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Motivation Notes

Week 1: Introduction to Motivation

What is Motivation?
Defining motivation
Difficult to define
Kleinginna and Kleinginna (1981): Gathered 102 defining/criticizing statements
regarding motivation
Motivation = the "Why" of behaviour
Motivation refers to the why of behaviour, not the how. Why do we engage
in certain behaviors and have certain feelings and thoughts but not others?
(Deckers, 2010, p.xvii).
Understanding motivation is about understanding the reason behind a behaviour
peoples motives (desires, wants, needs)
Reeve (2009, p8): "The study of motivation concerns those processes that give
behavior its energy and direction."
Reeve (2009)
To understand motivation we firstly need to understand what causes and directs
behaviour,
1. Direction/Cause
Initiation: Why does behaviour start?
Persistence: Once begun, why is behaviour sustained over time?
Goal-directedness: Why is behaviour directed towards some goals yet away from
others?
Change: Why does behaviour change its direction?
Termination: Why does behaviour stop?
2. Energy
"Why is desire strong and resilient at one time yet weak and fragile at another
time?" (Reeve, 2009, p6)
What kinds of behaviour?
Our own behaviour
Feeling motivated or unmotivated
Striving to achieve our goals
Overcoming motivational difficulties
Unusual behaviours
People do weird stuff
Behaviours we may class as weird or extreme ie criminal behaviours
Everyday behaviours
Psychology is interested in understanding those things we take for granted
We don't think about general motivation very often, the everyday behaviours that
are guided by motivations
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Motivation theory before the 20th Century

The source of behavioural motivation?
Three general types of historical theories regarding the source of behavioural motivation
Mechanistic Appetitive Rational
Behaviour is hard-wired Behaviour is driven by desires Behaviour is driven by
Fixed and needs rational/conscious
The idea that we thought
do a behaviour
because we have
evolved to do so
Genetically determined Rewards and punishment Intellect and rationality
Energy determined by
rewards and punishment
E.g. reflexes and E.g. hunger, sex, pleasure/pain E.g. our knowledge of
instincts right and wrong
Ancient Greeks: Socrates
Rational human beings
We are not mindlessly driven by our passions. As our intellect develops, it learns to
control our passions.
What we desire to do is based upon what our intellect tells us is the right thing to do.
Rational > appetitive
Ancient Greeks: Plato's tripartite theory
The 'soul' (or mind, or psyche) is composed of 3 hierarchically arranged parts:
Appetitive aspect: Bodily appetites and desires (hunger, sex, etc.)
Competitive aspect: Socially referenced standards (honour, shame, etc.)
Calculating aspect: Decision-making capacities (reason, choosing)
Each controls different aspects of behaviour
Higher aspects can regulate lower aspects or overcome
Ancient Greeks: Aristotle's tripartite theory
Agreed with Plato, but named the parts differently
Nutritive: Impulsive, irrational, animal-like. "Bodily urges necessary for the
maintenance of life."
Sensitive: Still 'bodily', but regulated pleasure and pain
Rational: Unique to humans - intellectual abilities and volitional control (the will)
Again rationality trumps desires or emotions
Core point
The 'calculating' or 'rational' aspects can control the lower elements. Rationality
trumps desires/emotions.
Ancient Greeks: Hedonism
Democritus, Epicurus
Our desires/emotions drive us - we are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
We behave so as to obtain the greatest amount of pleasure.
Appetitive > rationality
Our thoughts are subservient to our desires.
Medieval (middle ages): The rise of Dualism
Thomas-Aquinas (and other theologians)
1. Idea that there are two core aspects to behaviour, bodily (animal like) and soul
2. Wished to firmly differentiate humans and animals
3. Dualist theory
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Body (animal)
Irrational, impulsive, biological
Motivations arising from drives, desires, pleasure/pain.
Soul/mind (uniquely human)
Rational, intelligent, spiritual.
Motivations arising from rational thought
1600's: Descartes' dualism
Passive and active aspects of motivation
Body = motivationally passive
Physical (follows laws of physics) - motivated by satisfying nutritive needs
Responds mechanistically to the environment
Through senses, reflexes, physiology
Hydraulic mechanism: Cerebrospinal fluid from the ventricles flowing
through nerves controls action
Mind/soul = motivationally active
Non-physical (not subject to physical laws) - motivated by the 'will
300 years of impact investigations separated into:
Understanding the reactive, mechanisms of the body physiology
Understanding the purposive, intentional thoughts of the mind philosophy
Early/mid 1800's - Physiology
Explosion of interest in automatic/mechanistic approaches to behaviour
Nervous system physiology (electrophysiology)
Rise of science
Galvani (1780s): Electrical stimulation causes frog leg to twitch ('electricity' a
fluid flowing through nerves)
Similar explanation to Descartes
DuBois-Reymond (1849): Confirmed electrical nature of nerve impulse using a
galvanometer
Helmholtz (1852): Measured speed of nerve impulse for first time
Early/mid 1800's - Anatomy
Nervous system anatomy
Bell (1811) and Magendie (1822)
Sensory and motor nerves are separate (sensory enter spinal chord on posterior
side, motor exit on anterior side)
Foundation for sense-response approaches to behaviour
However: Dualism still ruled, until...
Mid 1800's: Darwinian evolution
Challenged Dualism
Evolution applies to:
Humans as well as animals
Mind as well as body
Long standing separation of animals (automatons) and humans (rational) questioned
Instincts as a theoretical bridge between humans and animals
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20th Century themes

