Role of emotional and volitional processes in forming bechavior

Emotion is made up of three components; physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience. One of the oldest theoretical controversies regarding emotion focuses on the timing of our feelings in relation to the physiological responses that accompany emotion. William James and Carl Lange proposed that we feel emotion after we notice our physiological responses. Walter Cannon and Philip Bard believed that we feel emotion at the same time that our bodies respond. A third, more recent, theory, the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory, focuses on the interplay of the emotions rather than the timing of the emotions. It states that there are only two components of emotion, physical arousal and a cognitive label.

Embodied Emotion

Emotions and the Autonomic Nervous System

Emotions are both psychological and physiological. Much of the physiological activity is controlled by the autonomic nervous system’s sympathetic (arousing) and parasympathetic (calming) divisions. Our performance on a task is usually best when arousal is moderate, though this varies with the difficulty of the task.

Physiological Similarities Among Specific Emotions

Three emotions—fear, anger, and sexual arousal—produce similar physiological responses that are nearly indistinguishable to an untrained observer. However, the emotions are felt differently by those experiencing them.

Physiological Differences Among Specific Emotions

Emotions stimulate different facial muscles. Additionally, scientists have discovered subtle differences in activity in the brain’s cortical areas, in use of brain pathways, and in secretion of hormones associated with different emotions.

Cognition and Emotion

A spillover effect occurs when our arousal response to one event spills over into our response to the following event. Arousal fuels emotion; cognition channels it. Emotional responses are immediate when sensory input goes directly to the amygdala via the thalamus, bypassing the cortex, triggering a rapid reaction that is outside our conscious awareness.

Expressed Emotion

Nonverbal Communication

Much of our communication is through the body’s silent language. Psychologists have studied people’s abilities to detect emotion, even from thin slices of behavior. Research has found that women are typically more sensitive to nonverbal clues than men.

Detecting and Computing Emotion

Discerning lies from truth is difficult for the untrained eye. There are certain professionals who are more skilled at detecting emotion. Researchers are studying the role of nonverbal communication during job interviews. In E-mail communications, nonverbal cues are missing which can lead to misinterpretation.

Culture and Emotional Expression

Although some gestures are culturally determined, facial expressions, such as those of happiness and fear, are common the world over. In communal cultures that value interdependence, intense displays of potentially disruptive emotions are infrequent.

The Effects of Facial Expressions

Expressions do more than communicate emotion. They also amplify the felt emotion and signal the body to respond accordingly. Emotions, then, arise from the interplay of cognition, physiology, and expressive behaviors.

Experienced Emotion

Among various human emotions, we looked closely at how we experience three: fear, anger, and happiness.

Fear

Fear is an adaptive emotion, but it can be traumatic. Although we seem biologically predisposed to acquire some fears, what we learn through experience and observation best explains the variety of human fears.

Anger

Anger is most often evoked by events that not only are frustrating or insulting but also are interpreted as willful, unjustified, and avoidable. Blowing off steam may be temporarily calming, but in the long run it does not reduce anger. Expressing anger can actually make us angrier.

Happiness

A good mood boosts people’s perceptions of the world and their willingness to help others. The moods triggered by the day’s good or bad events seldom last beyond that day. Even significant good events, such as a substantial rise in income, seldom increase happiness for long. We can explain the relativity of happiness with the adaptation-level phenomenon and the relative deprivation principle. Nevertheless, some people are usually happier than others, and researchers have identified factors that predict such happiness.

Perspectives on Motivation

Motivation is the energizing and directing of behavior, the force behind our yearning for food, our longing for sexual intimacy, our need to belong, and our desire to achieve.

Instincts and Evolutionary Psychology

Under Darwin’s influence, early theorists viewed behavior as controlled by biological forces, such as specific instincts. When it became clear that people were naming, not explaining, various behaviors by calling them instincts, this approach fell into disfavor. The underlying idea—that genes predispose species-typical behavior—is, however, still influential in evolutionary psychology.

Drives and Incentives

Drive reduction theory states that most physiological needs create aroused psychological states, driving us to reduce or satisfy those needs. The aim of drive reduction is internal stability, or homeostasis. Thus, drive reduction motivates survival behaviors, such as eating and drinking. Not only are we pushed by our internal drives, we are also pulled by external incentives. Depending on our personal experiences, some stimuli (for example, certain foods) will arouse our desires.

Optimum Arousal

Rather than reducing a physiological need or tension state, some motivated behaviors increase arousal. Curiosity-driven behaviors, for example, suggest that too little as well as too much stimulation can motivate people to seek an optimum level of arousal.

A Hierarchy of Motives

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs expresses the idea that, until satisfied, some motives are more compelling than others. It indicates that physiological needs must first be met, then safety, followed by the need for belongingness and love, and finally, esteem needs. Once all of these are met, a person is motivated to meet the need for self-actualization. This order of needs is not universally fixed but it provides a framework for thinking about motivation.

