All right, let's continue to talk about motivation and emotion. So let's talk about a different kind of motivation. Let's talk about the achievement motive. So the achievement motive is the need to master difficult challenges and to outperform others and to meet high standards of excellence. Above all else, the need for achievement involves a desire to excel, especially in competition with others.
Research on achievement motivation was pioneered by researcher David McClendon and colleagues, and they argue that achievement is not the only way to achieve success. argued that achievement motivation is of the utmost importance. That is the spark that ignites economic growth, scientific progress, inspirational leadership, and masterpieces in the creative arts. Research on achievement motivation have focused mostly on variations among individuals.
In this research, investigators usually measure participants'need for achievement with some variant of the thematic app perception test, also known as the TAT. The TAT is a test that is performed by a group of researchers. is a projective test so this is one that requires subjects to respond to vague or ambiguous stimuli in way that ways that may reveal personal motives and traits the stimulus materials for the tat are pictures of people in ambiguous scenes open to interpretation the stimulus materials um these scenes are then used to ask participants to write or tell stories about what's happening in the in the scene and what the characters are feeling. The themes of these stories are then scored and measured to determine the strength of various needs.
The research on individual differences in achievement motivation have yielded interesting findings on the personal characteristics of people who score high in the need for achievement. For instance, they tend to work harder and more persistently on tasks than people low in the need for achievement. They are also more likely than others to delay gratification in order to pursue long-term goals. John Atkinson has elaborated extensively on McCullen's original theory of achievement motivation and identified some important situational determinants on achievement behavior.
Atkinson theorizes that the tendency to pursue achievement in a particular situation depends on a couple of important factors. One, the strength of one's motivation to achieve success, which is viewed as a stable aspect of personality. One's estimate of the probability of success for the task at hand, and such estimates vary from task to task, and then the incentive value of success, which depends on the tangible and intangible rewards for success on the specific task. The last two variables are situational determinants of achievement behavior.
That is, they vary from one situation to another. According to Atkinson, the pursuit of achievement increases as the probability of success and incentive value of success go up. Atkinson notes that the probability of success and the incentive value of success on tasks are interdependent to some degree. As tasks get easier, success becomes less satisfying. And as tasks get harder, success becomes more satisfying, but becomes less likely.
When the probability and incentive value of success are weighed together, moderate challenging tasks seem to offer the best overall value. One thing I do want to say about this particular theory of achievement motivation, the desire for success or social approval for hard work or good grades or etc. is fairly common, but I do want to state that the interpretation of this particular view of this is definitely not necessarily true. Very sort of Western Eurocentric American capitalist view of value, right? This idea that tasks are only really motivating if there's some success incentive associated with it, right?
The idea of financial success is usually the one that they imply. And I would argue that other cultural groups may not view this as the primary way that this motivation may operate, right? It's just one theory. All right, let's shift gears a little bit from motivation to emotion. So I want you to think about each of the groups on the left.
So family, close friends, acquaintances, co-workers, people you might see around campus, and each of the experiences on the right. So loss of iPhone, loss of family member, divorce or breakup, birth of a child, bad haircut. And I want you to imagine how you might react in regards to each of these experiences with each of these groups.
So pause the video and jot down your thoughts on how you might react, for example, to a divorce or breakup in terms of how you would show emotion to family versus close friends versus acquaintances or coworkers or in the middle of campus. OK, now that you've had a chance to jot that down. I want you to notice the similarities and differences of how you report, how you might show emotion to the different groups. So for example, in the example of a divorce or breakup, with family members or close friends, you may show a lot of emotion, maybe even allow them to see you cry if you were upset about it, or discuss how angry you are at the person, et cetera, or disappointed. And then.
Whereas you might not share that with an acquaintance or a coworker. And certainly you probably wouldn't cry and throw yourself on the ground in the middle of campus, right? Or people who don't know you would see it. And so what's interesting is where you draw that line with how emotionally close you're willing to be with different individuals varies by culture, right? So how do those display rules differ from group to group?
Well, What social cues might inform you about the display rules for any given group? For example, if you started crying in front of someone you were just a friend of a friend with, and they came up to you and put their arms around you and hugged you and said, Oh, I understand. Yeah, tell me all about it.
That would be one cue. If they sort of inched away from you and leaned backwards and looked at you strangely, that would certainly be a different kind of cue, right? Maybe a cue that, what your behavior wasn't appropriate for the closeness of that group. And different cultural groups have different levels of comfort with sharing, right?
