MOTIVATION AND EMOTION

Relation between motivation and emotion

There is a relation between motivation and emotion in Psychology. Motivation
involves the desire a person has, to accomplish goals. Motives are the reasons
for human behavior. They both activate behaviors.
• Motivation moves behavior
• Motivation determines behavior

• The concept of motivation focuses on explaining what are the factors which
‘move’ behavior.

• The term motivation is derived from the Latin word movere, referring to
movement of activity.

• Motives are used to explain most of our behaviors.

• For example, why do you come to the university ?

• Thus, we can say that motives are the general states that enable us to
make predictions about behavior in many different situations.

• In other words, motivation is one of the determinants of behavior.

• Instincts, drives, needs, goals, and incentives came under the broad
group of motivation.
• The motivational cycle
• Psychologists use the concept of need to explain the motivational
properties of behavior.

• A need is lack or deficit of some necessity.

• The conditional of need leads to drive.

• A drive is a state of tension or arousal produced by a need.

• It supplies energy to random activity.

• There are three types of motives i.e., biological
(primary/physiological), psychosocial (secondary), and general.

• Both types (primary and secondary) are interdependent on each

other.

• Thus, no motive is absolutely biological or psychosocial.

• But they occur in the individual with different combination.

Biological Motives:
• Focus on the innate, biological causes of motivation like hormones, neurotransmitters, brain structures (hypothalamus,
limbic system, etc). For example, hunger, thirst and sex motives.
• Biological motives are also known as physiological motives as they are guided mostly by the physiological mechanisms of
the body.
• The biological or physiological approach to explain motivation is the earliest attempt to understand causes of behavior.
• Most of the theories, which developed later, carry the traces of the influence of the biological approach.
• The approach following the concept of adaptive act holds that organisms have needs i.e, internal physiological imbalances
that produce drive, which arouses behavior leading to certain actions towards achieving certain goals, which reduce the
drive.
Psychosocial Motives:
Focus on Psychological and social (as well as environmental) factors and how they interact with each other to produce
motivation. For example, need for achievement, affiliation, power, curiosity and exploration, and self actualization motives.
• Social groups such as family, neighborhood, friends, and relatives do contribute a lot in acquiring these motives.
General Motives:
• This is an intermediate category of motives between the physiological
and socio-psychological .
• The motives in this category are unlearned but not physiologically
based.
Emotions:
• Emotions are a complex pattern of arousal subjective feeling and
cognitive interpretation.
• Joy, sorrow, hope, love, excitement, anger, hate and many such
feelings are experienced in our daily life.
• Emotions involves physiological as well as psychological reactions.
• The term emotion is often considered similar to the terms feeling and
mood.
• Feeling denotes the pleasure o pain dimension of emotion which
usually involves bodily functions.
• Mood is an affective state of long duration but of lesser intensity than
emotion.
• Both these concepts are narrow than the concept of emotion.
Classification of Emotions:
• Emotion is a subjective (based on personal feelings, tastes, etc)
feeling.
• The experience of emotions varies from person to person.
• In psychology, six emotions are experienced and recognized .
• These are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.
• Lzard has proposed a set of ten basic emotions i.e. joy, surprise,
anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, guilt, interest and excitement
with combinations of them resulting in other emotional blends.
• According to Plutchik, there are eight basic or primary emotions.
• All other emotions are result of various mixtures of these basic
emotions.
• He arranged these emotions in four pairs of opposites i.e. joy-
sadness, acceptance-disgust, fear- anger and surprise-anticipation.
Intensity and quality of Emotions
• Emotions differ in their intensity(high, low) and quality (happiness,
sadness, fear)
• Subjective factors and situational contexts influence the experience of
emotions.
• These factors are gender, personality and psychopathology of certain
kinds.
• Evidence shows that women experience all the emotions except
anger more intensely than men.
• Physiological Base of Emotions:
• Both autonomic as well as somatic nervous system play important
roles in the emotional process.
• The experience of emotions is a result of a series of
neurophysiological activations in which thalamus, hypothalamus,
limbic system and the cerebral cortex are involved significantly.
• Individuals with extensive injury in these brain areas have been
known to demonstrate impaired emotional abilities.
• Selective activation of different brain areas have been experimentally
shown to arouse different emotions in infants and adults.
James-Lange Theory Of Emotion

