Motivation & Emotion
Motivation is the area of psychological science concerned with factors that energize or stimulate behavior. Four essential
qualities of motivational states can be noted: First, motivational states are energizing. They activate or arouse behaviours.
Second, motivational states are directive. They guide behaviours toward satisfying specific goals/needs. Third, motivational
states help people persist in their behaviour until goals are achieved/needs are satisfied. Fourth, motives differ in strength,
depending on internal and external factors.
A need is a state of deficiency, which can be either biological (e.g., water) or social (e.g., to be with other people). Either way,
needs lead to goal-directed behaviours. Failure to satisfy a particular need leads to psychosocial or physical impairment.
Abraham Maslow’s Need Hierarchy: Maslow believed that humans are driven by varied needs, which he arranged into a
need hierarchy. He placed survival needs (such as hunger and thirst) at the base of the hierarchy, believing they had to be
satisfied first, and personal growth needs at the pinnacle. Maslow believed that to experience personal growth, people must
fulfill their biological needs, feel safe and secure, feel loved, and have a good opinion of themselves.
Maslow’s theory is an example of humanistic psychology, viewing people as striving toward personal fulfillment. Humanists
focus on the person in motivation—it is you who desires food, not your stomach. From the humanist perspective, human
beings are unique among animals because we continually try to improve ourselves. A state of self-actualization occurs when
someone achieves his or her personal dreams and aspirations. A self-actualized person is living up to his or her potential and
therefore is truly happy.
Needs create arousal, which motivates behaviour. Arousal is a generic term used to describe physiological activation or
increased autonomic responses. Drives are psychological states that encourage behaviours that satisfy needs. For biological
states such as thirst/hunger, basic drives help animals maintain equilibrium. In the 1920s, the American physiologist Walter
B. Cannon coined the term homeostasis to describe the tendency for bodily functions to maintain internal stability despite
external changes.
Building on Cannon’s work, Clark Hull proposed that when an animal is deprived of a need, a drive increases in
proportion to the amount of deprivation. The hungrier you are, the more driven you are to find food. The drive state
creates arousal, which encourages you to do something to reduce the drive. Although the initial behaviours the animal
engages in are arbitrary, any behaviour that satisfies a need is reinforced and therefore is more likely to reoccur. Over time, if
a behaviour consistently reduces a drive, it becomes a habit; the likelihood that a behaviour will occur is due to drive and
habit.
Yerkes-Dodson Law: According to Y-D Law, performance increases with arousal until an optimal point, after which
arousal interferes with performance. It challenges the view that motivation always aims to reduce arousal. Instead, it
suggests that we are often motivated to maintain an optimal level of arousal—a state where we feel alert, engaged, and
focused. According to this law, students tend to perform best on exams when experiencing moderate anxiety—too little
makes them disengaged, while too much impairs concentration. Similarly, athletes perform well when aroused but may
choke under excessive stress.
Pleasure Principle and Hedonism:
Sigmund Freud proposed that human behaviour is guided by the pleasure principle, which motivates individuals to seek
pleasure and avoid pain. This concept, rooted in hedonism—an idea originating with the ancient Greeks—suggests that
people are naturally driven toward pleasant experiences. This perspective challenges biological drive theories like Clark
Hull’s, which argue that behaviour is only motivated by the need to reduce internal drives (e.g., hunger or thirst). For
instance, people often eat dessert even when they are not hungry, simply because it is pleasurable. From an evolutionary
perspective, behaviours linked to pleasure often enhance survival and reproduction, while painful experiences may signal
danger or harm and thus are avoided. This framework helps explain why not all motivated behaviours are driven solely by
biological necessity.
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation
Some behaviors are motivated for their own sake. Motivations are of two kinds: extrinsic motivation and intrinsic
motivation. The former emphasizes the external goal activity is directed towards, the latter is not associated with an external
goal. It may satisfy our natural curiosity and creativity. Think of pure play. Or, solving adaptive problems. (Creativity is the
tendency to generate ideas that may be useful in solving problems, communicating, and entertaining. ourselves and others)
Surprisingly, consistent evidence suggests that extrinsic rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation. In a classic study,
Mark Lepper and his colleagues allowed children to draw with coloured marking pens—an activity most children find
intrinsically motivating. One group of children was extrinsically motivated to draw by being led to expect a “good player
award.” Another group of children was rewarded unexpectedly following the task. A third group was neither rewarded nor
led to expect a reward. During a subsequent freeplay period, children who were expecting an extrinsic reward spent much
less time playing with the pens than did the children who were never rewarded or the children who received an unexpected
reward.
