Motivation and Emotion Text Study Notes

Chapter 11 – Goal-Congruent (Positive) Emotions

Goal congruent emotions are those that facilitate and sustain the attainment of personal

goals

Happiness is a prime example of a positive emotion

o Lazarus defines happiness as making reasonable progress toward the realization

of a goal

o According to Lazarus, emotions such as happiness represent a person-

environment interaction

o The motion of happiness is our cognitive evaluation of that interaction

Happiness

Subjective well-being (SWB), a measure that assesses, through a series of questions, how

people evaluate their lives both affectively and cognitively

Studies of people who are characterized by high SWB experience the following:

o (1) many positive emotions

o (2) few negative emotions

o (3) a tendency to be involved in interesting activities, and

o (4) satisfaction with their lives

Research has found that people high in SWB have many desirable qualities

o They participate in more community organizations, are more liked by others, are

less likely to get divorced, tend to live slightly longer, perform better at work, and

earn higher incomes

A central feature of SWB is feelings of gratitude

Three Myths About the Origins of Happiness

1. The Myth That Life is Difficulty and Few People are Happy

916 surveys of more than 1.1 million people in 45 nations represents most of the world

o Overall, people are quite happy

2. The Myth That Money Makes People Happy

Money is what provides the basics of life – such things as food, shelter, and clothing

Once the basic necessities of life have been satisfied, increasing income does not lead to

greater happiness

Studies have shown that people who hold such aspirations (American Dream) tend to

experience a lowered sense of well-being and poorer mental health

Studies of people who have suddenly become wealthy shows that such good luck does

elevate feelings of happiness but that those feelings are short lived

3. The Myth That We Cannot Become Happier

Although it is acknowledged that on the average there is good evidence for a set-point

interpretation of happiness, there are often marked individual differences

o For example, marital satisfaction

o There is clear evidence that changes in marital status can have not only immediate

implications for feelings of subjective well-being but long-term implications as

well

The Biological Component

Studies of twins adopted into different households indicate that about half of the variance

in subjective well-being in American society is the result of heritability

Researchers have found that happiness is positively related to good social relationships

The links to good social relationships also make sense in terms of Buck’s suggestion that

there are two forms of positive affect: selfish affect and social affect

Positive emotions have been linked to an active left prefrontal cortex, and negative

emotions have been linked to the right prefrontal cortex

Buck has suggested that the positive/negative distinction should be replaced by a

prosocial/selfish distinction

Accordingly, the left hemisphere would be viewed as prosocial and the right hemisphere

as selfish

Happiness as an Adaptive Behaviour

Buss has identified eight basic wishes or goals that people have

These wishes or goals indicate that people (at least certain people) have a desire for good

health, want professional success, are interested in helping friends and relatives, wish to

achieve intimacy, want to experience feelings of confidence that would help them to

succeed, want to experience the satisfying taste that comes from high-quality food, want

to be secure and safe, and want to have the resources to attain these things

Buss has suggested that these wishes or goals are consistent with an evolutionary analysis

of what is in our best interests

The Learned and Cognitive Components

The Conquest of Fear

Most animals have an innate fear of fire, something that appears to have been hardwired

in most animals because it is important for survival

o That our ancestors were able to conquer the fear of fire is therefore a remarkable

feat

o By learning to conquer this fear, our ancestors were able to do many things

One fascinating feature is that the human brain more or less constantly analyzes our

environment for threats to our survival

The main system that is responsible for this is the amygdala

o Were it not for the cortex, especially the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala would

likely put us in a state of fight or flight many times throughout the day

o But it doesn’t

o The reason is that the cortex has the capacity to inhibit or block the signals that

come from the amygdala to activate the fight-flight response

The Ability to Make Plans

The prefrontal cortex does a lot more than just make decisions about when we are or are

not threatened

The prefrontal cortex has also been implicated in the ability to create and manipulate

images

At a functional level, that means we can reflect on an outcome and make plans for the

future

As a result of learning to conquer fear and make plans, our ancestors were less under the

direction of the fight-flight response

o Thus, they likely came to experience positive emotions more of the time

o In other words, the emotion of happiness likely provided the incentive to think

and plan

The ability to make plans makes it possible for humans to self-regulate

Happiness results, on the one hand, from making use of self-regulatory processes which

ensure that we avoid pain and, on the other hand, from making use of self-regulatory

processes which help us achieve goals

Why Did Humans Evolve a Large Prefrontal Cortex in the First Place?