• However, this theory faced a lot of criticism and was rejected

Stimulus Specific physiological Perception of

Emotion experienced
changes physiological changes
James - Lange Theory of Emotion
• One of the earliest physiological theories of emotion was given by
James (1884) and supported by Lange and so it has been named the
James-Lange theory of emotion.
• As per the theory, environmental stimuli evoke Physiological
responses from viscera (the internal organs like heart and lungs),
which in turn are associated with muscle movement.
• James-Lange theory suggests that our perception about our bodily
changes, like rapid breathing, a pounding heart and running legs,
following an event brings forth emotional arousal.
The Cannon- Bard Theory of Emotion
• The Cannon- Bard theory proposed by Cannon (1927) and Bard
(1934) suggests that the entire process of emotion is mediated by
thalamus.

• It after perception of the emotion-provoking stimulus, conveys the

information simultaneously to the cerebral cortex and to the skeletal
muscles and sympathetic nervous system.

• The cerebral cortex then determines the nature of the perceived

stimulus by looking to past experiences.
Cultural bases of Emotions
• Most basic emotions are inborn and do not have to be learned.
Psychologists largely have a belief that emotions, especially facial
expressions, have strong biological ties.
• For example, children who are visually impaired from birth and have
never observed the smile or seen another person’s face, still smile or
frown in the same way that children with normal vision do.
• But learning plays an important role in emotions.
• This happens in two ways:
• Cultural learning influences the expression of emotions more than
what is experienced, for example, some cultures encourage free
emotional expression, whereas other cultures teach people, through
modeling and reinforcement, to reveal little of their emotions in
public.

• Learning has a great importance to do with the stimuli that produce

emotional reactions. It has been shown that individuals with
excessive fears (phobia) of elevators and automobiles learnt these
fears through modeling, classical conditioning or avoidance
conditioning.
Cognitive Bases of Emotions:
• Most Psychologists today believe that our cognitions, i.e. our
perceptions, memories, interpretations are essential ingredients of
emotions.
• Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer have proposed a two-factor
theory in which emotions have two ingredients: physical arousal and
a cognitive label.
• They presumed that our experience of emotion grows from our
awareness of our present arousal.
• They also believed that emotions are physiologically similar.
• For example, your heart beats faster when you are excited or scared
or angry.
• You are physiologically aroused and look to the external world for
explanation.
• Thus, in their view on emotional experience requires a conscious
interpretation of the arousal.
• If you are aroused after physical exercise and someone teases you,
the arousal already caused by the exercise may lead to provocation.
 Physiological arousal

Perceived external Experience of

stimulus emotion

Cognitive labelling
• To test this theory, Schachter and Singer (1962) injected subjects with
epinephrine, a drug that produces high arousal.

• Then these subjects were made to observe the behavior of others,

either in an euphoric manner (i.e. shooting papers at a waste basket)
or in an angry manner (i.e. stomping out of the room).

• As predicted, the euphoric and angry behavior of others influenced

the cognitive interpretation of the subjects’ own arousal.
Emotional Intelligence
• It is the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s emotions, to
discriminate among them and to use the information to guide one’s
thinking and actions.
• People who are capable of having awareness of emotions of
themselves or others and manage them accordingly are called
emotionally intelligent.
• Persons who fail to do so, deviate and thereby develop abreaction of
emotion, resulting in sychopathology of certain kinds.
• The concept of emotional intelligence includes intra-personal and
internal elements.
• The intra-personal element includes factors like self-awareness i.e.
ability to keep negative emotions and reactions under control and
self-motivation i.e. the drive to achieve despite setbacks, developing
skills to attain targets and taking initiative to act on opportunities.

• The interpersonal element of emotional intelligence includes two

components i.e. social awareness means the awareness and the
tendency to appreciate other’s feelings and social competence means
social skills that help to adjust with others, such as team building,
conflict management, skills of communicating, etc.