People set goals: a desired outcome, associated with specific object(s) or behavioral intention. Self-regulation of behaviour
is the process by which people alter or change their behaviour to attain personal goals. Good goals motivate people to work
hard. But what is a good goal? According to an influential theory developed by the organizational psychologists Edwin
Locke and Gary Latham, challenging—but not overly difficult—and specific goals are the best. Challenging goals encourage
effort, persistence, and concentration. In contrast, goals that are too easy or too hard can undermine motivation and
therefore lead to failure. Dividing specific goals into concrete steps also leads to success.
Self-efficacy, as proposed by Albert Bandura, is the belief that one’s efforts will lead to success, and it plays a key role in
motivating behavior. When individuals believe that their actions—like studying—will result in positive outcomes, they are
more likely to put in effort. However, overly inflated self-views can lead people to set unrealistic goals, which may result in
failure and discouragement. The most effective goals are those that are challenging but achievable. This ties into the concept
of achievement motivation, or the desire to do well relative to standards of excellence. According to McClelland,
individuals high in achievement need tend to set realistic, yet challenging goals, perform better academically, and have
clearer, more attainable career aspirations. In contrast, those low in achievement need may set goals that are either too easy
or unrealistically difficult, leading to inconsistent motivation and lower success rates.
Delayed Gratification
A key challenge in self-regulation is the ability to delay gratification—postponing immediate rewards to achieve long-term
goals. For example, students aiming for competitive careers like medicine often sacrifice short-term pleasures, such as social
outings, to focus on studying. Walter Mischel’s classic studies demonstrated that some children are better than others at
delaying gratification, and this ability is a strong predictor of future success.
Some people are able to delay gratification by using strategies that reduce the pull of temptation. One method is to avoid
looking directly at the tempting object—looking away, closing the eyes, or focusing attention elsewhere can make it easier to
resist. Another method is self-distraction, such as engaging in an unrelated activity, thinking about something else, or
imagining being in a different situation. The most effective approach often involves shifting from “hot” to “cold” thinking.
Hot thinking focuses on the immediate, appealing qualities of the reward, making it harder to resist, whereas cold thinking
reframes it in neutral or less appealing terms—for example, imagining a piece of cake as a block of wood. Hot thinking
tends to activate brain regions linked to desire and reward, while cold thinking draws on areas of the brain involved in
planning and self-control.
Emotions
Emotions are immediate responses to environmental events and differ from moods, which are longer-lasting emotional
states that can heighten or lower our sensitivity to emotional stimuli. While moods are more diffuse, emotions are specific
and arise in direct response to particular situations.
The cultural theory of emotions emphasizes that emotional experiences and expressions are learned and shaped by cultural
norms and practices. From this perspective, emotions are social constructions rather than purely biological givens, meaning
people in different societies may feel and express emotions differently depending on their values, social expectations, and
linguistic frameworks. For instance, among the Gururumba people of New Guinea, there is an emotion referred to as the
“state of being a wild pig,” in which individuals act in erratic and disruptive ways—running wildly, looting low-value goods,
and even attacking bystanders—behaviors that mirror the unpredictability of a wild pig. This emotional state carries a
recognized social purpose: men experiencing it are treated with tolerance and sympathy, as it is considered involuntary.
Importantly, it offers temporary relief from financial obligations and is most common among men aged 25 to 35,
coinciding with the financial pressures of early marriage. This suggests that the emotion functions as a culturally sanctioned
means of escaping stressful responsibilities.
In contrast, the biological theory of emotions argues that emotions are innate, universal, and rooted in human evolution.