So in some cultures, it's even odd to share with even some members of your family, while in other cultures... Emotions may be displayed very brightly and loudly even in public spaces or people you don't know as well. So what happens? Think about this and jot it down. What happens if you do not abide by the display rules of a given group?
And in what ways are you rewarded for following display rules? All right, let's use that to jump into talking about emotional experience. All right, so the elements of emotional experience can be broken down into three components.
There's a subjective or conscious experience, which we call the cognitive component, which is accompanied by a bodily arousal, which is the physiological component and by characteristic overt expressions which are the behavioral component right so we're going to continue uh chatting about this in a bit bit, but look at the image I have here. You can very clearly see this is highly exaggerated, right? Maybe happy, sad.
And emotions are fairly easy to read within a culture. So let's talk through the cognitive component. In studying the cognitive component of emotions, psychologists generally rely on individuals'highly subjective verbal reports of what they are currently experiencing.
People's cognitive appraisals of events in their lives are key determinants in the emotions they experience. The conscious experience of emotion includes an evaluative aspect. People characterize their emotions as pleasant or unpleasant. These evaluative reactions can be automatic and subconscious.
Of course, individuals often experience mixed emotions, which include both pleasant and unpleasant qualities. Research on emotional and emotional health can be found at the University of Michigan. on affective forecasting, which are efforts to predict one's emotional reactions to future events, demonstrate that people reliably mispredict their future feelings in response to both good and bad events. People tend to be reasonably accurate in anticipating whether an event will generate a positive or negative emotional response, but they are often way off in predicting the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions. All right, let's talk about the physiological component.
So in terms of the physiological component, we can talk about autonomic arousal. So much of the physiological arousal associated with emotion occurs through the actions of the autonomic nervous system. And we talked about this in the behavioral chapter, right? There seem to be a lot of neural circuits involved here.
The hypothalamus, amygdala, and adjacent... and structures in the limbic system are the seat of emotions in the brain. I put a star by limbic system and amygdala especially.
So the amygdala plays a central role in the acquisition of conditioned fears. All right, and now let's talk a little bit about the behavioral component. So emotions are expressed in body language or nonverbal behavior. And facial expressions can reveal a variety of basic emotions, from happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, and disgust.
So the facial expressions that go with various emotions may be largely innate, and we'll talk about this on the next slide as well. But... So the behavioral component is sort of the physical express reaction, right? All right.
So let's talk about cross-cultural similarities and differences in the expression of emotion. So after demonstrating that Western subjects could discern specific emotions from facial expressions, researchers took their facial cue photographs on the... the road to other societies to see whether nonverbal expressions of emotion transcend cultural boundaries. For example, they tested participants in Argentina, Spain, Japan, and other countries, and they found considerable cross-cultural agreement in the identification of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust based on facial expressions. The photos were also taken to a remote area in New Guinea and shown to a group of native people called the Foray who had virtually no contact with western culture.
The people from this this sort of isolated society, did a fair job of identifying the emotions portrayed in the pictures, leading to the conclusion that the facial expressions associated with basic emotions are universally recognized across cultures. Some theorists have questioned the assertion that facial expressions of emotion transcend culture. Researchers point out that there are some substantial variations across cultures in subjects accuracy in identifying specific emotions.
This line of research has also been criticized on the grounds that it depended on a rather small set of artificial highly posed caricature-like photos that did not do justice to the variety of facial expressions that can accompany specific emotions. Researchers have also found that many cultural disparities in how people think about and express their emotions exist. Some basic categories of emotion that are universally understood in Western cultures appear to go unrecognized or at least unnamed in some non-Western cultures.
For example, some cultures have no word that corresponds to sadness. Others lack words for depression, anxiety, or remorse. Display rules that are that are norms that regulate the appropriate expression of emotions vary by culture. So they prescribe when, how, and to whom a person can show various emotions.
These norms, again, vary from culture to culture. Thus, the nonverbal expression of emotions does vary somewhat from culture to culture. All right, let's talk about some theories of emotion. We're going to talk about a couple of theories here. So William James was an early theorist who urged psychologists to explore the functions of consciousness.
James developed a theory of emotion 130 years ago that remains influential today. At about the same time, he and Carl Lang independently proposed that the conscious experience of emotion results from one's perception of autonomic arousal. Everyday logic suggests that when you stumble onto a rattlesnake in the woods, the conscious experience of fear leads to autonomic arousal, which is the fight or flight response. The James Lane theory of emotion asserts the opposite. It posits that the perception of autonomic arousal leads to the conscious experience of fear.