In broad terms, it can be argued that it was adaptive for our ancestors to become

sensitized to potential threats

Fear, in short, evolved to help them survive

Both the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex emerged to deal with the same problem –

threats to our survival

o As such, they likely evolved together

The Motivation for Creating Plans

Various theorists have argued that positive emotions are responsible for self-interest and

for our personal survival

o Thus, the pursuit of happiness is a universal quality of humans

Researchers have suggested that humans are strongly motivated, because of the need for

group survival, to ensure that information is passed along to subsequent generations

o In other words, this isn’t simply altruism at work; it is prosocial affect, which, like

selfish affect, is at the heart of human survival and human evolution

Researchers have suggested that each succeeding generation refines the knowledge it has

been given and then passes that knowledge to the next generation

o The motivation underlying this process is “shared fate”

Because of humans large brains and because they learned how to communicate rather

complex ideas, humans developed the capacity to pass along chunks of cultural

information that are important for the survival of future generations

The Flow Experience and Happiness

Csikszentmihalyi

There are several common characteristics of the flow experience

o First, people who experience flow are completely aware of everything they are

doing

They completely understand the steps that are involved and cab progress

even though they don’t always know where they are going

o Second, they are able to get immediate feedback

They know that at each step they are going in the right direction or making

the right choices

o Third, they feel that their abilities match the task before them

They are neither anxious nor bored but, rather, feel completely challenged

He points out that happiness is not something that is experienced during flow but rather

occurs most strongly when people have finished a flow activity

People in the flow experience seem to be totally free of fear and anxiety

Humans, it can be argued, experience flow because they have a prefrontal cortex that

allows them to manage fear and anxiety, on the one hand, and manipulate images, on the

other hand

How does one achieve flow?

o It is achieved by allowing oneself to become completely absorbed in an activity,

be it an athletic activity, an artistic activity, or an intellectual activity

Happiness and Coping

The word coping is often used in connection with the word stress

Coping was coined to capture the idea that sometimes the best that we can do is make

reasonable progress toward dealing with external demands as well as goals

Myers and Deiner identified four main qualities linked to feelings of happiness:

extraversion, optimism, self-esteem, and personal control

o Three of these – optimism, self-esteem, and personal control – are closely linked

with the tendency to engage in coping responses

o When people are optimistic, they believe that good things are going to happen

o Self-esteem reflects self confidence and has a long history of being linked to

coping and success

o Personal control is a belief that one can muster the resources that one needs

The Biological Component

One learning occurs, the chemical output changes radically

There tends to be a dramatic decrease in the output of such chemicals as epinephrine, and

arousal drops dramatically

One chemical that tends to remain high is norepinephrine, which has been linked to

making adaptive behaviours and has been implicated in the activation of the reward

pathways of the brain

When positive affect is triggered, often as a result of successful coping, a new style of

thinking emerges

o This thinking or cognitive style has been described as “broad, flexible cognitive

organization and ability to integrate diverse material”, a style that has been linked

to increases in brain dopamine levels

The Learned/Cognitive Component

Self-Efficacy Theory

What many psychologists have come to believe is that animals develop some kinds of

generalized belief or expectation such that if they were able to cope in one situation, they

can cope in another situation

In humans, we have called these feelings of personal control, self-esteem, and optimism