Motivation theory post-Darwin
Original debate MECHANISTIC APPETITIVE RATIONAL
Post-Darwinian Instinct theories Behaviourism Structuralism, critics of
fields of study behaviourism
Ethology

Current fields of Cognitive ethology, Learning theory Cognitive psychology

study Neuro-ethology, (and humanism)
Evolutionary psychology
Behavioural ecology
Typically Physiological/biological/ Behavioural/learning Cognitive/humanistic
described as... evolutionary approaches approaches to approaches to motivation
to motivation motivation
Investigate The role of genetics in The role of learning The role of cognition
behaviour in behaviour (cog. psych.) and/or
agency (humanism) in
behaviour
Core concept Genetics Learning Cognition
Core questions
Key social and equity concerns
Modern GENETICS LEARNING COGNITION
perspective
Source of cause, Evolved connections? Learnt connections? Rationally constructed
direction and (Nature) (Nurture) connections?
intensity
Flexibility of Fixed genetically Flexible through Flexible through
behaviour learning cognitive interpretation.
Conscious control Mechanistic and Mechanistic and Often (particularly
(mechanistic/ non-conscious. non-conscious. humanism) assumes
deterministic vs Not dependant on conscious intent/volition
cognitive/volitiona intent or volition. and/or otherwise rational
l) processes

A disunited legacy of 'different perspectives'

The real question we will be exploring is how do we identify what is causing a behaviour
whether it be innate or conscious
Genetic? Learning? Cognitive?
Petri and Govern (2004), p34
"From our vantage point, no one theory can explain all the data on motivation.
Explanations of hunger will differ from explanations of achievement. It is naive to
believe that one comprehensive theory can explain all motivational states.
Incorrect to take any one side on these debates as:
1. Some behaviours are best explained one way, others another way
2. Many behaviours require an understanding of all three to fully explain
(motivation is often 'multiply determined')
An Integrated Approach to Motivation
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What do we study in psychology?

Psychology is
Traditional definition: The science of 'mind' and 'behaviour
Disjointed
Leaves out important aspects
Mind not adequately defined
Poor definition because it makes them seem separate. Also, psychology also
studies other things ie interaction with environment. Also, there is no clear
description of what the mind is.
Martin's definition: The study of the functional interaction between nervous
systems and their environments
Nervous system and Environments
Nervous system refers to the central and peripheral.

Two kinds of environments the nervous system interacts with

Exogenous responses include responses from outside the world or with the outside
world

Exogenous (external) environment

Activation of sensory mechanisms by forces/chemicals external to the body (vision,

audition, olfaction, somatosensory, taste)

Activation of muscles(includes verbal/visual communication)

Endogenous (internal, bodily, somatic) environment

Activation of internal sensory mechanisms (glucoreceptors, proprioceptive receptors,

etc.)

