Reflecting on Reflecting

My opinions on the subject Motivation and Emotion and the way it was delivered.

Good

• Loved being able to pick my own topic to write a textbook chapter on.  This is very helpful for people who want to go into 4^th year to decide on research topics of interest.
• Enjoyed learning and using Wikiversity and the ability to be more creative however a drawback was the fact we were not able to use any type of pictures, this makes it hard when there are theories with charts/graphs such as sexual response cycle.
• Tutes were highly engaging and interesting-really loved doing the surveys and having the ability to critic on different types.

Could be improved

• Did not enjoy reflecting- would have much preferred weekly quizzes giving incentive to learn and read the material each week. Or alternatively a mini essay each week- say 400 words or less on one aspect on each chapter, our choice.  Which had a set time/day to be due.
• Lectures were a little dry, although I like that the slides were table/chart format, it made the material easier to take in.
• A small mid semester exam could have been an option, considering there were no psych subjects this semester with them.
• Over all I feel I do not have a massively great understanding of this topic, most likely due to the fact of no exams/quizzes.

Week 13 - Growth Motivation and Positive Psychology

Holism and Positive Psychology

“If this essential core, inner nature of the person is frustrated, denied, or suppressed, sickness results” (Maslow 1968, as taken from Reeve 2009). 

For some people there is a constant battle between inner temperament and sociocultural pressures.  What is expected from people around you, friends, family, society, in comparison to the person who you actually are.  Reeve states that particularly for university students there is an expectation to be extroverted.  This would be specifically the case for someone who was living on university residents, as these type of students are expected to keep up with everyone, binge drinking and partying regularly.  Positive psychology focuses on the inner guides like meaning, authenticity and the passion to learn which assist in adding strength and wellness which inturn makes us happy, instead of following cultural expectancies.

Holism

Holism = Whole or Wholeness, study of what is healthy or unbroken 

Holism is concerned with assessing the person as a whole, rather than a series of differentiated parts.  Holism and positive psychology can be best understood as a “top down” approach meaning that the focus is on all encompassing motives, seeing how the master motives govern the more specific ones. A broken view of personality concerns human beings as fragmented sets of structures of forces that oppose one another for example the conflict between the ideal self and an actual self.  Humanistic psychology is about discovering human potential and encouraging its development, specifically toward growth and self realisation and away from facade, self-concealment and the pleasing and fulfilling the expectations of others. This type of self discovery can be considered when assessing why adolescents have such a hard time.  As social expectancies from friends develop and pressures from parents to behave a certain way.

Positive Psychology is concerned with the “good life” uses empirical methods of psychology to understand what makes life worth living.  It seeks to make people stronger and more productive, and to actualize the human potential in all of us. Instead of focusing on fixing the weaknesses within an individual it focuses on developing and amplifying peoples strengths.  Hence it could be seen as a positive method instead of negative.  I think this would be a good way to support those who are suffering depression.  Instead on focusing on the depression, focus on the aspects of the individual that are positive, and teach the depressed person to also focus on these aspects instead of looking at all of the negative things.

Positive psychology was empirically developed by Seligman in the 1990’s as a continuation from his work on learned helplessness.  Maslow and Rogers work on personal growth and actualization was not based on empirical research where as the work by Seligman was, his website is called the Positive Psychology Center. http://www.positivepsychology.org/

Self Actualization

Is about moving towards autonomy and realizing ones talents, capacities and potentialities.  It contains two fundamental directions

Autonomy and Openness

Autonomy is about depending on the self and regulating ones own thoughts, feelings and behaviours

Openness is being open to experience and receiving information.

One of the most talked about theories across various disciplines is Maslow’s motivational theory called the Hierarchy of Human Needs.  Maslow claimed that to reach self actualization you need to gratify each need, which is layered in steps, the most basic being physiological needs such as food, water and shelter.  Maslow classified the first four needs as deficiency needs, an analogy used is that of a vitamin, if these needs are in absence, growth and development is inhibited.  Growth need surfaces once deficiency needs have been adequately met. Growth need is predominantly based around the top need in the pyramid, which is self actualisation needs, which provide energy and direction to become what one is capable of becoming.  A few problems with Maslows Hierarchy, as stated in the lecture, is that 1) as the top of the pyramid, self actualisation, is the smallest part, it is the weakest need 2) Maslow states that only 1% of people ever self actualise 3) people need to progress through the stages when in fact there are people in the world who do self actualise without some of the needs e.g. homeless artist.

