7. What drives behaviour I) motivations and II) emotions PDF

Preview

Summary

Full lecture notes...

Description

28/2/2017 What drives behaviour? : motivations ●

● ● ● ●

●

Earliest theories: ○ Instinct theories ■ William James list, 1890s ■ All huhman drive is innate ■ E.g. avoiding pain, seeking shade, sex, responding to others, etc. ○ Psychodynamic theories ■ Sigmund Freud 1920 - Eros vs Thanatos ■ Motivation has 2 opposing poles ■ Eros → motivation, ■ Thanatos → death, self destruction ○ Incentive theories ■ B.F Skinner, 1940s ■ Just doing behaviours that were being driven by conditioning and learning ○ Drive reduction theories ■ Clark Hull ■ Body has ideal set point and motivation drives are activated when we deviate from the set points ○ Arousal theories ■ Hebb and Thompson, 1954 ■ You try to maintain an optimal level of arousal ○ Humanistic theories ■ Abraham Maslow, 1960s ■ Creativity and self expression positive role in driving us to do things → they suggest this idea of drive and motivation Drive → internal conditions that set a behaviour in motion e.g. drive is hungry, you then have motivation to reduce this and get yourself food Drive is a hypothetical construct Motivations can be a useful level of explanation → simplest way of explaining why you do something e.g. why did you come to this lecture → likely not to explain it as being due to going to a good school, therefore getting into uni therefore feel you have obligation to go to lectures, etc. Homeostasis: ○ Many body processes are in regulatory homeostatic processes e.g. blood glucose, temp, etc. ○ Homeostasis → trying to maintain a set point via feedback loops ○ Drive reduction theory proposes that all behaviours can be explained in this way → there's a deviation, we change behaviour to fix it and go back to setpoint ○ Role of hypothalamus ■ Has glucoreceptors ● For detecting changes in blood glucose concentration

■

●

●

Has thermoreceptors ● For detecting changes in temperature ■ Magoun et. al (1938) research ● Implanted wires into hypothalamus of cats ● When wires were warmed, the cats panted and vasodilated, even though body temp was normal ● → indicates role in temp regulation in homeostasis Glucostatic theory of hunger ○ A simple set point or drive reduction theory ■ Glucoreceptors in hypothalamus act on deviations from set point ● If glucose levels get low, drives you to be hungry and search for food ● If glucose levels get high, you experience lower hunger ○ Evidence for the simple set point and drive reduction theories: ■ Biologically plausible and intuitive ■ Most adults have relatively constant body weights ■ In lab animals, reducing blood glucose levels by insulin increases their eating ○ Evidence against: ■ There is an obesity epidemic in many countries around the world → shows that glucose levels can't determine eating as many overeat ■ Magnitude of blood sugar level reduction needed to increase eating in lab animals is unnaturally large ■ Consuming high energy drinks before a meal doesn't reduce eating ■ Eating from a bottomless soup bowl shows that people continue eating and don't feel more full than eating from a normal bowl → Agreed homeostatic theories are probably not the full story because evidence against it, and also there are non-regulatory drives likesex, money, etc. which have no optimal set point

The Brain’s reward centre: ● Olds & Milner ○ Electrodes were implanted into the limbic system of rats ○ Randomly thought to stimulate the limbic system every time rats entered a corner of their cage ○ Rats soon went over to that corner up to 700 times an hour ○ Realised that this region must be where the pleasure area was → they even preferred going over there over food or water and continued to exhaustion ● Human reward centre ○ In humans, this reward centre appears to be centred on the nucleus accumbens, part of the basal ganglia ○ Knutsen et. al, 2001 research ■ Study showing activity of nucleus accumbens during presentation of large

●

reward and small reward ■ Larger activity with larger rewards, less activity with smaller rewards ○ Schlaepfer et al, 2008 research ■ Having direct stimulation of nucleus accumbens in severely depressed humans seemed not necessarily to make them feel better but did seem to help symptoms and made them more excited about future potential rewards (e.g. “taking up bowling again would be pleasureable”) Summary of theories of motivation: ○ Drive theories ■ Internal motives drive the motivation ■ E.g. hunger drive in me, so I have motivation to seek food ○ Incentive theories ■ Doughnut appears to me, I know from learning that it is rewarding, so I have motivation to eat it ○ → seems likely that both drive theories and incentive theories play a role on our motivation