Bandura has referred to such beliefs as feelings of self-efficacy

According to Bandura’s theory, whether or not one copes effectively is determined by

self-efficacy beliefs

o Among other things, self-efficacy beliefs affect whether people think in self-

enhancing or self-debilitating ways, how they motivate themselves, whether or

not they persist in the face of difficulties, and their susceptibility to stress and

depression

Bandura argues that when humans are faced with an obstacle or difficulty, they are

inclined to activate plans by setting goals for themselves that will take them out of that

situation or remove the obstacle

o The degree to which they do this is posited to be linked to their feelings of self-

efficacy

Broaden-and-Build Theory

Many theories have suggested that positive affect and positive emotions facilitate

approach behaviour or continued behaviour

o From this perspective, positive affect is highly adaptive in that it motivates and

rewards behaviours that lead the individual to explore novel objects, people, or

situations

The broaden-and-build theory hypothesizes that positive emotions broaden peoples

momentary thought-action repertoires, widening the number of thoughts and actions that

come to mind

o The theory suggests not only that there is a momentary increase in thought-action

repertoires, widening the number of thoughts and actions that come to mind

o The theory suggests not only that there is a momentary increase in thought-action

repertoires but also that these thought-action repertoires are added to existing

repertoires

o As a result, ones personal resources increase whenever positive emotions are

activated

o Studies have shown that over time, people who are more positive develop more

adaptive response repertoires by engaging in exploratory behaviours that give

them more accurate and better knowledge of the environment, whereas people

who are more negative fail to engage in such exploratory behaviours and thus fail

to do such things as correct false impressions

o According to the theory, triggering positive emotions is an effective way of

undoing negative emotions

The Question of Uncertainty and Coping

Happiness from Confronting Fear and Uncertainty; Developing a Bias for Action

One thing that characterizes our daily interactions with the environment is the lack of

certainty in how we should deal with a new situation

When there is no certainty, ones survival is threatened

To survive, people need to know about their environment and ho to effectively interact

with that environment, a process that psychologists simply call coping

Uncertainty is a cognitive state in which we are unable to fully understand something or

to fully know the outcome of an act

Researchers have found that uncertainty leads to high arousal, which can lead to the

narrowing of attention

Gilovich and Medvec suggested that acts of omission refer to not living up to our

potential, whereas acts of commission refer to not being prepared

o These feelings have collectively been referred to as feelings of regret

o Although acts of commission generally affect us immediately and can dominate

our attention (not being prepared for a speech, for example), acts of omission tend

to become important over time (not going to college, for example)

The Biological Component

To deal with unpredictability, humans typically engage in behaviours that will make

things more predictable

o If we are faced with an imminent attack, for example, we might attempt to build

defenses that will protect us

o Psychologists can such acts behavioural coping

o Whenever we engage in behavioural coping, norepinephrine is released in large

amounts, and our mood improves

The Learned/Cognitive Component

A great deal of evidence indicates that people get significantly more self-satisfaction

from exercising a coping response when the task is difficult than when it is easy

Personal control over threatening events appears to be a powerful source of motivation

for humans, and inability to control such events is often a source of stress

There is generally a positive relationship between the difficulty of coping and the

magnitude of the norepinephrine response, perhaps because people must put forth more

effort when the response is more difficult

Efforts to control a situation have typically been linked to high outputs of norepinephrine,

as long as the response is potentially adaptive

It appears that people can reframe or reinterpret a negative situation by adopting a

positive perspective

Gilovich and Medvec have suggested that unless we learn to seize the moment, we could

end up at some point with a list of regrets

Self-Efficacy theory and the Dual Route to Anxiety Control

Bandura suggests that one reason people initiate actions is they have feelings of self-

efficacy

According to Ozer and Bandura, perceived self-efficacy is concerned with peoples beliefs

in their capabilities to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources, and courses of action

needed to exercise control over given events

Self-efficacy determines what challenges people undertake, how much effort they will

expend, how long they will persevere, and how much stress and despondency they will

endure in the face of difficulties and failures

A second reason that people initiate a certain course of action is linked to outcome

efficacy – that is, their beliefs about how satisfying it will be to achieve a certain goal

Bandura has suggested that people avoid potentially threatening situations not because

they experience anxiety and arousal but, rather, because they fear that they will be unable

to cope, either behaviourally or cognitively

According to Bandura, one of the greatest sources of threat at the cognitive level is the

inability to deal with perturbing thoughts that often arise in the face of fear and threat