Maslow also described six behaviours for encouraging self actualisation

1.     Make Growth Choices- life is a series of choices, choose toward progression and growth

2.     Be Honest – be different, unpopular, nonconformist, be honest and true to yourself and take responsibility for your choices and consequences of choices

3.     Situationally Position Yourself for Peak Experiences – become an expert in your field, if there is something you love doing, then do more of it.

4.     Give up defensiveness – be open to the mistakes you make and learn from them

5.     Let the Self Emerge – listen to your own personal interests and aspirations of who you want to become.

6.     Be Open to Experience – Be spontaneous, original and open to experience, try and drop the self consciousness, defenses or shyness. Stop and smell the roses.

Finally engage in fulfilling relationships which support autonomy and openness.

Actualizing Tendency.

“The organism has one basic tendency and striving – to actualize, maintain and enhance the experiencing self” (Rogers, 1951)

Rogers believed that actualizing tendency was innate, an example used to demonstrate this is of a child persisting through the struggle of crawling to walking, to which is “the forward thrust of life” which supports the child to continue moving forward.

Organismic Valuation Process – an innate capability for judging whether a specific experience promotes or reverses growth. Enhancing experiences are positively held and thus given the green light, where as experiences seen as regressive are growth blocking and given the red light and are subsequently avoided.

Actualising Tendency – motivates the individual to want to undertake now and challenging experiences.

Causality orientations are the forces that cause behaviour.  These can either be autonomy or control, autonomy meaning the self and control meaning external.  I think that these are interesting topics and I wonder if there would be a correlation with personality traits.  For example maybe someone who is introverted may be more likely to have a control causality orientation.

Critique of positive psychology.

As stated in Reeve (2009) terms used in positive psychology seem vague and ill defined.  I completely agree with this comment, as I was reading the text-book and writing the notes above the topic seems all a bit airy fairy although this is changing with empirical support.  Another point that is important to mention is the fact that it may be all good and well to talk about how to change a person to be more positive, but what about all of the negative emotions that are humanly innate such as jealously,and insecurity that come from people being in situations that they cannot change such as low socio-economic status.

Week 12 – Unconscious Motivation

Unconscious motivation is a difficult concept to understand.  This is due to the fact that Freudian psychodynamic theories initially lacked any form of empirical evidence. However as time goes on researchers are discovering that some of what Freud was talking about can be tested, such as the unconscious.  I still have a hard time trying to grasp these seemingly unrealistic notions of implicit motivation and the Id and Ego. 

Of all the Freudian theories my one main interest lies in the interpretation of dreams.  As a young girl I purchased a dream dictionary that was heavily based on Freudian interpretations, although I remember even then, dismissing most of the sexual associations and interpreting the way I saw them.  Now I have found a website which does the trick.  http://www.dreammoods.com/

After reading the section of object relations theory I begin to wonder if psychopathology can all be a direct result of parenting and childhood experiences.  

As stated in Reeve (2009) as we are growing up, if we are treated with warm and responsive care, a person develops positive mental models of himself or herself, of significant others and of relationships in general.  If a child grows without the feelings of relatedness or is frustrated through cold, rejecting and unresponsive care a person develops maladaptive mental models that leave them vulnerable to psychopathology. This makes me think of the case of the two little boys in England who murdered a toddler. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/20/newsid_2552000/2552185.stm

These two children were bought up in low socio-economic neighbourhoods, with one of the children having an abusive alcoholic mother, who was rarely at home and did not offer any form of relatedness or nurturing. This neglectful treatment leads to the development of extreme maladaptive behaviours. 

