Remembering, Thinking, and Feeling Worksheet

Part I: Motivation, Emotion, and Behavior

Explain the relationships between motivation, emotion, and behavior. How does emotion affect motivation? Give an example of a specific behavior and the motivators and emotions that can be behind that behavior. Your response should be at least 300 hundred words. Motivation can be defined as the driving force behind all the actions of an individual. The influence of an individual’s needs and desires both have a strong impact on the direction of their behavior. Motivation is based on your emotions and achievement-related goals. When you feel like the world is against you and you would rather stay in bed and wallow, rather than go out there and face the world again. Your motivation is not going to be at an all-time high. Motivation stems from components that involve the drive and performance of learned responses, such as a learned behavior will not occur unless it is energized.

Motivation can be perceived as a crucial influence on behavior. It helps progress the ability to effectively solve problems and make decisions. Motivation is the behavior that is originated and directed toward a desired goal. This conduct can vary in intensity and persistence. The lack of motivation then causes you to stay in that little world of self-pity for as long as you feel down and depressed. Our motivation relies very much upon just how happy we truly are. If you feel lousy about yourself, you will not have much motivation to change things because you will not feel worthy of the change. Drives and needs can produce emotions, too. Consider the example of the person swimming underwater who comes up under a raft. The need for air will produce not only a struggle to reach the edge of the raft, but also intense fear. Extreme hunger or thirst is also likely to result in emotional responses such as grief anger or fear. Some psychologists have come to accept the idea that people cannot think about motivation without considering that individual’s emotions.

Emotions are a crucial part of motivation. The short-term actions can account for goals, pressures, and threats while long-term behavior often fails. Emotion differs from motivation by the fact that there is not a goal orientation associated with it. This interaction is a result of the collaboration of perception, responses, and feelings. As these examples indicate there is sometimes no clear-cut separation between motivation and emotion. Generally, though, we can think of motivation as arising from some internal source such as deprivation of a biological requirement (food for instance) and of producing some sort of goal-directed behavior (such as searching for food). On the other hand, we can think of emotion as being an internal state usually produced by an external stimulus and not necessarily leading to any particular behavior. In fact, a given emotion can result in many different sorts of behavior, even within the same individual. Huitt. W. (2011). Motivation to Learn. Retrieved January 30, 2013, from http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/motivation/motivate.html

Part II: Theories of Emotion

Summarize the four major theories of emotion. Identify which theory of emotion you think is the most valid. What makes this theory more valid to you than the others? Identify which theory of emotion you think is least valid. What makes this theory less valid? Your response should be at least 300 hundred words.

The four main theories of emotion include:
* the James-Lange theory,
* the Cannon-Bard theory,
* the Schacter-Singer theory, and
* the Lazarus theory.

The James-Lange theory resolved from the independent ideas from the combined ideas and conclusions of William James and Carl Lange. The James-Lange theory claims that emotions happen as a result of experiences one inhibits and the bodily sensation associated with it. This event first causes physiological arousal and continues with a physical response. It is not until then that the person interprets the physical response as an emotion. The sequence prepares each person for the action releasing emotions to engage attention and interpret the sensation, as in the fight-or-flight reaction. For example, we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, or afraid because we tremble. Basically what this is saying is that the physical aspects (e.g. fast heart rate, etc.) appear before the emotions are perceived. So until we physically respond to a situation (e.g. promotion), we do not perceive or understand the emotions surrounding it (“I am excited”). The second theory of emotion is the Cannon-Bard theory. This concept was originally developed by Walter Cannon and later expanded upon by physiologist Phillip Bard.