Changing our beliefs and cognitive dissonance: ●

In 1954, Chicago housewife Dorothy Martin “received a message from superior beings on the planet Clarion” via automatic writing that a great flood was about to destroy America (but that a flying saucer would save the true believers)

●

Martin acquired a group, known as the Seekers, who left jobs, study, and possessions to await the flying saucer

●

After a couple of reschedulings, Martin received a message that the flood had been called off

●

Rather than retreat home and feel embarrassed at being taken in on something so ridiculous, many of the group became more set in their beliefs Festinger et. al researchers 1956 ○ They infiltrated the group and noted everything they did/said ○ They predicted that this would happen to the group members after the prophecy would fail to become true by looking at the cognitive dissonance theory ○ Cognitive dissonance theory ■ People desire internal consistency amongst their thoughts and beliefs ■ If two beliefs are dissonant, they enter an unpleasant tension state arises → they obtain a drive to reduce tension ■ The dissonance between 2 beliefs can be reduced in 3 ways: ● Changing one or both beliefs ● Adding new conciliatory beliefs ● Forgetting or downplaying both beliefs ○ Cognitive dissonance theory in relation to the “Seekers” ○ Beliefs held by them ■ I am reasonable, sensible ■ I just gave away everything to join this group which turned out to be completely wrong ○ When they experienced discomfort, after it went wrong, the options are:

●

■

●

●

Change one or both beliefs ● Unlikely ■ Forget or downplay beliefs ● Not an option ■ Add new conciliatory beliefs ● Rationalisation Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959 ○ Get undergrads to do a really boring task for 1 hour ○ Afterwards, they were asked to tell the next participant to the next one it was a really interesting task ○ They payed them either no money, 1 dollar or 20 dollars ○ They then asked them to rate how much they enjoyed the task ○ They found that those who were paid 1 dollar were the ones who enjoyed the task most ○ Cognitive dissonance interpretation ■ The participants had 2 beliefs ● That task was really boring ● I wouldn't lie to a stranger without good reason ■ Those that were paid $20 had a good reason to lie, so told the next participants it was good but didn't rate the enjoyment very high ■ Those that were paid $1 didn't have a good enough reason to lie so changed their beliefs about enjoying the task more so that they weren't lying to the next participants, therefore rating the task more highly Self perception theory: ○ Possible alternative to the cognitive dissonance theory: self perception theory ○ If we don't have powerful internal evidence, we infer our own beliefs and feelings from our own behaviour ○

●

Bem (1967) argues a different basis of the research done by Festinger and Carlsmith → having seen themselves recommend the task to another person, the participants infer that they must have enjoyed it

However cognitive dissonance is now a relatively accepted theory and can be seen in many different situations e.g.: ○

○

Heavy users of household electricity reduce consumption if reminded of previous conservation endorsement ■

Beliefs: “I endorse cutting energy consumption” and “I consume a lot of energy”

■

Altered second belief by action, and use less energy

When children are told not to touch a toy under threat of severe or mild punishment: ■

They refrained from touching it in both conditions, but liked the toy less in mild punishment condition

■

Beliefs in mild case: “I want to play with the toy” and “the punishment is mild”

■

→ change their beliefs about how nice the toy was to play with to justify not playing with it

The whole picture of motivation: ●

There seems to be different types of motives involved in creating motivation

●

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ○

He studied the conflict between motives

○

He thought there was a hierarchy between different motives

○

He went out and found people who seemed to be really successful and concluded that motivations arise hierarchically:

○ ○ ○ ○

The bottom base are the essentials, that if we don't have we feel negative about The ones higher up and positive motives that you want to achieve The evidence for a strict hierarchy like this is quite slim Some people seem to report being satisfied even if they haven’t satisfied lower needs yet → therefore maybe not in this precise order of needs However some people do tend to fulfill the lower orders first What drives behaviour? : love, attachment and affiliation

○

● ●

Emotions are more of a constellation of things than easily definable quantities Subjective sensation of emotions