Alteration of internal bodily states through release of hormones and regulation of

internal organs (heart rate, respiration rate, etc.)

'Functional (psychological) Process'

Mapping the flow of information:
Sense internal psychological mechanisms > Response
From sensory mechanisms through internal mechanisms which lead to responses
Study of psychology is about trying to understand the white section which is the
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nervous system

Examples

Endogenous stimuli stimulate exogenous response. Both are interactional and support
survival (highly functional)
Motivation?
Understanding motivation requires us to understand three things:
1. The nature of the mechanisms we have (the ways in which things can be important to
us
2. The way in which things gain relevance. That is how relevance becomes associated
3. The way particular responses become associated with drives or emotions.
Motivational Mechanisms: Intervening processes which represent the relevance of
sensory information to the organism - Sensations, emotions, drives ect
Concept-relevance association
Relevance-response association
Thus relevance is the key factor that determines behaviour
Questions to explore
Motivational mechanisms
How many? (natural kinds versus human constructs)
What function do they provide?
Neural underpinning?
Associations
Concept-relevance associations
Relevance-response associations
Recap: Three approaches to motivation
Genetic
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Learning
Cognitive
Concept-relevance associations and relevance-response associations may be
determined/influenced by genetics, learning, or cognition.
Application to unit structure
Exploring motivational mechanisms in rough order of evolutionary (phylogenetic)
complexity
Reflexes and instincts
Sensations (e.g. pain)
Drives (e.g. hunger, thirst)
Arousal (e.g. sleep)
Basic emotions (e.g. anger, fear, happiness)
Social emotions (e.g. shame, empathy)
For each, well explore a range of questions
How many?
What function do they provide?
Neural underpinning?
Common triggering stimuli and how associated? (genetics, learning, cognition)
Common responses and how associated? (genetics, learning, cognition)
What can go wrong?
Different mechanisms are there for each ie how many emotions
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Week 2: Natural and sexual selection

Darwinian Evolution
Recap: Where we got to and where were going
Historical approaches towards understanding motivation are grouped as:
Mechanistic > hard-wired/genetic
Appetitive > Learning
Rational > Cognition/agency
Unit organisation
Material presented in rough order of phylogenetic development or complexity
phylogenetics: the study of the evolutionary development of some biological or
psychological trait.
A lot of work towards understanding the body was kicked off by Descartes
Mechanistic Approaches to Motivation pre-Darwin
1600's: Descartes' dualism: Body is mechanistic, mind is not
1700's-1800's: Explosion of study in anatomy/physiology
Mid 1800's: Darwin...
Darwinian evolution/ Evolutionary theory - Controversies & abuses
Widely accepted as the best account we have of the origin of physiological and
psychological characteristics of the body
Proposed a naturalistic as opposed to divine explanation for the source of life.
Proposes humans and animals evolve from a same primate
Social Darwinism lead to misunderstandings of evolutionary theory and taints a lot of
attitudes.
Controversy in Darwin's time
Also very controversial and misunderstood.
Naturalistic explanation of source of life and species
Questioned separation of humans and animals
Common ancestor
Controversy after Darwin's time
Social Darwinism: Survival of the fittest applied to social/political theory
Side-stepping the controversies
Evolutionary theory = multiple, discrete claims
Evolutionary theory: Theoretical claims
2 theoretical claims:
Heredity
Many biological processes driven by proteins
Proteins coded for by DNA
Section of DNA coding for a protein = gene
Genes (and resulting traits) passed from parents to children
Variation
Passing of genes from parent > child not perfect
Main sources of genetic variation
Mutations: Mistakes in the DNA process that alter the structure of a gene
Sexual reproduction: e.g. crossing over during meiosis (formation of
gametes): Genetic material from our parents gets shuffled together during
meiosis (when the sperm meets the egg)
Therefore: Child's genes (and thus physical/psychological characteristics) similar
but not identical to parents.
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Evolutionary theory: Logical claims

