelings occur and the answers to those ‘why’ questions will be seen as explanations. It is fitting therefore to begin with a discussion of what we mean by the term explanation.

SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION

The reasons that the man or woman in the street may give to ‘explain’ why someone is behaving in a certain way might not satisfy a behavioural scientist. The word ‘explanation’ in science suggests that we know what necessary and sufficient conditions need to obtain in order that a certain phenomenon should occur. In the physical sciences, such conditions can often be stated with a degree of exactitude, such that we can very accurately predict the phenomenon in question. Even the physical sciences, however, move towards what might be termed ‘measured uncertainty’ as they reach the dizzy heights of current theory. Psychological science reaches its uncertainty at the outset and for obvious reasons. A particular piece of behaviour is usually determined by so many factors that specifying all of them is impossible. Psychologists are not thereby prevented from scientific prediction. It simply becomes the case that their predictions are usually probabilistic. We predict that certain outcomes are more probable than others when certain conditions pertain. Psychological science is not any the lesser for being a probabilistic science (though not a few psychologists seem in a hurry to suggest that psychology is not a real science). The ‘bottom line’ is surely that any predictive statement should be testable with regard to its truth or falsehood. Certainly psychology as a discipline does evoke keen interest among philosophers of science and many would doubtless see it as more than just a probabilistic science. Without unduly widening the debate, most interested parties could at least agree that when a probabilistic statement is made it should be in principle as testable as any other statement about the empirical world.

EXPLANATION AND THE NEVER-ENDING

Providing an explanation is potentially an endless affair. It is so, in two kinds of way. The first is familiar to any parent with a child who has reached a certain age when ‘why’ questions become matters of great moment. If the cause of z is given as y the next question is what causes y; answer x, and so on. The really accomplished child performers can take us back through the alphabet at a rate of knots. What constitutes a ‘proper’ or ‘full’ explanation is not a hard or fast matter. We ourselves choose where to limit potentially endless causal chains, and we do so according to what seems appropriate in the context of our giving the explanation.

Thesecond way in which explanation can be never-ending refers not to the potentially infinite length of a causal chain, but to potentially infinite levels of analysis that can be applied to any link in the chain. A person’s action becomes the movement of an arm; the movement of an arm becomes the activity of nerves, and so on. This form of infinite regress is well known and is called ‘reductionism’. Proper explanation is not here a question of where we choose to end, but where we choose to begin. A common reductionist fallacy is that ‘explanation’ somehow gets better as so-called ‘molar’ events are broken down into their ‘molecular’ constituents. In psychology, the worst manifestation of this fallacy is the mistaken belief that physiologically couched explanations are better than ‘mere’ psychological ones. Once again, the truth is that ‘proper’ explanation has to do with the context in which a question is asked and the kind of answer that is expected.

EXPLAINING AND UNDERSTANDING

Some, no doubt, would see a great deal of overlap in the use of these two concepts. After all, people often ask for an explanation of something in order to understand it. However, although scientific explanation entails a type of understanding, the opposite is not always true. People often content themselves with an understanding which falls short of scientific explanation. People are highly motivated to seek meaning in their lives, and so pervasive is such ‘effort after meaning’ that the scope of science is seen as extremely limited in terms of the questions it can answer. They therefore seek to ‘understand’ themselves and the world by other means: light-heartedly perhaps through tea-leaves and playing-cards; more seriously through systems of thought such as religions and schools of psychoanalysis.

There should really be no need for conflict between the search for explanation and the search for understanding. Often, however, there is an undeniable muddle. It would be wrong, for example, to confuse a psychoanalyst’s ‘interpretation’ of a client’s dream with a scientific explanation. As Rycroft (1966), himself a psychoanalyst, has pointed out, psychoanalysis does not seek explanation in any scientific fashion, as if it were some rival system to empirical psychology; rather it seeks to impose structure and meaning on what otherwise might be a chaotic tableau of an individual’s experiences. Of course exercises in one discipline might provide insights for another, and most would agree that some interesting and empirically testable propositions might on occasion emerge from psychoanalytic theorizing.

