User:Lisa Watson

This user is a participant in the Motivation and emotion unit, 2010. See also: Textbook

This page is an e-portfolio. Also see other participants' pages.

About Me

Hi my name is Lisa and I am in my final semester of full time study completing a Bachelor of Psychology. I am majoring in Forensic Studies (Law) and hope to have a career in forensic psychology.

Week 1

Initially I was apprehensive about how difficult this unit would be so I didn’t know what to expect going into the first lecture. From the unit outline, I was interested in the topics covered so was keen to start, however the assessment items such as the e-portfolio were new to me so I didn’t know what to expect. Having said that, I can see the benefits of this type of learning so am keen to give it a go.

The first lecture was a good introduction to the unit and looked at the study of motivation and its history. The main concept from this lecture was the equation

                                         Motivation = Energy + Direction 

Broken down this equation means:

Motivation- Defined as “to move” in Latin.

Energy- is created through strong, intense and persistent behaviours.

Direction- Behaviour aimed toward achieving a particular purpose or goal.

That is, motivation is a combination of energy and direction. The four motivational sources that give behaviour its energy and direction (i.e its strength and purpose) are Needs, Cognitions, Emotions and External Events. Needs refers to physiological, psychological and social needs. These needs force us to seek out satisfaction in these areas, that is, motivation. Cognitions include such things as religious beliefs and are needs/drivers of behaviour. Emotions are the last of the internal motives and can drive motivation. Lastly, the fourth motivational source is External Events.

The study of motivation comes back to two questions, what causes behaviour (why do people do what they are doing?). And why does behaviour vary in its intensity? (why do people behave one way in a situation but behave differently at another time?). These questions are of particular interest to me as I have always been interested in understanding why people behave the way they do and how that can vary so much person to person.

Week 2

From reading about the assessment items in the unit outline, I was nervous about my ability to complete them as I have never done any form of blogging before and although i feel i am computer savey, I didnt have any idea where to start with my e-portfolio. This lecture helped immensly with the ins and outs of wikiversity! In terms of the textbook chapter, the lecture eased my fears a little bit, knowing there was a table of contents that we could work from gave me peace of mind there was a place to start and plenty of help along the way! It was also good to know we could develop our own ideas from this and focus on a particular area of interest to us. This made me excited about this assessment and was keen to get started. By the end of the lecture, although I was still feeling nervous about the e-portfolio, I was feeling much better about the unit in general and my ability to complete it! The topics we are covering seem very interesting and am looking forward to a few in particular.

Week 3

This first part of this weeks lecture focused on the brain in terms of motivation and emotion. I found this information particularly interesting as it breaks down thinking about the brain into 3 parts; the thinking brain, the motivated brain and the emotional brain.

          Thinking Brain: refers to cognitive and intellectual functions.
          Motivated Brain: Whether you want to do a task.
          Emotional Brain: What your mood is while doing that task.

Although each of these operates individually, I believe each part is interrelated and operates together. In terms of the neurotransmitter pathways in the brain, there are four motivationally relevant pathways which allow parts of the brain to communicate; dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine and endorphins.

Essential hormones that underlie motivation, emotion and behaviour are Cortisol, Testosterone and Oxytocin.

Cortisol is known as the “stress hormone” as it is released in response to stress and is associated with poor intellectual functioning, negative affect and poor health outcomes. Testosterone is associated with high sexual motivation and also underlies the mating effect. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone, also known as the “tend and befriend stress response”, as it motivates seeking the counsel, support and nurturance of others during times of stress.

The second part of the lecture covered Physiological Needs. A Need is defined as “any condition within an organism that is essential and necessary for life, growth, and well-being.” Needs are an essential part of an individuals well-being. That is, when needs are satisfied, well-being is maintained and enhanced and when they are neglected, biological or psychological well-being is disrupted. It is for this reason that motivation states allow us to satisfy our needs to ensure no damage or disruption occurs. This part of the lecture goes into detail about 3 basic human needs; thirst, hunger and sex.

Abraham Maslow (1970) created a hierarchy of human needs as can be seen in the picture below.

Maslow's hierarchy of Needs

Physiological needs being the primary human need and includes such things as breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis and excretion. I found it particularly interesting that sex was considered a primary need. I guess it comes down to the evolutionary perspective of procreation. The second most essential of human needs in the hierarchy is safety. Safety includes security of body, employment, resources, morality, the family, health and property. Third on the hierarchy is love/belonging and includes friendship, family and sexual intimacy. Again sex is a human need but in I guess in a different perspective. In this instance sex is in an intimacy and connection sense, as opposed to an evolutionary perspective. Fourth in the hierarchy is esteem and includes self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others and respect by others. Lastly on the hierarchy is self-actualisation. Self-actualisation includes morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice and acceptance of facts as human needs.