2 logical claims
Reproductive survival
Ie food finding traits, mate finding traits and reproduction traits and traits that
compel us to help our family survive
If gene(s) > traits which increase likelihood of that gene passing to next
generation, those genes+traits will continue across generations.
Genes that code for traits increasing probability that
The organism will reproduce successfully
Other organisms carrying same gene will successfully reproduce
Selection
Offspring differ slightly from parents and siblings
Individual with reproductively advantageous trait over others in its generation will
pass that trait onto more offspring
Over successive generations, that trait will become dominant in the population
Artificial and Natural Selection
Artificial Selection
Selective breeding to target specific traits
Traits 'artificially' selected for passing onto next generation
Three forms of selection pressure: (three ways in which a trait can be selected to
pass on the genes to the next generation)
If you have long hair, I will let you breed
Natural Selection
Environment is the selector
Environmental change drives evolutionary change
Changes in the environment which alter the selective pressure thus driving the
evolutionary adaptation of species.
Darwin's biggest contribution was that in nature it is the environment that
determines which characteristics aid survival and which don't. Ie in a cold
environment, long haired animals will be more likely to survive and breed and will
be more common over the next generations.
Environment = selector
(Sexual Selection)
Covered later...
Example: The Peppered Moth
4. Peppered Moth (Biston betularia betularia)
5. Before industrial revolution they were white to camouflage. However, after the industrial
revolution, the sut darkened the colour of the trees meaning the whiter the moth, the
more likely it was to die. The darker moths therefore had a survival advantage. Over
time, the trees begun to turn to normal as did the moths. As the environment changed,
the selection pressures changed the characteristics, which best determined the organisms
survival and reproductive success.
Time Habitat trees Dominant moth colour
Pre-industrial revolution Light-barked, lichen-covered Light, speckled colour
During industrial revolution Blackened by soot Dark
Post-industrial revolution Light-barked, lichen-covered Light, speckled colour
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Example: Evolution in viruses and bacteria

The quicker an organisms life span (how quickly they develop and reproduce) means
they will be able to better adapt.
Simple analogues: you can infer from them to others like humans.
Short generational turn-over time = high rate of evolution
Laboratory mouse: sexual maturity in 6-8 weeks. Hence why mice are used so often.
Drosophila (fruit fly): 7-9 days or longer, depending on environmental temperature
Model organisms: any species heavily studied in order to investigate a particular
biological or psychological phenomenon
Studied because
Simple analogues
Cheap and easy to raise/maintain
Short life-spans and developmental turn-over
Bacteria and viruses: However bacteria and viruses are fastest as they can replicate in a
matter of minutes.
Drug resistance
VIDEO: Virus evolution
Animals with advantages such as speed, are more likely to survive.
Natural selection: forces of nature select who will survive
HIV: virus keeps adapting to the drugs
Post-Darwin History of Mechanistic Approaches to Motivation
Early instinct theorists: William James
William James followed on from Darwin and looked at behaviour as reflective
instinctual behaviours and this applies to humans just as much as it does to animals.
Most behaviours are instinctual:
Human behaviour can be explained through instincts
Human instincts
He believed humans had animal and uniquely human instincts
Instincts were middle ground between reflexes and learning. A base upon which
experience can build through habit formation: Believes instincts were primary
drive behind human behaviour. He however assumed that not all behaviours were
instinctual but rather that instincts played a middle role between hard-wired
reflexes and flexible learnt behaviours.
All animal instincts plus many human ones:
20 physical instincts: e.g. sucking, locomotion, etc.
16 mental instincts: rivalry, curiosity, pugnacity, sociability, sympathy,
shyness, hunting, secretiveness, fear, cleanliness, acquisitiveness, modesty,
constructiveness, jealousy, play, parental love.
Not all behaviour is instinctive:
Reflexes > Instincts > Learning
Early instinct theorists: McDougall
Instincts include
Parental care, sympathy, combat, self-assertion, curiosity, submission, food
seeking, mating, repulsion, constructiveness, escape, appeal, gregariousness.
Like James, thought there were a set of human instincts but didn't think they were just
dispositions but rather that all instincts consisted of three things:
Cognitive component: Knowing of an object that can satisfy the instinct
Affective component: The feeling (emotion) that the object arouses
Conative component: Striving toward or away from the object in order to reach a
goal.
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That is: Teleological (purposive) view:

Purposive approach. Ie hungry rat understands that food will satisfy its hunger, will
solve his emotional upset and will strive for it. Issue is that it assumes the rat is
capable of such thinking
Main criticism: tendency to attribute human traits to animals/Assumes awareness
Anthropomorphic
Criticisms of the early instinct theories
1. None of them adequately distinguished learnt behaviours from instinctual
behaviours.
2. Does the concept of instincts refer to all behaviour or just to a specific sub set.
3. Level of automaticity: was it automatic or was it thought out
4. Main problem was vague definition of instinct
NOMINAL FALLACY: naming something doesn't explain itCritiqued by e.g. Kuo
(1921), Tolman (1923)
Vague/crude definitions
Uncertain relationship to learning (are responses fixed or not?)
Does 'instinct' = all behaviour (e.g. McDougall), or a specific subset (e.g. James)
Level of automaticity: McDougall's teleological approach vs James' more
mechanistic approach
Vague definition > overuse of the concept...
Overuse: Everything is an instinct >
How many are there?
Nominal fallacy
Naming X does not explain X
Self-confirming
Very common fallacy in psychology.
Classical ethologists
Instinct approach down the toilet, behaviourism takes over. They spent time observing
animals in their natural habitats.
Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen concerned with
Also criticisms of concept of energy as driving force behind behaviour
Evolution, development and function of behaviour
Primarily instinctual behaviours
Detailed naturalistic observational records before behavioural interpretation
Careful labelling and description of core components of instincts
Behaviour explained by build-up and release of energy
Criticisms
Main criticisms: still didn't have a clear distinction between the learnt and hard
wired components of behaviour.
Distinction between learned and instinctive behaviours still unclear
Concept of energy criticised by some as unnecessary
Modern ethological approaches
Behavioural ecology
Interested in trying to understand relationship between behaviour and environment
from an evolutionary perspective.
Evolution of behaviour
Includes: E.g. predator-prey relationships, resource competition amongst
conspecifics, group membership, aggressive and sexual behaviours, parental care.
Mostly studying innate, but sometimes learned.
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1. Cognitive ethology
How animals interpret information (study of the 'animal mind')
Interested in study of animal minds. Parts involved in higher order decisions
Neuro-ethology
Neural underpinnings of reflexive/instinctual behaviours
Evolutionary psychology
Genetic mechanisms of human behaviour.
"The analysis of the human mind as a collection of evolved mechanisms, the
contexts that activate those mechanisms, and the behavior generated by those
mechanisms" (Buss, 1999, p.47)
Sexual Selection
Introduction
Darwin claims that it is not just external conditions that place sexual pressures on
organisms but it can also be internal (sexual selection)
How well you are able to pass your genes on to future generations depends on
Natural Selection
Finding food, keeping warm/cool, avoiding predators, etc.
Applies to ALL living organisms
Sexual Selection
Convincing a prospective mate to mate with you
Applies only to organisms that engage in sexual (rather than asexual) reproduction
A (the?) major cause of physical/psychological differences between the sexes in a
given species
Why sex? Why did sexual reproduction evolve
VIDEO: Why did sexual reproduction evolve?
Sex must offer an advantage
Sex generate variability among offspring and when you take away the variability > you
lose the benefit of sex and the challenges that differences cause for predators, viruses etc.
Reproductive divergence
Basic explanation
Sex must offer an advantage
Sex generate variability among offspring and when you take away the variability > you
lose the benefit of sex and the challenges that differences cause for predators, viruses etc.
Ova (eggs) Sperm