The desire for meaning as a fundamental human motive has not gone unrecognized by psychologists. Indeed it has been a theme, implicit or explicit, in the writings of most so-called humanistic psychologists. This particular book chooses to concentrate on less weighty motives than the need for meaning in an individual’s existence. Human beings, aware as they are of their own mortality, do occupy much of their time in easier pursuits and their more everyday preoccupations are those that are more readily approached by the empirical method. It is recognized, however, that this limitation of coverage is imposed and is not a value judgement on what is omitted. If I had to admit to a prejudice, it would be that among those who could meaningfully call themselves ‘existentialist’ thinkers, I find communication of issues more vivid and straightforward among philosophers, novelists, and even theologians, than among the ranks of psychologists.

WHERE WE FIND EXPLANATIONS

Motivational words in common usage often suggest certain locations when explaining behaviour. Words such as ‘instinct’, ‘urge’, ‘drive’, ‘impulse’, ‘intention’ share that aspect of meaning that suggests looking inside an agent to discover the cause of an activity. These inward- looking motivational words can be further sub-divided into those which imply crude biological causation and those which mean something more refined. In the former category are those suggestive, to the lay person, of inborn tendencies to action, and, when they are used in respect of human behaviour, there is an implicit suggestion of motivation shared with other animals. These are the obvious implications of the way such words as ‘instinct’ and ‘drive’ are used in common parlance. On the other hand, a word such as ‘intention’ suggests to the lay mind something in the nature of a mental cause. The ordinary person would follow Descartes in assuming a dualism of mind and body, mental and physical. When such a thing as ‘intention’ is attributed to cats and dogs and other favoured infra-humans it is often a sign that their status is being raised to that of mind-owners.

Not all our motivational words point inward. Words like ‘reward’, ‘goal’, ‘incentive’, ‘penalty’ refer to things out there in the environment, things which most societies hope will exercise some motivational control over individuals. Whether we tend on the whole to find our explanations for behaviour inside or outside, in mental or in physical terms, tends to reflect the image of humanity to which we are ideologically committed. An inclination to use inner words and mind words suggests a view which stresses the importance of individuality and free will. A tendency to use inner and body words suggests a pessimistic view of people as the inevitable victim of blind motives which will inevitably be expressed. ‘That’s human nature’ is the favourite cliché of this ideological clique. The use of outer words suggests on the one hand an optimistic view of humanity as capable of great achievements if the right environment is provided, but also a pessimistic one in the sense that individuals are not really free agents — they simply react according to environmental contingencies.

Although psychologists might wish to present themselves as ideologically neutral scientists, the fact is that motivational words from ordinary language are used in their theories and do keep their full implications. Behaviourally inclined theorists, in so far as they stress outer determinants of behaviour, are sometimes seen as reducing humanity to responding automata; psychoanalysts, with their talk of instinctual impulses, reduce us to a collection of blindly driven psychic apparatuses, while cognitivists provide the ultimate in boredom by reducing us to information processors. Such criticisms would be valid if theoreticians were blinkered enough to believe that their models of man and woman were any more than working models. The truth is that the free-will versus determinism debate is not a genuine one, in the sense that there are not arguments for one side or against the other. As individuals in our everyday lives we assume we have free will, and we attribute it to others. A behavioural scientist, on the other hand, can only proceed usefully by assuming as a working hypothesis that behaviour is determined. Fortunately behavioural scientists usually have a clear sense of when they are on and when they are off duty, and for the most part have robust defences against trying to predict their own behaviour — something which otherwise could lead to logical problems.

We come now to an overview of subsequent chapters of this book. In these chapters, all of the causal locations mentioned will be emphasized at different points. This is not to be taken as flabby eclecticism, rather as an assertion that all the ‘models of humanity’ so far referred to are necessary for a proper appreciation of the behaviours which we seek to understand. To illuminate certain aspects of behaviour, we shall consider human beings as biological organisms, which they are. To illuminate others, we shall see humans and other animals as behaviour-emitters under the control of environmental stimuli, which to a demonstrable degree we and other animals are. Finally, we shall give equal consideration to human beings as autonomous agents, acting on their environments, receiving input, retrieving memories, making decisions, and executing responses: all things that we undoubtedly do. In some chapters all these views of humanity will share the stage; in others one view will tend to dominate. At the end of the book, it is hoped the reader will have a rounded appreciation of what makes people tick — an idiomatic phrase that is yet to be bettered as a description of what most non-psychologists would consider to be the psychologist’s area of expertise.