Basic emotions such as joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and surprise are thought to be hardwired into the brain, serving
adaptive functions like avoiding danger or strengthening social bonds. Paul Ekman’s work challenged the cultural theory by
showing that emotional expressions are universal. In his study with the Fore people of New Guinea—a remote, preliterate
group unfamiliar with Western media—participants were told brief emotional stories and asked to select from photographs
of Americans the facial expression that best matched the story. The Fore consistently identified expressions like joy, anger,
sadness, fear, disgust, and surprise with accuracy comparable to people in Western societies. Ekman concluded that these
basic emotional expressions are biologically innate, not learned, making them more like breathing than language. However,
while the underlying emotions may be universal, cultural “display rules” govern how and when emotions are expressed. In
a classic study by Ekman and Wallace Friesen, American and Japanese men were videotaped while watching both neutral
and disturbing film clips. When alone, both groups showed similar emotional expressions, but in the presence of an
interviewer, Japanese participants smiled more and showed less disgust than Americans, reflecting cultural norms about
emotional display.
Higher Cognitive Emotions
Higher cognitive emotions, unlike basic emotions, are universal in presence but show high cultural variability in how they
are experienced and expressed. They develop gradually over time and are not tied to a single, identifiable facial expression.
For instance, while fear can arise within milliseconds and is easily recognized through facial cues, love tends to emerge slowly
over days, weeks, or months and lacks a distinct facial marker. This difference reflects their underlying neural processing:
basic emotions are largely handled by subcortical brain structures, whereas higher cognitive emotions rely more on cortical
regions, particularly the neocortex. The neocortex—significantly expanded in recent human evolution—supports complex
functions such as explicit reasoning and analytical thought, enabling these emotions to be shaped by social contexts and
cultural learning. Higher cognitive emotions also serve important social purposes. Guilt, for example, encourages reparative
actions and strengthens bonds by signaling remorse, while shame deters antisocial behavior and reinforces compliance with
social norms. Embarrassment can elicit forgiveness and tolerance by acknowledging a social misstep, and pride reinforces
behaviors valued by the community, motivating achievement and a sense of belonging. Gratitude fosters reciprocal
relationships and cooperation, jealousy or envy helps maintain attention to fairness and social hierarchies while potentially
motivating self-improvement, empathy allows for understanding and responding to others’ feelings—forming the basis of
compassion—and moral outrage supports social justice by calling out harm or unfairness.
Interestingly, basic emotions can sometimes be co-opted to serve the social functions of higher cognitive emotions. For
instance, disgust at the sight of feces is a biological reaction meant to protect against disease, yet when someone feels disgust
in response to an immoral act, this same biological response is redirected to create social distance from behaviors or
individuals deemed morally unacceptable.
How do people experience emotions?
People experience emotions in ways that are subjective, physiological and cognitive.
Subjectively, emotions are personal, inner, first-person experiences (phenomenological) that cannot be directly measured
from the outside. While some individuals feel a wide range of emotions daily, others report only mild or infrequent
emotional states. Extremes in emotional sensitivity can be linked to psychological disorders such as depression or panic
attacks, whereas conditions like alexithymia make it difficult for individuals to recognize or describe their feelings.
Emotions are also tied to physical changes in the body, such as increased heart rate, muscle tension, or blushing.
Historically, William James and Carl Lange proposed that emotions arise from our interpretation of these bodily changes, a
view known as the James-Lange theory. For example, walking alone on a dark street and hearing quick footsteps behind you
might cause your heart to race, your muscles to tense, and your breathing to quicken; according to this theory, noticing
these bodily changes leads you to conclude that you are afraid. In contrast, the Cannon-Bard theory argued that emotional
experiences and bodily reactions occur simultaneously but are processed independently by different brain regions.
Cognitive perspectives, such as Schachter and Singer’s two-factor theory, suggest that emotions emerge when physiological
arousal is interpreted within a specific context, with this cognitive label determining the emotion experienced. This helps
explain phenomena like misattribution of arousal, where identical bodily responses are interpreted differently depending on
the situation—fear after narrowly avoiding a car accident, or romantic excitement after meeting someone attractive. A
related process, excitation transfer, occurs when residual arousal from one event intensifies emotional responses to a
subsequent event, as when post-exercise adrenaline amplifies anger during an argument. Emotions also play a crucial role in
judgment and decision-making by serving as rapid evaluative cues. According to Schwarz and Clore’s affect-as-information
theory, people often rely on their current mood to make broad judgments—such as life satisfaction—without consciously
considering its source, leading those in positive moods to rate their lives more favorably than those in negative moods.