Complete functioning cell 1/2 of DNA only
1/2 DNA
All cellular structures (membranes,
organelles, etc.)
Big Small
Difficult to move > Stays where it is Easy to move > Evolved motility
Resource intensive to produce > Only Cheap to produce > Make heaps of them
make a few of them
Stays where it is Goes to the egg
Typically, females bear the brunt of Biological investment in offspring ends
physical development of the offspring. with fertilisation.
Considerable time/biological resources Little time/biological resources required
required per offspring. per offspring.
Can sire few offspring over lifespan Can sire many offspring over lifespan
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Conflict of interest
Goal of evolution = maximising number of offspring (who themselves survive to
reproduce) >
Fundamental evolutionary conflict of interest between the sexes
Females: Maximising survival likelihood of their small number of offspring
o Females are likely to be interested in maximising survival of their offspring
whereas men are more likely to maximise the number of their offspring.
Males: Maximising number of offspring sired
Divergent paths to evolutionary success >
Sexual dimorphism (in behaviour, morphology and ornamentation)
VIDEO: Sexual dimorphism
Darwin's theory couldn't explain why some animals were so bright as it doesn't aid
physical survival ie peacock tails.
Eventually he came upon the idea of sexual selection. The ornaments are there to attract
a mate.
Males: competition
Females: choice
Sexual Dimorphism in Behaviour
Aim for males
It would make sense for males to try to mate with as many females as possible but
this conflicts with the fact that females are very choosy, thus they compete instead
Compete with other males for access to/control over females
Convince females of
Genetic health by physical beauty/strength
Resource provision capability to aid in child-rearing
Aim for females
Choose the best male to mate with
Females hold balance of power, males can only pass on their genes if females
allow them.
BUT
Great diversity in degree of sexual dimorphism across species
Different theories put forward - Parental Investment theory...
Explained by the theory of parental investment on the next page
Mediation by Resource Availability?
Evolution drives males and females to develop physical and behavioural characteristics
that will maximise the long-term (i.e. cross-generational) survival of their genes.
Not just number of offspring, but cross-generational reproductive success
Therefore, effects of sexual selection partly dependant on resource availability
required to raise offspring
Paternal parenting investment theory
Sexual dimorphism: Greater in resource-rich environments, lower in resource-poor
environments.
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Resource-rich environments
Result: High sexual dimorphism
Females able to obtain enough food on their own, thus they are less reliant on
males. In these environments, females are more picky and males are less involved
and mate with more animals. Females can afford to be discerning.
Females Males
Typically able to attain enough food for Cross-generational survival of male genes
their offspring on their own. less/not dependant on own parental effort.
Males driven by maximising number of
partners Increase in partner search/
courting behaviours.
Focussed on signs of genetic Discerning nature of the females leads to:
health/strength/intelligence. Male-male competition
Can afford to be discerning to ensure Courting behaviours focussed
the highest quality paternity. around displays of genetic strength/health
Resource-poor environments
6. Result: Lower sexual dimorphism
7. Both parents needed to find enough food and raise the kids. As a result, females
are more likely to be focused on signs of resource provision and fertility and males
tend to be less promiscuous and more involved.
8. For males, contributing to parenting is the best way for them to ensure the survival
of their genes.
9. Males and females look more similar and act more similar
Females Males

