Ch. 9 Paragraphs

1. Discuss the characteristics of motivation. How are motives related to needs, arousal, drives, homeostasis, and incentives?
        Motivation is the area of psychological science concerned with the factors that energize, or stimulate, behavior. Maslow's hierarchy of needs categorizes needs from those most essential to sustain life, which we are the most motivated to fulfill, to humanistic psychological needs that give someone fulfillment and happiness. Needs create arousal, which is our physiological activation, and drives, which encourage behavior that satisfies needs. Basic biological and animal drives like hunger and thirst help maintain homeostasis, the equilibrium of the body. Incentives are external objects or goals, rather than internal drives, that motivate behaviors.
2. Discuss intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and how the latter can replace the former.
         Extrinsic motivation are the external goals an activity is directed toward, such as working to earn a paycheck or running for a charity. Intrinsic motivation refers to the pleasure associated with an activity, such as gratification or the feeling of self-fulfillment from volunteering, or listening to music. People have a natural exploratory drive and creativity which promotes learning, solving problems, and art without reward. studies show that rewarding intrinsically motivated behaviors undermined intrinsic motivation and reduced the amount of time spent doing the intrinsic activity because of their developed expectation of a reward.
3. Discuss at least two major adaptive roles of emotions.
        Emotions are adaptive because they prepare and guide behaviors. Emotional expressions change to exhibit how we reacts to environmental stimuli, and so that we can accurately perceive others' behavior. Negative and positive experiences guide behavior that will increase the probability of survival and reproduction. Expressions and moods give us information about what other people are feeling because we are social animals.
4. Discuss the major types of emotion that people feel and how these types are related to each other.
         Primary emotions are evolutionarily adaptive, shared across cultures, and associated with specific biological and physical states. They include anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and happiness. Secondary emotions are blends of primary emotions and include remorse, guilt, submission, and anticipation. In the circumplex model emotions are mapped according to their valence (negative or positive) and activation (level of arousal).
5. Discuss the role in emotion of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
         The amygdala processes the emotional significance of stimuli and generates immediate emotional and behavioral responses. Because of the amygdala, people might only jump from the sight of a spider, but will run at full speed from an activated grenade. Sensory information that is passed through the thalamus will either go directly to the amygdala quickly for priority processing, or to the sensory cortex to be further scrutinized before going to the amygdala.
         The right and left frontal lobes are affected by different emotions and it is believed that the variable amount of activation on either side of the prefrontal cortex is associated with specific emotional states in what is known as cerebral asymmetry. The right prefrontal cortex is more active with negative emotions and the left more so with positive emotions. It has also been theorized that people who are dominant in one hemisphere can bias emotion.