Mood can similarly shape evaluations of experiences, people, or events, sometimes influenced by seemingly trivial factors
like the weather or physical health.
How to be happy?
Material wealth is not a reliable route to lasting happiness. Studies show that people who win large sums, such as lottery
jackpots, experience only a brief surge in happiness. Most quickly return to their baseline emotional state—happy
individuals remain happy, and those who were unhappy often stay that way. Sudden wealth can even lead to dissatisfaction
over time, a view supported by Adam Smith. He argued that rapid fortune often isolates individuals, straining old
friendships and breeding resentment among new acquaintances. The upstart, as Smith noted, becomes alienated, envied by
old peers and rejected by new ones,leading to social disconnection and eventual unhappiness.
If sudden wealth brings limited joy, what does contribute to lasting happiness? Research consistently points to strong social
bonds: good health, close friendships, and especially loving family relationships. Being connected to others—parents,
children, partners—is key to long-term well-being. Conversely, sadness is most often linked to relational loss: betrayal,
estrangement, or bereavement. While losing money can hurt, losing meaningful relationships causes far deeper and more
enduring pain. Thus, happiness is rooted less in fortune than in stable, meaningful human connections.
Linguistic Pathways to Happiness: Consoling with words—offering sympathy or advice—has likely evolved from earlier
nonverbal forms like touch. Today, it feels instinctive to comfort someone with language. Cognitive therapy builds on this,
teaching structured techniques to challenge negative thoughts, and can be as effective as antidepressants like Prozac.
Entertaining through stories and jokes also boosts mood. While fiction offers no obvious evolutionary advantage, Geoffrey
Miller suggests it may function as a display of intelligence and creativity. Telling engaging stories or making others laugh
signals social insight and cognitive skill, possibly offering indirect social benefits.
Venting, or talking to release unpleasant emotions, is a more modern development, popularized by Freud. Rooted in the
hydraulic theory of emotion, Freud viewed emotions as mental fluids that build pressure and must be released—through
talk therapy or emotional confession. This led to the cathartic theory, where expressing feelings is thought to “get them out
of your system,” like steam from a pressure valve. While widely used today, this idea is far removed from Aristotle’s original
use of the term catharsis, which had no hydraulic implication.
Debriefing, though different from Freudian psychoanalysis, is rooted in the same hydraulic theory of emotion—the idea
that talking about traumatic feelings releases internal pressure and prevents emotional damage. Based on this view, one
would expect that discussing trauma soon after it occurs would reduce long-term psychological harm. However, research
suggests the opposite. Psychologist Jo Rick found that road accident victims who received debriefing actually reported more
flashbacks and fear a year later than those who received no intervention. Neuroscience helps explain this. Contrary to
Freud’s belief that unexpressed memories fester, current research shows that bad memories tend to fade naturally over
time—a process called extinction. But repeatedly talking about traumatic events can reactivate neural circuits, preventing
this fading and reinforcing the memory instead.
Technologies of Mood: Beyond language, humans have long employed a range of sensory technologies to regulate
emotion and enhance mood. These include colour, music, touch, scent, taste, and even physical treatments like massage.
Colour can directly affect physiological states. For example, exposure to red light increases heart rate and blood pressure,
making people feel warmer but also more agitated. Blue light, by contrast, induces calm and lowers physiological arousal.
These responses appear to be at least partially innate, as even newborns are soothed more by blue light.
Music acts similarly to visual art, engaging perceptual systems to alter mood. While music may not induce happiness
directly, it often sets the emotional stage for it. For instance, supermarkets use calming music to nudge shoppers into a more
receptive mood, thereby enhancing the appeal of products. Music can also evoke love, longing, or joy—functions explored
both by Shakespeare and neuroscientists like Steven Pinker, who dubbed music auditory cheesecake.
Scent is another ancient emotional tool. Incense in religious settings helps cultivate reflection and reverence, while the
perfume industry relies on scent’s ability to influence mood and social attraction. Touch, especially in the form of massage,
is deeply therapeutic. It releases natural opiates in the brain, promoting relaxation and well-being. Massage is a timeless
technique, recommended by Hippocrates and still central in both modern medicine and alternative therapies.
