Psychology
The Hydraulic Model of Instinctive Behaviour
The Hydraulic Model of Instinctive Behavior is a psychological concept that likens instincts to a hydraulic system, suggesting that unexpressed instincts build up like pressure in a closed system and must be released. This model implies that unmet instinctual needs can lead to psychological tension and that the release of these instincts is necessary for psychological well-being.
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6 Key excerpts on "The Hydraulic Model of Instinctive Behaviour"
eBook - ePub- John Bowlby(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
internal to the organism that are necessary for the activation of a behaviour pattern. These include maturation of body and central nervous system, as in the case of flight in growing birds, and endocrine balance, as in the case of the sexual behaviour of most if not all vertebrates. They also include whether or not the pattern has recently been activated, since it is well known that many instinctive activities are less easily evoked after they have recently been in action than after a period of quiescence. After copulation few animals are sexually aroused as easily as they were before. This and comparable changes are clearly due to a change in the state of the organism itself and in many cases experiments show that this change lies within the central nervous system. To account for these changes Lorenz (1950) postulated a series of reservoirs, each filled with ‘reaction specific energy’ appropriate to a particular behaviour pattern. Each reservoir was conceived as being controlled by a valve (the innate releasing mechanism or I.R.M.) which could be opened by the perception of the appropriate sign stimulus so that the reaction specific energy could be discharged in the performance of the specific behaviour. When the energy had drained away the behaviour ceased. Subsequently he supposed, the valve closed, the energy accumulated afresh and after a while the process was ready to be repeated. This psychohydraulic model of instinct with its reservoir and accumulation of ‘energy’ bears an obvious resemblance to the theory of instinct advanced by Freud, and it seems not improbable that both Freud and Lorenz were led to postulate similar models as the result of trying to explain similar behaviour.However that may be, this psychohydraulic model is now discredited. It is no longer espoused either by Lorenz or Tinbergen, and for my part I hope the day will come when it is abandoned by psychoanalysts also. For it is not only mechanically crude but fails to do justice to the data. Much experimental work in recent years has demonstrated that behaviour patterns cease not because they have run out of some hypothetical energy, but because they have been ‘damped down’ or ‘switched off’. Various psychological processes may lead to this result. One such, affecting behaviour in the long-term, is habituation. Another, affecting it in the short-term, is illustrated by experiments using oesophagostomized dogs. These have demonstrated that the acts of feeding and drinking are terminated by proprioceptive and/or interoceptive stimuli which arise in the mouth, the oesophagus, and the stomach and which in the intact animal are the outcome of the performances themselves; in other words there is a mechanism for negative feedback. Such cessation is due neither to fatigue nor to a satiation of the need for food and drink; instead the very act itself gives rise to the feedback stimuli which terminate it. (For discussion see Deutsch (1953) and Hinde (1954).)Equally interesting are the observations of ethologists that, as well as being activated by exteroceptive stimuli, behaviour can also be terminated by them. Moynihan (1953), for instance, has demonstrated that the incubation drive of the black-headed gull is reduced only by sitting on a full clutch of properly arranged eggs. So long as this situation holds the bird sits quietly. If the eggs are removed or disarranged she becomes restless and tends to make movements of nest-building. This restlessness continues until she again experiences the stimuli arising from a full clutch properly arranged. Similarly, Hinde (1954) has observed that in early spring the mere presence of a female chaffinch leads to a reduction of the male’s courtship behaviour, such as singing and searching. When she is present he is quiet, when she is absent he becomes active. In this case, where a socially relevant behaviour pattern is suppressed by sign stimuli emanating from another member of the same species, we might perhaps speak of a ‘social suppressor’ as a term parallel to social releaser.