Thus, according to self-efficacy theory, whether we choose to engage in a particular

activity depends on whether we perceive that we have behavioural coping skills and that

we can control our thinking

There is a strong link between feelings of self-efficacy and catecholamines such as

norepinephrine and epinephrine

o When feelings of self-efficacy are strong, catecholamines are typically at a low

level

o As self-doubt begins to increase (at moderate levels of self-efficacy), the level of

these two catecholamines increases markedly

o When people refuse to participate in a potentially threatening activity (when self-

efficacy is weak), the level of these two catecholamines goes down

Considerable research shows that negative thoughts tend to be closely linked to avoidant

behaviours

What anxiety causes us to do is to be cautious – top stop, look, and listen before

proceeding

o What this model shows is that before we gain control over our actions, as well as

our anxiety, we need to gain control over out negative thoughts

o One thing that can help us gain control over our negative thoughts is to become

competent, what Ozer and Bandura refer to in their model as having our

developing coping efficacy

Optimism and Hope

When people see desired outcomes as attainable, they are inclined to continue to exert

efforts to attain those outcomes; however, when they see outcomes as unattainable,

whether this is caused by something they lack or by external constraints, people reduce

their efforts and eventually give up

o In other words, outcome expectancies play an important role in determining

whether people are inclined to continue or quit

Optimists and hopeful people tend to view all desired outcomes as attainable, even in the

midst of failures and setbacks

o Some people have suggested that they tend to be very unrealistic or that they live

in an illusionary world because they fail to accept things that are not going well

When things are going well, there is not a great deal of difference between optimists and

pessimists – hopeful and hopeless people

When things start to go badly, however, pessimistic and hopeless people tend to give up,

whereas optimists and hopeful people tend to persist

Definitions

Optimism: generalized expectancy that good, as opposed to bad, outcomes will generally

occur when one is confronted with problems across important life domains

The concept of hope implies that we can find the path to our goal, often by using our

skills or ability or perhaps by persisting

Optimism and Pessimism

Pessimism seems to be principally associated with neuroticism and negative affect,

whereas optimism is principally linked with extraversion and positive affect

Among other things, this seems to indicate that although optimists tend to be open to new

experiences or new stimulation, pessimists tend to be more withdrawn and inhibited in

their interactions with the world

The Biological Component

Lionel Tiger

o Argues that when our ancestors left the forest and became plains animals, they

were faced with the task of obtaining food by killing other animals

o Suggests that one mechanism involved the endorphins

o Endorphins have at least two important qualities:

They have analgesic properties (the ability to reduce pain),

And they produce feelings of euphoria

o Tiger contends that it was adaptive for our hunting ancestors to experience a

positive emotion when they were injured because that would reinforce their

tendency to hunt in the future

The Learned/Cognitive Component

Optimism as an Acquired Thinking Style

If optimism and hope are merely ways that people have learned to think about the world

and do not reflect deep, underlying personality attributes, it should be relatively easy to

change such thinking styles

Optimists regard setbacks, failures, and adversity as temporary, as specific to a given

situation, and as caused by external causes

Similarly, hope involves an explanatory style in which problems are regarded as

temporary and specific to a given situation

Thus, within Seligman’s system, optimism is a more inclusive concept; it contains three

elements, whereas hope contains only two

Evidence for Seligman’s Theory

Success at Sales

o To determine whether measures of optimism might be good predictors of sales

success, Seligman compared his test of optimism with the Career Profile tests

developed by Metropolitan Life to select its sales staff

Academic Success

o Those children who persist get the top marks

o More recently, educators have observed that one reason classroom performance

dives is that children get depressed

o In a longitudinal study to examine the role of optimism and pessimism in

depression and intellectual achievement, researchers found that there were two

major risk factors for poor achievement:

Pessimism and bad life events (parents separating, family deaths, family

job loss)

Optimism and Health

Numerous studies have shown that optimistic people are healthier than pessimistic people