OVERVIEW OF SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS

The next four chapters of the book comprise a section which is titled ‘Biological imperatives?’ and each offers a succinct review of research on motivational factors in regard to a specific activity: eating, sleeping, sexual, and aggressive activity. All these activities have an important role for biological factors in their determination. They are activities indulged in by other animals as well as human beings. Eating we know ultimately satisfies a survival need. Sleeping, although we are less clear about its relation to survival, is certainly a behaviour which, like eating, becomes intensely craved when deprivation is experienced. Sexual activity is certainly necessary for the survival of the species, and the survival of genes. Aggression is also to differing degrees the expression of a behavioural repertoire which many species have evolved presumably because it has some survival value.

We have however deliberately put a question mark after the title ‘Biological imperatives’. Why? In the end, the task of this book in regard to motivation is to explain why activities are engaged in, and, while the stark term ‘hunger’, for example, might be taken as referring to an exclusively biological motive, the activity of eating is determined by factors additional to those stemming from physiological need. The same argument applies to the other so-called biological imperatives.

The sixth chapter maintains an interest in things physiological but addresses the area of emotion, as well as the area of so-called ‘emergency’ motivation derived from the body’s primitive responses to threat. We often talk of ‘gut emotion’; in this chapter we ask to what extent is feedback from ‘gut reactions’ a necessary component of emotional feeling. How much does our body tell us about what we are feeling, and how much is due to the brain’s cool assessment of the sort of situation we are in?

The seventh chapter moves towards those activities which, though they may be rooted in matters of survival, take on some complexity in the case of human beings. Those activities are ‘predicting’ and ‘controlling’ what happens in the environment. We begin this important chapter by placing such activities in a firm comparative (i.e. across- species) context. Only after doing this, do we look at some of the special ways in which humans differ from other animals in their motivation to cope with the uncertainties of life.

The eighth chapter assesses the historical and current status of those very influential theories of motivation which point to behaviour generally being energized by a hypothetical force, such as drive or arousal. This chapter highlights some of the difficulties of trying prematurely to marry quasi-physiological concepts and behavioural ones, and suggests how cognitive ‘information-processing’ models may be capable of providing better predictions of efficiency in the performance of tasks.

In the second part of this chapter we skirt the area of emotion again and address the issue of ‘felt’ arousal. We explore individual differences in the degree to which people seek high arousal states, thrills, and excitement. We also explore why all of us seem to see low arousal sometimes as unpleasant (boredom) and sometimes pleasant (relaxation); equally, sometimes we see high arousal as unpleasant (anxiety) and sometimes pleasant (excitement).

In chapter 9 we could be said to develop further some of the ‘mastery’ motifs implicit in chapter 7. Here we are more concerned however with long-term mastery in the form of achievement. We ask why some people, in a variety of areas where success and failure are salient outcomes, go on trying and persisting while others give up or do not get involved in the first place. In some ways, this chapter covers the sort of research which many will see as lying at the heart of motivation. We shall see that with regard to the pursuit of goals, many competing motives — including social ones, such as ‘to be liked and approved of and ‘to conform’ — can get in the way of any simple need to achieve success.

The final chapter returns to the area of emotion and explores further the role of cognition in relation to emotion. We try to disentangle definitional confusion and genuine differences of opinion. We utilize the broader term ‘affect’ in deference to those who see emotions as complex entities automatically involving cognitive appraisals of a situation. We provide a summary of an important ‘affect’ theory — opponent process theory — which seems to involve little in the way of cognitive involvement. We also finally look at the way that affect can cue cognitions and vice versa.

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Eating

THE CONCEPT OF HOMEOSTASIS

Our physical survival depends on a certain stability being maintained inside our bodies. The term ‘homeostasis’ is used to describe the regulatory processes that contribute to the maintenance of stability. A thermostat is a specific example of a ‘homeostat’. It is activated by signals from an environment which initiate activity until such a time as different signals arrive and shut down the activity, thus initiating in turn an ‘off-period’ which will eventually prompt the return of the ‘on-signal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction and overview
• 2 Eating
• 3 Sleeping
• 4 Sex
• 5 Aggression
• 6 Gut reactions and gut emotions
• 7 Predicting and controlling
• 8 An energizing force?
• 9 Achieving, succeeding, failing, and persisting
• 10 Affect, emotion, and cognition
• References
• Index