● ●

●

●

●

●

●

○ They are usually self reported in research Associated drives with emotions ○ e.g. wanting to hit something correlated with anger Physiological associations with emotions: ○ Emotions are correlated with arousal i.e. arousal of the sympathetic nervous system ○ Release of hormones ○ Amount of sweating, etc. Associated cognitions with emotions ○ We have different thoughts/thought processes related with certain emotions ○ Can be self reported Associated emotional expressions with emotions ○ Vocal/bodily/facial expressions ○ Can be observed or measured precisely using video analysis/EMG What are emotions? ○ Nummenmaa et. al 2013 study ○ People are asked to colour in the body silhouettes in areas which they associate with emotions ○ People generally showed that depending on different emotions, they associated the emotion with different parts of the body Ekman and Friesen 1971 ○ Took photographs of people displaying different facial emotions ○ He took them to New Guinea tribe which had no western contact and asked them to associate a situation with the photos ○ They picked roughly 90% of the time the same face as westerners ○ Seems to suggest facial expressions aren't just western cultures but are innate basic concepts of our psychology ○ He proposed we have 6 main basic emotions: ■ Anger ■ Fear ■ Disgust ■ Surprise ■ Happiness ■ Sadness ○ And other emotions are secondary emotions which are combinations of these basic emotions, like empathy may be a combination of happiness and sadness Russell 1980 ○ Proposed, although you can't determine the number of emotions, they may all lie on a plane from high to low arousal and misery to pleasure ○ You can then plot different emotions on this ○ Some emotions, for example disgust, don't necessarily sit particularly well on the plane because it is very situationally determined

Emotions vs. Emotional expressions: ● Emotional expression is what has been studied because you can't really study emotions directly themselves since they are abstract concepts therefore these research are not necessarily accurate for emotions ○ Not necessarily a 1:1 ratio between emotions and emotional expressions ○ Emotions can be suppressed or feigned, so emotional expression may not represent your emotions ○ Body language is a way of communicating emotions which could also be considered, but are again difficult to quantify ● Theories of emotion: ○ The important questions surrounding emotion: ■ Does cognition precede emotion (do you recognise a threat and then respond to it by feeling emotion) ■ Does physiological arousal precede emotion (is your heart racing making you scared?) ■ Does physiological arousal follow emotion (do you feel scared which then causes your heart to race?) ○ James 1884/Lange 1885 ■ Physiological arousal precedes emotion ■ The body reacts to situations with physiological responses (racing heart, trembling hands, etc) ■

○

Emotions then arise when we perceive what the body is doing via some other part of the brain

■ “I’m laughing, so I suppose I’m happy” Cannon and Bard’s criticisms of James/Lange hypothesis: ■ The body’s responses wouldn't be unique enough to specify all the different emotions i.e. how would you know whether the increase in heart rate should make you feel scared or angry ■ Physiological changes are too slow to account for sudden emotions (e.g.

■ ■

○ ○

○

hormones can take several minutes to get round the body) Paraplegics who are paralysed and get no information from the rest of their bodies are still completely capable of feeling emotions → Cannon and Bard suggested instead that: ● Emotions result from activity in the thalamus which may or may not be accompanied by physiological reactions → the pathways are separate and don't really influence each other

Which of these theories are more correct? Testing the theories: Ax 1953 research ■ James Lange theory predicts that each emotion has a unique physiological state → fear feels different from love because the physiological changes that induce each one are different ■ Brought people onto the lab and induced to feel either fear by being given electrical shocks, or induced to feel anger by being insulted by the assistant ■ Then the measured for heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension rate, etc. ■ Found that between the 2 different emotions, there was a lot of congruence in the physiological changes measured, however there were some specific differences: ● Found that the fear condition was more associated with higher muscle tension peaks, increase in respiration rate, etc. ● Found that the anger condition was more associated with increase in blood pressure, decrease in heart rate, etc. ■ → seemed to suggest that physiological states do affect emotions → evidence for the James/Lange theory Strack, Martin and Stepper 1988 research ■ Note that emotions are difficult to test → participants may report whatever emotion they think you’re trying to get them to display → these researchers got round this by using a pen in the mouth so they didn't have to tell the participants directly to smile ■ Participants had to either hold a pen with their mouth horizontally, forcing their mouth into a smile or hold a pen vertically in their mouth forcing a pout ■ They then had to watch a series of cartoons and report how funny they found it ■ Those that were smiling reported finding it funnier that those in the control