Considerable evidence indicates that optimism promotes health in variety of ways,

including an improved immune response, reduction in negative mood, and better health

promoting behaviours

The Concept of Hope

Feelings of hope are also closely linked to a wide range of adaptive behaviours

Snyder’s Definition of Hope

Snyder and his colleagues define hope in terms of two major elements that they

conceptualize as forms of thinking

o First, there is pathway thinking, which involves conceptualizing one or more

routes to a desired goal

o Second, there is agentic thinking, which involves thoughts that have to do with

initiating movement along ones chosen path

o Snyder and colleagues regard this relationship between agency and pathways as

reciprocal

o Hopeful people believe, on the one hand, that they can attain goals (agency) and,

on the other hand, that they can generate the alternatives (pathways) needed to

achieve those goals

In this theory, these two elements are interdependent

Scheier and Carver argue that outcome expectancies are the best predictors of behaviour

o Optimism is a generalized expectancy or disposition that good outcomes will

generally occur across important life domains

o Snyder argues that putting all the emphasis on outcomes fails to adequately

account for behaviour

Positive Emotions and Resilience

Resilient individuals “bounce back” from negative events whereas less resilient

individuals often find themselves unable to get back on track

Less resilient individuals seem unable to make the necessary adaptations to the demands

that are associated with a stressful encounter

The Role of Early Experience: The Question of Attachment

According to attachment theory, the ability of parent and child to form a secure bond

fundamentally affects the childs approach to the world

o From the security of having a close bond, the child explores, develops feelings of

confidence, and learns how to interact socially

The Biological Component

Evolutionary psychologists argue that the mother, the father, the family, and even the

extended family (sometimes called the tribe) are perceived as important sources of

protection for the child, who at birth, has few defenses

For this reason, researchers have suggested that human infants evolved a number of

mechanisms to securely bond with parents and caretakers

Buck argues that two fundamental social motives emerge from attachment:

o The need to follow or exceed expectations and the need to be loved

The Learned/Cognitive Component

Our ancestors often didn’t have the resources needed to provide for all their offspring

o Thus, they had to divide their energy accordingly, making decisions about what

was optimal and even neglecting certain offspring, much like a mother dog

ignoring the runt of the litter

Ancestors likely had different mating strategies

Three Attachment Styles: What Happens When Children Are Not Securely Attached

Researchers have suggested that three distinctive attachment styles develop in children as

a result of how they were treated by their mothers

o 1. Secure attachment style

o 2. Anxious/ambivalent attachment style

o 3. Avoidant attachment style

Attachment in Adults

Securely attached adults (as measured by self-reports) have the highest interest in their

jobs, experience the greatest job satisfaction, and are the lowest in terms of being fearful

about evaluation

Anxious/ambivalent attached adults, in contrast, tend to treat work largely as a search for

approval, express feelings of not being appreciated on the job, and prefer working with

others rather than working alone

Avoidant attachment adults tend to regard work primarily as a means of getting away

from undesired social contacts

Attachment History, Stress, and Seeking Social Support

Securely attached adults are indeed more inclined to seek social support

Social Support Systems and Health

Social support involves emotional support, informational support, tangible assistance, and

appraisal support (feedback on the accuracy of our evaluations of the environment)

McClelland has found that affiliative trust (a willingness to cooperate with others),

together with a sense of agency, is linked to a strong immune response and good health

Attachment, Belongingness, and Faith

Myers points out that people who have a strong spiritual faith (a belief in God, for

example) tend to be happier than are people who do not have a strong faith

Chapter 12 – From Curiosity to Creativity

Curiosity and Exploratory Behaviour

Before the 1950s, the behaviourists argued that primary drives, such as hunger, energized

the organism to engage in random behaviour

When the organism encountered the appropriate goal object during such random

movements, the drive would be reduced

As a result, the preceding behaviour would be reinforced

Through learning, the organism would become increasingly more efficient at finding the

appropriate goal object when a given drive state has been activated

Novelty, Curiosity, and Exploratory Behaviour

To determine if organisms have an innate curiosity drive, researchers created a variety of

situations to see what would happen if you introduced an individual to a novel

environment or situation

What these studies showed is that organisms are motivated to interact with new or novel

objects and that they learn in the process

The fact that interest in novel things diminishes with repeated exposure lead many

researchers to conclude that what initially motivates exploratory behaviour is novelty

o By definition, novelty means “new,” and something is new only as long as it

contains information that hasn’t been completely processed

The Preference for Complexity

If animals are given