I am in two minds about whether I agree with this hierarchy. I am not sure if it centres around the definitiveness of the hierarchy itself or the order the needs are listed. On one hand I agree that the physiological needs are primary needs, mainly because they are essential to survive but as the hierarchy progresses I feel it is more of an individual thing so I don’t particularly like that it seems so definitive. To rank these needs so matter of fact even when they appear to be on a personal level and can vary from person to person.

Week 4

Quasi-needs
Refers to the ephemeral, situationally induced wants that create tense energy to engage in behaviour capable of reducing the built-up tension. Such examples of this include needing money at the store, an umbrella in the rain, etc.

Social Needs
Refers to an acquired psychological process that grows out of one's socialisation history and activates emotional responses to a particular need-relevant incentives.

Achievement

Need for achievement:
Desire to do well relative to a standard of excellence.

Standard of excellence:
Any change to a person’s sense of competence that ends with an objective outcome of success vs. failure, win vs. lose, or right vs. wrong.

Achievement Goals

Mastery Goals:

• Develop one’s competence
• Make progress
• Improve the self
• Overcome difficulties with effort and persistence.

Performance Goals:

• Prove one’s competence
• Display high ability
• Outperform others
• Succeed with little apparent effort.

Week 5

Psychological Needs:

An inherent source of motivation that generates the desire to interact with the environment so as to advance personal growth, social development, and psychological well-being.

Self-determination Theory

Assumptions:

• People are inherently active
• Person-environment dialectic

Three Psychological Needs:

Autonomy: self determination, independence.

Competence: sufficient skills to be confident/able in the environment you are in.

Relatedness: need to bond with other people.

• All 3 of these need to be interconnected, i.e to be psychologically sound, all 3 needs to combined rather then satisfy only one or two.

Week 6

People’s motivation to exercise personal control over such things as their environment is based on their desire to make positive outcomes within that environment more likely to occur than negative outcomes. The motivation to exercise this personal control comes from the individual’s belief as to the power they have to influence outcomes.

Expectancy refers to a subjective prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur. There are 2 types of expectancy:

              Efficacy Expectancy: Expectancy of being able to behave in a way to cope effectively with a situation.
              Outcome Expectancy: Expectations that ones behaviour will produce positive outcomes or prevent negative ones.

Empowerment: Possessing the knowledge, skills & beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives.

Mastery Beliefs: Extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes & preventing aversive ones.

Learned helplessness: Physiological state that results when an individual expects that life's outcomes are uncontrollable. In terms of the experiment used to show learned helplessness with the dogs, I found this a little unsettling. I see this experiment as quite cruel and the ethics behind it are questionable as I am not sure I agree that the knowledge gained from the experiment outweighs the psychological damage done to the dogs.

There are 3 components of learned helplessness; Contingency, Cognition, and Behaviour.

      Contingency: objective relationship between a person’s behaviour and the environments outcomes.
      Cognition: Subjective personal control beliefs, Biases, Attributions, and Expectancies.
      Behaviour: listless, demoralised coping behaviour.

Week 7

No Lecture

Week 8

Class free period

Week 9

1. What is emotion?

Emotion is:

Feelings

• Subjective experience
• Phenomenological awareness
• Cognition
  

Bodily Arousal

• Physiological activation
• Bodily preparation for action
• Motor responses
  

Sense of Purpose

• Goal-directed motivational state
• Functional aspect
  

Social-Expressive

• Social communication
• Facial expression
• Vocal expression
  

Emotions are one type of motive which energises and directs behaviour.

2. What causes an emotion?

A significant situational event leads to cognitive and biological processes such as Feelings, Sense of purpose, Bodily arousal, and Social-expressive.

The Biology Perspective of emotion has the view that biology lies at the causal core of emotion. While the Cognitive Perspective suggests cognitive activity is a necessary prerequisite to emotion.

3. How many emotions are there?

The Biological Perspective emphasises primary emotions. These basic emotions are anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest. The Cognitive Perspective acknowledges the importance of the primary emotions, but stresses the complex (secondary, acquired) emotions.

4. What good are the emotions?

Emotions are used for Coping and Social Functions.

Coping Functions include such things as emotion used for protection, affiliation, rejection, exploration, etc.

Social Functions of emotion:

1. Communicate our feelings to others.
2. Influence how others interact with us.
3. Invite & facilitate social interaction.
4. Create, maintain, & dissolve relationships.
   

5. What is the diff. between emotion & mood?

Emotions:

• Emerge from significant life situations and appraisals of their significance to our well-being.
• Influence behaviour and direct specific courses of action.
• Emanate from short-lived events.
  

Moods:

• Emerge from ill-defined processes.
• Influence cognition and direct what the personal thinks about.
• Emanate from long-lived mental events.