○

○

○

group, and those pouting reported finding it less funny than those in the control group ■ Cannon Bard theory would predict that changes in body states will not cause changes in emotional state ■ Therefore the research suggested that the Cannon Bard theory is not right and that physiological states do affect emotions Schacter and Singer 1962 ■ Injected volunteers with adrenaline ■ Participants either told nothing or told that the drug would cause sweating, heart racing, etc. ■ Then left in a waiting room with either euphoric or angry person ■ Participants asked to self-report their mood ■ Found that those who didn’t expect the arousal, who weren't told that the adrenaline would increase arousal, were more influenced by the person in the waiting room and reported feeling more euphoric / angry ■ Found that those who expected to feel more aroused, were told that the adrenaline was likely to make them feel more aroused, didn't have much mood change and didn't feel particularly euphoric/angry ■ This suggests that the same physiological state doesn't always lead to the same emotion and sometimes external context influences how you interpret physiological cues ■ → evidence against James/Lange theory Dutton and Aron 1974 ■ An attractive female research assistant interviewer approached men who had just either just crossed the high suspension bridge (high arousal) or had crossed the bridge 10 mins ago (in a lower state of arousal) ■ Found that those that spoke to her just after, in high arousal, were more likely to phone her than those who had spoken to her after in a low arousal ■ Explained that those that spoke to her in the high arousal state misattributed the arousal as being caused by the research assistant instead of being caused by crossing the bridge ■ Suggests again that there are different conditions that can cause attributing arousal to different causes ■ → evidence against James/Lange theory Schachter and Singer 1962 ■ Two factor model that combines the James/Lange and the Cannon Bard theories ■ Cannon and Bard were right in that physiological changes underspecify emotions ■ James & Lange were right that we do sometimes infer our emotions from our body states ■

Proposed that emotions have 2 factors → physiological arousal + cognitive label

■

Therefore people in the same physiological state may experience different emotions depending on what they attribute the physiological state to

■

Experience of emotion is an interpreted body state

○

●

Zadra and Clore 2011 ■ Some evidence that emotions can influence our perception e.g. higher attention in higher arousal states ■ Cerebral cortex input likely influences physiological reactions e.g. thinking about exams may induce physiological changes associated with being nervous (butterflies, stomach churning, etc.) Summary: ● Cannon-Bard theory wrong because body states can influence emotional states ● James-Lange theory not quite right either, because body states don’t uniquely determine emotional states ● Two-factor theory getting closer, but can’t account for effects of body state or emotion on perception, nor effects of emotion on body states → all three factors more closely interconnected than theories have proposed

Where are emotions found in the brain? ● The limbic system plays an important role in emotion ● Many regions involved in emotions, including the amygdala and hypothalamus ○ Phan et. al 2002 ■ Amygdala more involved in fear than other emotions ■ No single region consistently activated across all emotion studies ● Plenty of evidence for this: ○ Cats without a cortex can still experience many emotions but not without thalamus ○ Monkeys with amygdala lesions display Kluver-Bucy syndrome → eat everything, inappropriate sexual activity, etc. Emotion vs reason and the somatic marker hypothesis: ● Emotions are part of cognition ● Emotions serve as heuristics (something which allows you to learn about something) that bias decisions in generally beneficial ways to allow us to make good, relatively fast decisions ○ E.g. iowa gambling task in Bechara et. al research ■ Participants given 4 decks of cards ■ Told to pick a card from one of the 4 decks ■ Each card either carries a loss or reward ■ Each deck contains some cards that will lose you money, and some which will gain you money ■ A and B decks are bad decks which generally lose you money, C and D are generally good decks which have a lot of good cards so picking from

■ ■

■

■

■

them will usually win you money You have to work out which decks are best Normal patients start to form a hunch about which are good decks and which ...