Hunger

The Physiology of Hunger

Hunger’s inner push primarily originates not from the stomach’s contractions but from variations in body chemistry, including hormones that heighten or reduce hunger. For example, we are likely to feel hungry when our glucose levels are low or when ghrelin is secreted by an empty stomach. This information is integrated by the hypothalamus, which regulates the body’s weight as it influences our feelings of hunger and satiety. To maintain weight, the body also adjusts its metabolic rate of energy expenditure.

The Psychology of Hunger

Our preferences for certain tastes are partly genetic and universal, but also partly learned in a cultural context. The impact of psychological factors, such as challenging family settings and weight-obsessed societal pressures, on eating behavior is dramatic in people with anorexia nervosa, who keep themselves on near-starvation rations, and in those with bulimia nervosa, who binge and purge in secret. In the past half-century a dramatic increase in poor body image has coincided with a rise in eating disorders among women in Western cultures. In addition to cultural pressures, low self-esteem and negative emotions (with a possible genetic component) seem to interact with stressful life experiences to produce anorexia and bulimia.

Sexual Motivation

The Physiology of Sex

Physiologically, the human sexual response cycle normally follows a pattern of excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution, followed in males by a refractory period, during which renewed arousal and orgasm are impossible. Sex hormones, in combination with the hypothalamus, help our bodies develop and function as either male or female. In nonhuman animals, hormones also help stimulate sexual activity. In humans, they influence sexual behavior more loosely, especially once sufficient hormone levels are present.

The Psychology of Sex

External stimuli can trigger sexual arousal in both men and women. Sexually explicit materials may also lead people to perceive their partners as comparatively less appealing and to devalue their relationships. In combination with the internal hormonal push and the external pull of sexual stimuli, fantasies (imagined stimuli) influence sexual arousal. Sexual disorders, such as premature ejaculation and female orgasmic disorder, are being successfully treated by new methods, which assume that people learn and can modify their sexual responses.

Adolescent Sexuality

Adolescents’ physical maturation fosters a sexual dimension to their emerging identity. But culture is a big influence, too, as is apparent from varying rates of teen intercourse and pregnancy. A near-epidemic of sexually transmitted infections has triggered new research and educational programs pertinent to adolescent sexuality.

Sexual Orientation

One’s heterosexual or homosexual orientation seems neither willfully chosen nor willfully changed. Preliminary new evidence links sexual orientation with genetic influences, prenatal hormones, and certain brain structures. The increasing public perception that sexual orientation is biologically influenced is associated with increasing acceptance of gays and lesbians and their relationships.

Sex and Human Values

Sex research and education are not value-free. Some say that sex-related values should therefore be openly acknowledged, recognizing the emotional significance of sexual expression. Human sexuality at its life-uniting and love-renewing best affirms our deep need to belong.

The Need to Belong

No one is an island; we are all, as John Donne noted in 1624, part of the human continent. Our need to affiliate—to feel connected and identified with others—boosted our ancestors’ chances for survival and is therefore part of our human nature. We experience our need to belong when suffering the breaking of social bonds, when feeling the gloom of loneliness or the joy of love, and when seeking social acceptance. For people experiencing ostracism, stress and depression can result. On the other hand, people who feel a sense of belongingness are happier and healthier.

Notion “emotions”

Emotions are aspect of higher nervous activity that characterize subjective attitude of person to various stimuli arousal in surroundings. Emotional status reflects actual needs of man and helps in its realization.

Classification of emotions

According to subjective status there are positive and negative emotions. Negative emotions are sthenic (aggression, affect) that stimulate human activity and asthenia (horror, sadness, depression) that inhibit behaviour. Lower or elementary emotions are caused by organic needs of man or animal as hanger, thirst and survival, so on). In humans even lover emotions undergo to cortical control and are brining up. Social, historical and cultural customs cause also formation of higher emotions that regulates public and private relations in society. Higher emotions appear due to consciousness and may inhibit lower emotions.

Appearance of emotions in ontogenesis.

In newborns emotions of horror, anger, pleasure, are revealed just after birth. Hunger, pain, getting cool, wet bedclothes cause in newborn child negative emotions with grimace of suffering and crying. Sudden new sound or loss equilibrium causes horror and loss of free movement causes anger. Final formation of human emotions develops gradually with maturation of nervous and endocrine regulatory systems and needs up brining.

Biological importance of emotions

Emotions are important element of human behaviour, creation of conditioned reflexes and mentation. Negative emotions give fusty evaluation of current situation does it useful or not. Mobilizing of efforts helps then to satisfy current needs of person. Positive emotions help to put in memory scheme of behaviour, which was useful and have lead to success.

Animal experiments have shown that a sensory experience causing neither reward nor punishment is remembered hardly at all. Electrical recordings from the brain show that newly experienced types of sensory stimuli almost always excite wide areas in the cerebral cortex. But repetition of the stimulus over and over leads to almost complete excitation of the cortical response, if the sensory experience does not elicit a sense or either reward or punishment. That is, the animal becomes habituated to the sensory stimulus and thereafter ignores it.  If the stimulus causes either reward or punishment rather then indifference, the cortical response becomes progressively more and more intense during repeated stimulation, and the response is said to be reinforced. An animal builds up strong memory traces for sensation that are either rewarding or punishing but, conversely, develops complete habituation to indifferent sensory stimuli.

