Motivation and Emotion

Motivation: a psychological process that directs and maintains your behavior toward a goal. Motives are the needs, wants, interests, and desires that propel or drive people in certain directions.

• Instinct Theory: we are motivated by our inborn automated behaviors.
• Biological Motives
• Hunger
• Thirst
• Sleep
• Social Motives
• Achievement
• Order
• Play
• Autonomy
• Affiliation
• Drive Theory: Biological internal motivation (homeostasis)
• Incentive Theory: Environmental motivation (not as much homeostasis, more outside factor)
• Drive-Reduction Theory: When individuals experience a need or drive, they're motivated to reduce that need or drive.

Biological Basis of Hunger: Hunger does not come from our stomach. It comes from our brain, they Hypothalamus

• Why do I feel hungry? 
• Glucose: the form of sugar that circulates in the blood. Provides the major source of energy for body tissue. Glucose low=hungry, Glucose high=feel full
• Lateral Hypothalamus: when simulated it makes you hungry. When lesioned (destroyed) you will never be hungry again.
• Ventromedial Hypothalamus: when simulated you feel full. When lesioned you will never feel full again.
• Environmental Factors
  1. Availability of food
  2. Learned preference and habits
  3. Stress
• Set Point Theory: the hypothalamus acts like a thermostat. Wants to maintain a stable weight. Activate the lateral when you diet and activate the ventromedial when you start to gain weight.

Eating Disorders

• Bulimia Nervosa: characterized by binging (eating large amounts of food) and purging (getting rid of the food).
• Anorexia Nervosa: starve themselves to below 85% of their normal body weight.
• Obesity: severely overweight to the point where it causes health issues.

Achievement Motivation

• Intrinsic Motivators: rewards we get internally, such as enjoyment or satisfaction.
• Extrinsic Motivators: reward that we get for accomplishments from outside ourselves (grades or money or etc.) Work great in the short run.
• Over Justification Effect: promising a reward for doing something you like to do results in you seeking the rewards as the motivation for performing the task.

Management Theory

• Theory X: managers believes that employees will work only if rewarded with benefits or threatened with punishment.
• Theory Y: managers believe that employees are internally motivated to do good work and policies should encourage this internal motive.

Emotion: a response of the whole organism
Physiological arousal
Expressive behaviors
Conscious experience

• James-Lange Theory of Emotion: experience of emotion is awareness of physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli.
• Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion: emotion-arousig stimuli simultaneously trigger:
• physiological responses
• subjective experience of emotion
• Schachter's Two-Factor Theory of Emotion: to experience emotion one must:
• be physically aroused
• cognitively label the arousal
• Emotion-Lie Detectors
• Polygraph: machine commonly used in attempts to detect lies. Measures several of the physiological responses accompanying emotion
• Perspiration
• Cardiovascular
• Breathing changes
• Amygdala: a neural key to fear learning

Experienced Emotion

• Catharsis
• emotional release
• catharsis hypothesis: "releasing" aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges.
• Feel-good, do good phenomenon: people's tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood.
• Adaptation-Level Phenomenon: tendency to form judgements relative to a "neutral" level
• brightness of lights
• volume of sound
• level of income
• Relative Deprivation: perception that one is worse off relative to those with whom one compares oneself.

Social Relations

• Prejudice: an unjustifiable attitude towards a group of people.
• Stereotyped: a generalized belief about a group of people.
• Social Inequalities: a principle reason behind prejudice.
• Ingroup: people with whom one shares a common identity.
• Outgroup: those perceived as different than ones in group.
• Ingroup bias: the tendency to favors one own group.
• Scapegoat Theory: the theory that prejudice provides an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame.
• Aggression: any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy.
• Biology of Aggression
• Genetics
• Neural Influence (is aggression in the brain)
• Biochemical
• Frustration-Aggressive Principle: the blocking of an attempt to achieve some goals. Creates anger which generate aggression.
• Conflict: a perceived incompatibility of actions, goals or ideas. Situation where people must choose between and act that is beneficial to themselves but harmful to others and an act that is moderately beneficial to all.

Attraction:

• Proximity: repeated exposure to something breeds liking.
• Reciprocal Liking: you are more likely to like someone who likes you.
• Similarity: Opposites do not attract. Birds of the same feather do flock together. Similarity breeds content.
• Liking through Association
• Physical Attractiveness
• Love
• Passionate: an aroused state of intense positive absorption of another.
• Compassionate: the deep affectionate attachment, to intertwine love.
• What makes compassionate love work?
• Equity
• Self-disclosure

Altruism: unselfish regard for the welfare of others.

• Bystander Effect (bystanders less willing to help if there are other bystanders around)
• Social Exchange Theory: the idea that our social behavior is an exchange process, which we minimize costs.
• Peace Making: give people superordinate(shared) goals that can only be achieved through cooperation.
• GRIT (Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension Reduction): a strategy of conflict resolution based on the defusing effect that conciliatory gestures can have on parties in conflict.

Social Psychology

Social Psychology: the study of how we think about, influence and relate to one another.

• Social thinking: how do we think about one another?
• Attribution Theory: the idea that we give a casual explanation for someone's behavior.
• Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency to underestimate the impact of a situation and overestimate the impact of personal disposition.
• Attitudes: a belief or feeling that predisposes one to respond in a particular way to something. Do our attitudes guide our actions?                                                                                          Only if...
• External pressure is minimal.
• We are aware of our attitudes.
• The attitudes is relevant to the behavior.
• Foot-in-the-door Phenomenon: the tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger result.
• Door-in-face Phenomenon: the tendency for people who say no to a huge request, to comply with a smaller one.
• Cognitive Dissonance Theory: we do not like when we have either conflicting attitudes or when our attitudes do not match our actions.

Social Influence

• Conformity: adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.
• Conditions that Strengthen Conformity
  1. One is made to feel incompetent.
  2. The group is at least three people.
  3. The group is unanimous.
  4. One admires the group's status.
  5. One has made no prior commitment.
  6. The person is observed.
• Reasons for Conforming
• Normative Social Influence: influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disappointment.
• Informational Social Influence: influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality.
• Social Facilitation: improved performance of tasks in the presence of others.
• Yerkes-Dodson Law: there is an optimal level of arousal for the best performance of any tasks:
• easy tasks - relatively high
• difficult tasks - low arousal
• other tasks - moderate level
• Social Loafing: the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling efforts toward a common goal than if they were individually accountable.
• Deindividuation: the loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.
• Group Polarization: the concept that a group's attitude is one of extremes and rarely moderate.
• Groupthink: the mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides common sense.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: occurs when one person's belief about others leads one to act in ways that induce the others to appear to confirm the belief.