Week 9 –Textbook chapter of Sexual Motivation

Whilst researching for the textbook chapter of sexual motivation I began to realise the large extent of research that has been undertaken in the field however there most certainly is room for more.  The first step was to look at the original data in the field, the Kinsey Reports (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948).  I could have spent many hours sifting through the reports and reading the statistics that the researchers found, however I did not have the time so I looked at the most important aspect, why the research was undertaken. It was interesting to find that although many people have criticised the face-to-face methods used by Kinsey and colleagues, the authors had actually outlined and scrutinised the methods of researching in the reports. Kinsey had spent much time researching and analysing the best way to approach the topic, and from previous research decided it was best to take the face to face interview approach.  This approach worked out to be beneficial considering the amount of data that was able to be collected. Even though the sample was homogeneous it was a breakthrough and significant study for the field of human sexual behaviour.

One particular topic that I enjoyed researching was pheromones.  Although there is still no hard evidence for them playing a role in human sexual motivation I wanted to research it as I have always thought that they existed. Why do we find ourselves attracted to some people and not others? In addition why does our arousal rise in the presence of certain people, and not others? To think that there is a subliminal message that is letting off a physiological response in other people around us is amusing to say the least. The book that I read “The Scent of Eros” (Kohl & Francoeur, 2002) was an interesting debate outlining the evidence as to why human pheromones exist.

To see my chapter please follow the link http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Textbook/Motivation/Sexual_motivation

Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B., & Martin, C. E. (1948). Sexual behavior in the human male. Philadelphia, PH: W. B. Saunders Company.

Kohl, J. V., & Francoeur, R. T. (1995). The scent of Eros: Mysteries of Odor in Human Sexuality. New York, NY: Continuum

Week 8 – Nature of Emotion

Five Perennial Questions

What is an emotion?

What Cases an Emotion?

How many emotions are there?

What good are the emotions?

What is the difference between emotion and mood?

I will summarise these points very briefly as they are important aspects of emotion.

Firstly what is an emotion.  When asked this in the first tute of motivation and emotion in September my personal response was

Emotion = an expression which is a reflection of an internal state of feeling as a response to a stimuli which is either internal or external.

Reeve (2009) argues that emotion is a concept that is hard to define.  Our tute certainly had troubles trying to define it, as everyone had different definitions. The concept of emotion is of a multidimensional construct consisting of feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose and social expressive.  The definition Reeve uses is

“emotions are short lived, feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us to adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events.” 

Using the term significant life event is a little strange considering that you express sadness by crying sometimes when watching a movie or TV show which is not considered to be a significant life event. I would use the term situational rather than significant.  To me this is implying that emotions only arise from something significant which could mean a birth or death, I believe we express emotion from situations which aren’t specifically significant.

What causes an Emotion?

There are two perspectives of what causes emotion biology and cognition.  The argument amongst professionals in the field is similar to that of the chicken and egg problem which one comes first, biology or cognition.

How many emotions are there?

Both the cognitive and biological approaches consist of many different researchers all proposing various amounts of emotions. However, there are consistently six basic emotions usually mentioned, or are some variations of theorists views.  These being:

Fear – Perception of physical or psychological danger or threat

Anger – belief situation is not what it should be: the restraint, interference or criticism is illegitimate

Disgust – getting rid or of getting away from a contaminated (bodily, interpersonal and moral), deteriorated or spoiled object.  Function of disgust is rejection.

Sadness – Most negative, aversive emotion arises primarily through separation or failure.

Joy – Desirable outcomes related to personal success and interpersonal relatedness

Interest – Most prevalent in day to day functioning, ever-present, desire to explore, investigate, seek out manipulate and extract information from the objects that surround us.

What good are the emotions?

The purpose of emotions, as originally argued by Darwin is to help cope with hostile situations.  Reeve states that emotions are positive, functional, purposive and adaptive organizers of behaviour.   They serve as coping functions throughout evolution and in our day to day lives and they serve as social functions assisting us with our interactions and communications with others.  The most interesting factor about emotions is that they are so variable between individuals.  Some people show less fear while others may be more prone to anger. Thinking of a person who I work with, she is always crying everything seems to trigger it. It could be a sign of depression but on the other hand she seems to not be able to control her emotional reactions to situations, which are rarely highly threatening. To this individual her emotions are of no use and she is being regulated “by” her emotions.