External manifestations of emotions are revealed in motor acts, effects of autonomic and endocrine regulation. Motor manifestations of emotions are mimic, gesticulation, body posture and walk. Emotional excitation usually is followed by autonomic reactions as blush, dilation of pupils; increase of arterial pressure, rate of heartbeat and breathing. Level of catecholamines in blood and 17-oxycetosteroides in urine rises also. Positive emotion may activate parasympathetic division of autonomic nervous system. Severe emotional excitation may result in visceral disorders because of circulatory disturbances and excess hormones in blood.

Nerve substrate of emotions

Several limbic structures are particularly concerned with the affective nature of sensory sensations – that is whether the sensations are pleasant or unpleasant. The major rew3ard centres have been found to be located along the course of the medial forebrain bundle, especially in the lateral and ventromedial nuclei of the hypothalamus. Less potent reward centres are found in the septum, amygdala, certain areas of the thalamus, basal ganglia, and extending downward into the basal tegmentum of the mesencephalon. The most potent areas for punishment and escape tendencies have been found in the central grey area surrounding the aqueduct of Sylvius in the mesencephalon and extending upward into the periventricular zones of the hypothalamus and thalamus. Less potent punishment areas are found in some locations in the amygdala and the hippocampus. Electrical recording from the brain show that newly experienced types of sensory stimuli almost excite areas in the cerebral cortex.

Theories of emotions

Biological theory of emotions (P.K. Anochkin) considers that life course includes two main stages of behavioural act: 1) formation of needs and motivations that results from negative emotions and 2) satisfaction of needs that leads to positive emotions it case of complete accordance of image and result of action. Incomplete compliance of suspected and real result of action cause negative emotions and continues behavioural act.

Information theory of emotions  (P.V. Simonov)considers that emotions reflect strength human of need and possibility of its satisfaction in current moment. In absence of needs emotions can’t arise. There is also not emotional excitation, if getting excess information about mode of satisfaction this need. Lac of information already causes negative emotions that help to recall to mind life experience and to gather information about current situation.

Neurotransmission of emotional excitation

Emotional excitation is spread in the brain due to variety of neurotransmitters (noradrenalin, acetylcholine, serotonin, dopamine and neuropeptides including opioides. Positive emotions may be explained by revealing catecholamines and negative emotions, aggression result from production acetylcholine in the brain. Serotonin inhibits both kinds of emotions. Decrease of serotonin in blood is followed by groundless anxiety and inhibition of noradrenergic transmission results in sadness.

Structure of behavioural act

According to theory of functional systems (Anochkin) there are such stages of behavioural act: 1) afferent synthesis; 2) taking of decision; 3) acceptor of result of action; 4) efferent synthesis (or programming of action); 5) performing of action; 6) evaluation of final result of action. Due to converging and processing of both sensory information and memory traces afferent synthesis in the brain is performed. Taking of decision is based on afferent synthesis by choosing optimal variant of action.

Neuronal mechanisms of behaviour.

In the very lowest animals olfactory cortex plays essential roles in determining whether the animal eats a particular food, whether the smell of a particular object suggest danger, and whether the odour is sexually inviting, thus making decisions that are of life-or-death importance. The hippocampus originated as part of olfactory cortex. Very early in the evolutionary development of the brain, the hippocampus presumably becomes a critical decision-making neuronal mechanism, determining the importance of the incoming sensory signals. Once this critical decision-making capability had been established, presumably the remainder of the brain began to call on it for the same decision making. Therefore, if the hippocampus says that a neuronal signal is important, the information is likely to be committed to memory. Thus, a person rapidly become habituated to indifferent stimuli but learns assiduously any sensory experience that causes either pleasure or pain. It has been suggested that hippocampus provides the drive that causes translation of short-term memory into long-term memory.

Motivation at Work

For most people, work is a huge part of life. At its best, when work puts us in "flow," work can be satisfying and enriching. What, then, enables worker motivation, productivity, and satisfaction? I/O psychology studies behavior in the workplace through its primary subfields: personnel psychology, organizational psychology, and human factors psychology.

Personnel Psychology/Harnessing Strengths

Personnel psychologists aim to identify people’s strengths and to match them with organizational tasks. Subjective interviews lead to quickly formed impressions, but they also frequently foster an illusory overconfidence in one’s ability to predict employee success. Structured interviews, pinpointing job-relevant strengths, enhance interview reliability and validity. Personnel psychologists also assist organizations in appraisal that boosts organizations, motivates individuals, and is welcomed as fair.

Organizational Psychology: Motivating Achievement

People who excel are often self-disciplined individuals with strong achievement motivation. To motivate employees to achieve, smart managers aim to create an engaged, committed, satisfied workforce. Effective leaders build on people’s strengths, work with them to set specific and challenging goals, and adapt their leadership style to their situation.