eBook - ePub- Nicky Hayes(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
The question remains, therefore, just how far a particular kind of behaviour can really be considered to be “purely” genetic, and independent of environmental factors. Although early work by Lorenz and Tinbergen tended to be based on the assumption that the behaviour was produced almost mechanically, as a result of inherited mechanisms, later researchers showed that the interaction of inherited mechanisms and environmental factors was very much more complicated. These issues will be coming up again as we look at specific areas of comparative research in later chapters; but it is worth exploring the general debate here.Lorenz's hydraulic model
In 1950, Lorenz proposed that the mechanisms of sign stimuli, innate releasing mechanisms, and fixed action patterns might be visualised as operating like a hydraulic system. The idea was that if a certain form of behaviour was innate, then, given the right circumstances, the animal would experience a powerful inherited drive to perform that behaviour. This drive would be motivated by what Lorenz referred to as action-specific energy —energy that was directed towards performing that inherited behaviour and nothing else.In Lorenz's model, below, the action-specific energy relating to a specific drive would be continually building up, rather in the way that a tank will fill with liquid from a continuously dripping tap. If an appropriate sign stimulus appears in the environment, it will operate the innate releasing mechanism (IRM) associated with that drive, and that will open a channel, allowing the action-specific energy to gush out, producing the behaviour. If the sign stimulus happens to be particularly powerful, it acts as a super-releaser, opening the channel very wide so that even more energy is released. But if no appropriate sign stimulus appears in the environment at all, then the tank will gradually fill up, until the action-specific energy overflows, randomly, producing displaced activities drawn from other innate behaviour patterns.
- Jessica Kuper(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Consequently, to some critics, psychoanalysis lacks sufficient empirical anchorage and conceptual consistency to count as science, its instinct theory having more the force of a myth than of a material account. Psychoanalysis itself has come to question the usefulness of its instinct theories. Without denying the existence of biologically grounded factors affecting behaviour and mental life, analysts such as Horney (1937) have emphasized the roles of society and culture in the development, differentiation, and dynamics of the psyche. McDougall In his Introduction to Social Psychology (1908) William McDougall defined an instinct as ‘…an inherited or innate psychophysical disposition which determines its possessor to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of a certain class, to experience an emotional excitement of a particular quality upon perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or, at least, to experience an impulse to such action’. He thought of the connections between the three aspects of instinct as neural, yet insisted that the system is psychophysical, by which he meant that perception, emotion and impulse, as mentally manifested, are essential to and active in the instigation, control and direction of instinctive action. Although McDougall, being an instinctivist, is often represented as ignoring effects of experience, he did allow that instincts are capable of modification through learning. But he held that such modification could occur only in the cognitive and conative divisions; the emotional centre was supposed to be immune. Accordingly he argued that identification of the distinct primary emotions is the way to discover what and how many instincts there are, and that this is a necessary preliminary to understanding of the derived complexes and secondary drives patterning behaviour and mental life
eBook - ePub- William McDougall(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
The psychology that finds in our instinctive constitution the foundation or source of all our activities may then be identified with purposive psychology as opposed to mechanistic psychology; for the latter, if it makes any use of the term “instinctive,” does so only to imply the more complex forms of reflex action mechanically conceived. Of late years an old Greek word has been given currency as the most convenient term to denote all psychology that is vitalistic, purposive, or instinctive, in the sense defined above. It is proposed to use the word “hormé” (derived from the Greek noun ὁρμή = an urge to action, and the verb ὁρμάω = I strive, I am impelled or suffer impulsion) to denote the energy that seems to find expression in purposive striving, in conation of every kind; and the adjective “hormic” to denote such strivings or activities and also the psychology which, in opposition to the mechanical psychology, regards this conception of hormic striving as its most fundamental category. 1 The issue between the hormic or purposive and the mechanical psychology is only in process of being defined. At the time when this book was first published (1908) the view that human nature comprises some instinctive foundations was widely, I think one may fairly say generally, accepted. It was supported by the great authority of William James and of Wilhelm Wundt. But this book, by its attempt to define more nearly the nature and rôle of instincts in human life, has done much to bring to a head the issue between the hormic and the mechanical psychology