What is the difference between emotions and mood?

Moods are enduring states which last for days and can be positive and negative in comparison an emotion is something which is a brief, short lived event, lasting for seconds or minutes.

As everyone wants to be happy, I think a very interesting aspect of this chapter is positive affect, and how to find conditions which make us feel good.  Research has shown manipulations of small gain, amusement or pleasure can elicit a positive mood for up to 20 minutes.  These include, receiving a free product or a gift, watching an amusing movie or random acts of kindness.  The benefits of positive affect are outstanding.  Those who are exposed to conditions that allow them to feel good are more likely to: help others, act sociably, express greater liking for others, be more generous to others and themselves, take risks, act more cooperatively and less aggressively, solve problems in creative ways, persist in the face of failure feedback, make decisions more efficiently and show greater intrinsic motivation on interesting activities.  With this list of great things we should all invest in time each day to do something that will make us feel good, for example if you give a surprise gift to another person it may lead to a flow on affect, where that person will then give to another and so on.

Week 11 Personality, Motivation and Emotion

Today’s lecture topic was on Personality, Motivation and emotion.  The main question pondered on this topic was Why do different people have different motivational and emotional states even in the same situation?  As put by James Neill: some people may go to a party and consider it a really fun experiences, where as other individuals may find this type of social situation to be very distressing and avoid it.  The differences in treatment of situations, such as parties, can be attributed to personality traits.   Traits determine how people react to certain situations.  As outlined by Reeve (2009) people are usually categorised as either sensation seekers or sensation avoiders.  Seeking/avoiding can be appreciated by either a continuous spectrum or distinguished by two categories, you are either one or the other.  In consideration of most labels that are attributed in psychology I prefer the notion of spectrums rather than attaching a distinct label.

Research has indicated that there are five main personality traits called The Big Five these being Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Openness.  The table below gives a basic outline of each. 

The most important factors are Extroversion and Neuroticism.  This is because they have been linked to happiness.  It is thought that those who are deemed as very happy are higher in extraversion and lower in neuroticism and those who are less happy are higher in neuroticism and lower in extraversion.  As I heard this statement I thought, well may as well give up life now as I’m an introvert and thus will never be happy! But this is not true, as I find things in my life that make me happy.  Reading the text book further it indicates that there are two types of happiness – hedonic and eudaimonic.  Hedonic is what most people think of as happiness where as eudaimonic concerns self realisation, ie engaging in meaningful pursuits and doing things that are worth while.  This is what happiness means to me.  This makes me think of my friend who is in Sales, we were discussing depression one day and he said that he doesn’t understand how anyone can suffer depression as he doesn’t let anything upset him.  I suspect that he would be high on extraversion and would generally be always happy.  Neuroticism and introversion may have many negative connotations attached to them, but what about all the great things that neurotic or introverted people do or are! Maybe neurotic/introverted people are more intelligent or more creative!

Whilst on holidays recently I was reading a book on happiness, called The Happiness Trap (Harris, 2007).  Harris discusses that happiness is not an emotion that should be constant, which most people think, like most emotions such as sadness, anger or fear it comes and goes.  People may misconceive that if they are not happy all of the time then something must be wrong with them. Harris certainly makes some interesting points, but his book is definitely aimed at pursuing happiness through eudamonic menas, thus it is aimed at helping introverts and neurotics.

Arousal

Arousal level is the function of how stimulating the environment is.  Performance is best when arousal is moderate, if arousal is too low then people seek to increase arousal levels as it assists in increasing performance.  If arousal levels are too high then people become distressed and anxious and may try to decrease arousal levels.  An interesting study was conducted by Heron to determine what under-arousal would do. Prolonged underarousal conducted in a sensory deprivation experiment had many detrimental effects such as inability to think clearly, hallucinations, decline in problem solving abilities and not surprisingly irritability.
In our tutorial we did some surveys on sensation seeking.  Surprisingly my sensation seeking was quite high. I found this surprising because I am an extrovert and do not consider myself a high risk taker.