Cooking represents the gustatory technology of emotion. Like painting/music, it intensifies natural stimuli into
super-stimuli. Foods rich in sugar, like chocolate, offer a temporary boost in mood but are usually followed by a crash,
leaving people feeling worse. Similarly, tea, coffee, and even tryptophan-rich foods like cottage cheese or chicken liver can
temporarily elevate serotonin levels, influencing mood. These mood technologies—colour, music, touch, scent, and
food—tap into evolved sensory systems, offering emotionally potent experiences. However, most provide short-term mood
enhancement rather than sustained emotional well-being.
Chemical Route to Happiness: Drugs offer perhaps the most direct path to altering mood. For individuals suffering from
severe depression, antidepressants can be essential, yet many hesitate to use them therapeutically, even while readily
accepting recreational drug use like alcohol, cannabis, or cocaine. This paradox is what psychiatrist Gerald Klerman termed
"pharmacological Calvinism", a belief that using drugs to treat emotional suffering is somehow morally suspect or weak.
Both therapeutic drugs like Prozac and recreational ones like Ecstasy act by boosting serotonin, a neurotransmitter linked
with mood. This has led to the popular theory that low serotonin causes depression. However, this idea is overly simplistic.
While antidepressants increase serotonin within hours, the therapeutic effects often take weeks to appear—unlike the
immediate high from drugs like Ecstasy. Furthermore, no consistent serotonin abnormalities have been found in depressed
patients. The true biochemical mechanisms of mood remain largely mysterious, despite pharmaceutical marketing that
promotes serotonin-based explanations.
Recreational drugs provide short-lived euphoria, often followed by sharp comedowns. Repeated use to delay these lows can
lead to addiction, where the pursuit of the high eclipses all other needs. In a now-famous experiment by James Olds, rats
were given access to a lever that stimulated the brain's reward center. The rats kept pressing the lever obsessively, even
ignoring food—an image eerily similar to human addiction.
Over time, the body builds tolerance, requiring larger doses for the same effect. This intensifies the physical toll: long-term
cocaine use, for instance, may lead to nasal damage, heart attacks, strokes, or psychosis. Ultimately, while drugs can alter
mood chemically, they rarely offer a sustainable or risk-free path to happiness.
Bodily Technologies of Mood: Bodily practices—like meditation, breathing techniques, and physical movement—serve
as some of the most effective and least harmful technologies for emotional regulation. Meditation, particularly in its Eastern
forms, involves stillness, focused breathing, and mental quieting, producing a calm state by signaling to the brain—through
bodily feedback—that all is well. Similarly, Western relaxation methods tap into the same principle: calm the body to calm
the mind. Other emotions can be induced through movement or posture. For instance, jogging can trigger euphoria, and
even mimicking a facial expression (like smiling) can make one feel the associated emotion. These are examples of bodily
technologies of emotion, techniques that alter mood by acting on the body first.
This reverses the common-sense belief that emotions cause bodily reactions. As William James argued in 1882, emotional
experience often follows bodily change. For example, we don’t run because we are afraid—we feel afraid because we run.
The feedback loop between body and mind allows for both the amplification and regulation of emotion. James likened the
body to the mind’s sounding board, like a guitar's sound box that amplifies vibrations. This feedback can escalate
emotion—each sob deepening grief—or it can be used consciously to dampen emotion, such as holding back tears to
reduce sorrow. Ultimately, bodily technologies remind us that emotion is not just mental; it is embodied—and thus, can be
shaped by the body itself.
People often make two common mistakes when trying to regulate their emotions. The first is thought suppression, where
they try to avoid feeling or responding to an emotion entirely. Research by Daniel Wegner and colleagues shows that this
strategy is usually ineffective and can lead to a rebound effect, where the suppressed thoughts return even more strongly
than before. The second common mistake in emotion regulation is rumination, which involves continuously thinking
about, elaborating on, and focusing on undesired thoughts or feelings. This pattern of thinking tends to prolong negative
moods and interferes with effective coping strategies, such as distraction or problem-solving. Instead of resolving the
emotion, rumination keeps individuals stuck in a negative emotional state.