eBook - ePub- William McDougall(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The principal feature and the principal virtue of Freud’s departure from Janet was the discarding of a sensationist and mechanistic (or quasi-mechanistic) psychology and the putting of his psychology on a hormic foundation. That is to say, Freud aligned himself with that tradition in psychology, known as voluntarism, which comes down from Aristotle and of which Schopenhauer has been the most influential modern exponent; the tradition which sees the most fundamental characteristic of men and animals in their purposive striving towards ends or goals. Like other exponents of this view, Freud regards this hormic urge to activity and to self-development and expression, given in the native constitution, not as entirely undirected and unspecialised, but rather as specialised in each species in dispositions or impulses to strive towards goals of certain types; and he calls such specialised tendencies “instincts.” An instinct so conceived is something very different from the instinct of the mechanistic behaviourist or the “tendency” of Janet; for them an instinct is merely an “action-pattern,” a system of reflex arcs in the nervous system which, on being appropriately stimulated, leads the nervous excitation through a fixed system of channels to a certain group of muscles and glands. In contrast to this, the instinctive disposition of the hormic psychology generates an impulse towards a goal of a certain type; and this impulse may express itself in strivings that may take a multitude of forms and bring into play a variety of muscular and other executive processes according to the circumstances; this variety being greater, the greater the creature’s power of intelligent appreciation of the circumstances and of intelligent adaptation of its actions to those circumstances.Freud recognises that the human species is endowed with many such instincts. But he assigns predominant importance to one of these, the sex instinct, his view of which has been developed in great detail, as we shall see in later chapters. Freud has postulated other instincts of man, writing vaguely of various lower instincts of cruelty, brutality, and destructiveness, and of a group of Ego instincts; but all these he has left entirely undefined. In a recent work he writes: “No knowledge would have been so important for the establishment of a sound psychology as some approximate understanding of the common nature and possible differences of the instincts.”1
eBook - ePub- L.S. Vygotsky(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
As regards the psychology of the instincts, this means that here we have to limit ourselves to drawing comparisons between certain instincts observed in children and analogous forms of the behavior of primitive man, though this does not in any way mean conceding that in the development of the instincts, there is a straightforward and passive mechanism present which consists in the simple repetition of already experienced history. Such a recognition would be in utter contradiction with the dynamic social conditionality of the psyche, a result we established earlier as a fundamental principle. It is not hard to show that, in the system formed by man’s behavior and man’s instincts, there is nothing permanent and inflexible, nothing that moves solely by the force of inertia. In a genuine behavioral system, the instincts are just as socially conditioned, just as adaptable and changeable, just as capable of assuming new forms, as are all the other reactions. Hence it is not the principle of parallelism in the development of the instincts which holds such great importance for pedagogics, but rather the mechanism responsible for the social adaptation of the instincts and their inclusion in the general scheme of behavior.Two Extreme Views of the Instincts
There were two extreme views in the psychological and pedagogical interpretation of the older, traditional point of view of the instincts. Some saw in the instincts the legacy of the animal in man, the voice of the wildest and the most unbridled passions, a residue of the burden of all those primitive and savage epochs that had been experienced by mankind and since left far behind. To these scientists, the instincts appeared to be of the nature of rudimentary organs, i.e., organs that had once possessed particular biological meanings and functions corresponding to the lowest stage of evolution of the organism. With the transition to a higher stage, however, these “organs” had become unnecessary and were doomed to gradual atrophy and condemned to disappear. Hence the extraordinarily poor evaluation of the instinctive capacities from the standpoint of psychology, and the pedagogical slogan that repudiates as mere instinct all educational values, the utter absence of any concern for the development of the instincts, and, at times, the pressure to straggle against, and suppress and curb, the child’s instincts. There was a whole system of pedagogics that guided education under the banner of such a struggle against the instincts.
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