Week 10

Three central aspects of emotion:

1. Biological:

• Autonomic nervous system
• Endocrine system
• Neural brain circuits
• Rate of neural firing
• Facial feedback
  

James-Lange theory of emotion suggests 2 hypotheses:

1. The body reacts uniquely to different emotion-stimulating events,

2. The body does not react to nonemotion- stimulating events.

Emotional experience is a way of making sense of bodily changes (e.g., a sudden cold shower → increased heart-rate/arousal → emotion e.g., surprise/shock/fear)

2. Cognitive:

• Appraisals
• Knowledge
• Attributions
• Socialisation history
• Cultural identities
  

An appraisal is an estimate of the personal significance of an event. It is this appraisal that causes emotion, rather than the event itself.

Primary attribution – good or bad

Secondary attribution – cause

Primary + secondary attributions → emotion

3. Socio-cultural:

• Socialisation history
• Cultural identities
  

Emotion knowledge: Other people and cultures in general instruct us about the causes of our emotions.

Expression Management: How we should express our emotions.

Emotion Management: When to control our emotions.

Week 11

The big 5 personality traits

The Big 5 according to the “NEO”:

• Neuroticism
• Extraversion
• Openness to Experience
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
  

Each measured by 6 facets (traits)

Happiness

Extraversion = Happiness, Happiness set point

Neuroticism = Unhappiness, Unhappiness set point

Performance and Emotion

Sensory deprivation:

An individual’s sensory and emotional experience in a rigidly unchanging environment.

Overstimulating, stressful environments:

Emotional disruption

• Anxiety
• Irritability
• Anger
• Cognitive disruption
• Confusion
• Forgetfulness
• Impaired Concentration
• Physiological disruption
• Sympathetic
• Nervous system
• Hyperactivity
  

Human beings harbor motives for counteracting insufficient stimulation and underarousal, as well as for excessive stimulation and overarousal.

Control:

Perceived Control

Differences in people’s preperformance expectancies of possessing the needed capacity to produce positive outcomes.

In order to perceive that one has control over a situation:

1. The self must be capable of obtaining the available desired outcome.
2. The situation in which one attempts to exercise control needs to be at least somewhat predictable and responsive.
   

Desire for Control

The extent to which individuals are motivated to establish control over the events in their lives.

Week 12

Contemporary psychodynamic perspective

1. The Unconscious Much of mental life is unconscious.

2. Psychodynamics Mental processes operate in parallel with one another.

3. Ego Development Healthy development involves moving from an immature socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others.

4. Object Relations Theory Mental representations of self and other form in childhood that guide the person’s later social motivations and relationships.

ID and the Ego

Regression:

• The process of forgetting information and an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic.
• Repression is the ego’s counterforce to the id’s demanding desires.
  

Suppression:

The process of removing a thought from attention by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate.

Freud’s Drive Theory:

Source of Drive: Bodily deficit Impetus of Drive: Intensity of the psychological discomfort (anxiety) Object of Drive: Environmental object capable of satisfying bodily deficit Aim of Drive: Satisfaction by removing the bodily deficit.

Development of mental representations

Object Relations Theory

• Unconscious tone
• Capacity for emotional involvement
• Mutuality of autonomy with others
  

Week 13

Holism & Positive psychology

Holism:

• Stresses “top-down” master motives such as the self

and its strivings toward fulfillment.

• Focuses on discovering human potential and

encouraging its development.

Positive Psychology:

• Devotes attention to the proactive building of personal

strengths and competencies.

• Seeks to make people stronger and more productive,

and to actualize the human potential in all of us.

Self-actualization

Two fundamental directions

Autonomy = Greater mindfulness,Courage to create, Realistic Appraisals. Openness = Selfrealization

Actualizing tendency

• Innate, a continual presence that quietly guides the

individual toward genetically determined potentials.

• Motivates the individual to want to undertake new and

challenging experiences.

Causality orientations

Autonomy Causality Orientation

• Relies on internal guides (e.g., needs, interests)
• Pays closer attention to one’ s own needs and feelings
• Relates to intrinsic motivation and identified regulation
• Correlates with positive functioning (e.g., self-actualization, ego development, openness to experience etc.)

Control Causality Orientation

• Relies on external guides (e.g., social cues)
• Pays closer attention to behavioral incentives & social expectations
• Relates to extrinsic regulation and introjected regulation

The problem of evil

• How much of human nature is inherently evil?
• Why do some people enjoy inflicting suffering on

others?

Humanistic Theorists’ Views

• Evil is not inherent in human nature. Evil arises only

when experience injures and damages the person.

• Both benevolence and malevolence are inherent in

everyone. Human nature needs to internalize a benevolent value system before it can avoid evil.

Positive psych & growth

• Positive psychology looks at people’s mental health and the quality of their lives to ask, “What could be?”
• Seeks to build people’s strengths and competencies.

Week 14

Conclusion and Review