In other words, while you might assume that your pulse is racing because you're fearful, James and Lange argue that you're fearful because your pulse is racing. According to James Lange theory, different patterns of autonomic activation lead to the experience of different emotions. Hence, people supposedly distinguish emotions such as fear, joy, and anger on the basis of the exact configuration. of physical reactions that they experience. Walter Cannon found the James-Lange theory unconvincing.
Cannon pointed out that physiological arousal can occur without the experience of emotion. He argued that visceral changes are too slow to perceive the conscious experience of emotion. Finally, he argued that people experiencing very different emotions such as fear, joy, and anger exhibit patterns of autonomic arousal that are too similar to be readily distinguished. Thus, Cannon espoused a different explanation of emotion.
Later, Philip Bard elaborated on it. The resulting Cannon-Bard theory argues that emotions occur when the thalamus sends signals simultaneously to the cortex, creating the conscious experience of emotion, and to the autonomic nervous system, creating visceral arousal. The Cannon-Barr model is compared to the James-Lange model. In another influential analysis, Schachter asserted that people look at situational cues to differentiate between alternative emotions.
According to Schachter, the experience of emotion depends on two factors, the autonomic arousal and the cognitive interpretation of that arousal. So Schachter proposed that when you experience physiological arousal, You search your environment for an explanation. Schachter agrees with the James Lane view that emotion is inferred from arousal.
However, he also agrees with the Cannon-Barr position that different emotions yield indistinguishable patterns of arousal. He recognizes these views by arguing that people look at external rather than internal cues to differentiate and label specific emotions. So again, to differentiate those three theories, let's go back.
James Lang, there's a stimulus in the environment. You have an autonomic arousal and you then interpret that autonomic arousal into conscious feeling. I feel afraid because I tremble. So the idea that the arousal comes first, right?
Then we have the Cannon-Bard theory where we've got a stimulus. They believe there's subcortical brain activity in the amygdala and that the conscious feeling in autonomic arousal happen kind of simultaneously, right? So fear and arousal happen simultaneously based on subcortical brain reactivity.
Schachter sort of takes a combination of these. So I label my trembling as fear because I appraise the situation as dangerous. So the stimulus causes autonomic arousal. Then we have an appraisal in the brain, which leads to our conscious feeling.
What's interesting about the Schachter theory specifically is that as we understand physiological arousal, a lot of similar physiological arousal occurs for a variety of experiences. So for example, the heart racing when you're about to ask someone out on a date. or go on stage is extremely similar, if not indistinguishable, to the heart racing when a dog is barking.
So a really good thing, you're about to walk on stage and present or walk on stage and get your diploma, your heart races. When you're about to go on a date with someone, your heart races. When a dog is chasing you, your heart races, right? That physiological arousal, autonomic arousal that we talked about. in the prior chapter, those arousal symptoms are going to be similar, right?
You're going to see an increased heart rate, increased breathing, all of those. Some physiological symptoms are very similar. And so the idea that our body is just able to interpret that when they look pretty much identical. In fact, one of the sort of outcomes of the fact that the physiological arousal can be so similar is that this is actually a contributor to some anxiety disorders.
That people misinterpret arousal for danger and it leads to... panic symptoms, right? So in panic disorder.
And it's this misinterpretation of your body's natural sort of arousal state. So it's not really, I don't know that the original theory is really as clear cut when we understand that the physiological arousal is pretty similar. It would be very difficult to know exactly what emotion you were feeling from essentially the same physiological responses.
Alright, let's talk a little bit about the primary emotions. So Charles Darwin believed that emotions develop because of their adaptive value. So Darwin viewed human emotion as the product of evolution.
This premise serves as a foundation for several modern theories of emotion developed independently by a number of different researchers that I have listed here. These evolutionary theories consider emotions to be largely innate reactions to certain stimuli. As such, emotion should be immediately recognizable under most conditions without much thought. Evolutionary theorists believe that emotion evolved before thought. These theorists generally assume that emotions originate in the subcortical brain structures that evolved before the higher brain areas associated with complex thought.
Evolutionary theories also assume that natural selection has equipped humans with a small number of innate emotions with proven adaptive value. This figure summarizes the conclusions of leading theorists in the area. As you can see, the researchers haven't come up with identical lists.
However, there's considerable agreement. So all three theorists conclude that people exhibit about eight to ten primary emotions and six of them appear on all three lists. Fear, anger, joy, disgust, Interest and surprise.
So those are important. Again, they're fear, anger, joy, disgust, interest, and surprise. All right, that's all we've got for the emotion and motivation section of the course.