The Cannon-Bard theory argues that physiological and emotional changes occur simultaneously in response to a stimulus (Fournier, 2010, Para. 1). The following chain of events initially starts with emotion-provoking stimuli received by the senses and then are relayed simultaneously to the cerebral cortex. Next, the stimuli provide the conscious mental experience of the emotion. This action is finally relayed to the sympathetic nervous system, producing the physiological state of arousal. That is, you experience both the physical aspect and the perception of the emotion at the same time, not one caused by the other. For instance, you see the bear (stimulus) and simultaneously feeling fear and a pounding heart kick in at the same time. This seems to make more sense than the James-Lange theory. The third theory is that of Schachter-Singer, which is referred to as a two-stage theory. They state that for an emotion to occur there must first be a physiological arousal, and second there must be an explanation for the arousal. So, there must be some kind of attention-getter and the reason why it got that specific person’s attention.

For example, getting a promotion – the person would first feel the physiological arousal associated with excitement, e.g. increased heartbeat. Second, the promotion would be the explanation for the arousal and get the attention of the person. The fourth theory to consider for this section is the Lazarus theory, which most heavily emphasizes the cognitive aspect of emotion. The premise behind this theory is that an emotion-provoking stimulus triggers a cognitive appraisal, which is followed by the emotion and physiological arousal. This concludes that a thought must come before any emotion or physiological arousal. In other words, you must first think about your situation before you can experience an emotion. It seems that each theory holds a bit of truth, and perhaps they each explain some emotional situations. They are also more holistic this way. Each theory has been tested and has some supporting evidence. But no theory can really be proven. The more support a theory has, the more likely it is valid. Perhaps the Cannon-Bard theory seems to fit for most of my experiences. Their theory states that the emotion and the physical arousal occur at the same time as each other. They can happen at the same time or actually one without the other. Fournier, G. (2010). Cannon-Bard Theory. Retrieved January 30, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/encyclopedia/2008/cannon-bard-theory/

Part II: Thinking, Intelligence, and Creativity

Describe thinking, intelligence, and creativity in your own words. How are thinking, intelligence, and creativity related? Does one’s creativity illustrate anything about his or her thinking processes or level of intelligence? Why or why not? Your response must be at least 300 words.

Thinking is the act of mental or brain activity involved in problem solving and judgment. This premise involves the formulation of a regular train of ideas, influenced by past learning and experience. An example would involve the idea of humans are thinking beings. Thinking can also be considered as a way of deciding whether a claim is true, false, or some notion of either. Intelligence is one’s innate ability to comprehend, understand, and profit from experience. This mental activity acquires information, familiarizes the data, and then applies the knowledge to one’s own thought process and reasoning. An individual apprehends some aspect of an object or situation based on past learning and experience. This aptitude drives understanding, cognitive reasoning, and learning in different ways to deal with new or trying situations. Creativity can be thought of as the ability to think up and design new ideas. This imaginative skill can be tethered through the richness of ideas and original thinking to produce new thoughts and inventions. Some examples might be for a new solution to a problem, a new method, a new design concept for an object, or a new artistic form.

This concept is also harnessed by imagination and expressiveness. It seems that the three concepts of thinking, intelligence and creativity are interrelated. We need a certain degree of intelligence, our innate ability to think, before we can either think or be creative. We need to be able to use our mental abilities (thinking) in order to be creative. And, to be creative, we need to have thinking/mental abilities. The more a person thinks and creates, the intelligence of that individual can increase to a certain degree. Intelligence is the ability to see relationships and to use this ability to solve problems. Creativity on the other hand is the ability to come up with a range of possible new original solutions to a given problem. Each concept differs when dealing with a problem. But these three perceptions can cohesively assist the strategies for a common pattern of thinking of solutions.

Creativity does illustrate our thinking processes or level of intelligence. To create something, people need to use our mental abilities. This involves the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. There is a positive correlation between creativity and intelligence. In other words, the more creative the person is, the higher the level of intelligence that person has. So, we need some level of intelligence in order to be creative. However, it might be difficult to actually access the exact level of intelligence based on one’s creativity, as it is only one aspect of intelligence. Highly creative people are also extremely intelligent. Creativity is typically used to refer to the act of producing new ideas, approaches or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific way.