Cannot provide enough food for their offspring

Cross-generational survival of male genes no
on their own. longer independent of male investment in parenting.

Male evolution drives the development of paternal

characteristics.

Less promiscuous; greater paternal effort.

Focussed on signs of resource provision and
fidelity.

Sexual Selection in humans

Application to humans?
Highly controversial
Important questions
Sexual dimorphism in humans?
Dimorphism driven by sexual selection?
Application to homosexual relationships?
Flexibility of human mating strategies
Nature/nurture
Core question all evolutionary accounts of behaviour needs to address
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Week 3: nature and nurture

Hard-wired motivation in Functional Processes

Recap: Motivation in Functional Processes
Motivational mechanisms
Connections between sense-relevance, and relevance-response
We have a range of sensory systems that detect stimuli from the exogenous environment
and feed this info into the nervous system. This sensory info then undergoes further
sensory processing and association with related info from other sensory systems.
Responses may be directed towards internal or external environment.
Afferent: in coming
Efferent: outgoing
Motivational mechanisms: the psychological processes that reflect the relevance of
something to us.

Source of Hard-Wired Connections in Motivation

Certain connections have been locked into our behavioural repertoire through our genes.
So over generations, survival pressures from the environment have lead to certain
exogenous or endogenous stimuli having a largely genetic meaning fixed to it. Any time
we are exposed to these stimuli, it carries the same meaning. It's relevance and therefore
our response doesn't change.
Thus, for a motivational system to be hard wired, it means that there is no/little
flexibility in the meaning a given stimulus has and the way we will respond to it.
The only was to change the relevance of response is through that hard wired system
being selected against, through evolution.
Over successive generations, survival pressures from the natural environment have,
through evolutionary processes, led to...
Sense-relevance:
Certain stimuli in the environment having a (largely) genetically-fixed
meaning/relevance to us
Relevance-response:
Certain responses being triggered in a (largely) genetically-fixed way after
detection of a stimulus with a given meaning/relevance
Flexibility in connection
Predominantly fixed and inflexible during lifespan
Connections altered by natural selection across multiple generations
Reflexes
Description of Reflexes
Simplest means we have of interacting in a functional manner with the environment.
The entire functional research process is usually refered to as a reflex arc which consists
of sensory neurons synapsids directly or via a small number if inter neurons to motor
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neurons.
Simplest form of functional process imaginable.
Monosynaptic reflex: contains only one synapse in the entire functional process (2
neurons). That is, a sensory neuron is directly connected to a motor neuron.
Polysynaptic reflex: there is one or more intermediate inter neuron between the sensory
and motor neurons.
Unlearned (genetically-fixed), automatic, rapid response triggered by a predetermined
stimuli
Reflex arc
Entire reflexive Functional Process
Sensory neurons synapsing with motor neurons (often via interneurons in spinal
chord). Brain not involved.
Example

Monosynaptic reflex example: Patellar reflex

Mono synaptic: best example is a knee jerk/patella reflex. Corrects movement in the leg
Functional process of patellar reflex arc:
When the wuadriceps muscle stretches the Proprioceptive sensory receptors in the
quadriceps muscles fire. The signal travels down the spinal Cord where it synapses with
a motor neuron which triggers the quadriceps muscle to contract (excite) and the
hamstring to relax (inhibit) making the leg jerk forward.
Most muscle control of limbs requires two muscles, one on either side. One acting as an
extensor and one acting as a flexor. These muscles work against each other to keep our
limbs positioned. Thus in order for a limb to love, one muscle must contract while its
antagonist muscle relaxes. Thus while the quadriceps muscle contracts, the hamstring
relaxes
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Polysynaptic reflex example: Withdraw reflex

Relies more heavily on inter neurons. Protective reflex.

We have temperature and pain receptors in our hands which require exposure to intense
stimuli to trigger the reflex. Once they fire, the signal goes down the spinal cord where
they synapse on to inter neurons which synapse onto motor neurons one of which fires
(excites) the bicep muscle contracting it while the other inhibits the tricep relaxing it thus
allowing the arm to move upwards.
For both reflexes, all this occurs in the peripheral nervous system. That is, the brain is
not involved. The brain is not involved because the response is much quicker without the
brain. Functional response occurs before sensory message is received.

Functional Process Questions

Stimuli
Exogenous or endogenous
Relevance fixed genetically
Withdrawal is exogenous where patellar is normally endogenous because it relies
on a proprioceptive feedback system that tells the body about a stretch.
For bomb cases, the relevance of the stimulus is genetically fixed (it can't be
altered or changed)
Responses
Mostly exogenous: Because many reflexes play a protective role, response
mechanisms tend to be exogenous.
Response fixed genetically
Where is the motivational mechanism?
Reflexes do not require a judgement mechanisms rather their relevance is coded in
our genes and is decided by evolution
For some reflexes, no changes can be made. However, for other reflexes they can
be changedNo discrete relevance-judgement mechanism required
Relevance hard-coded in the system. Source of relevance judgement = evolution.
E.g. Withdraw reflex
Stimulus constitutes a threat to the organism
Evolved mechanism to trigger escape response
Modification?
For many, little modification is possible
Some can be mediated by simple learning and other factors
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Human Reflexes
Types of reflexes in humans

How many reflexive systems do we have and what are their functional roles? We can group
reflexes together as:
Newborn-only versus lifespan
Survival reflexes
Function ie survival, protective or adaptive as well as primitive
Clear, current adaptive function
Many serve 'protective' functions (e.g. withdraw, blinking, coughing, vomiting) but
also other adaptive functions (e.g. swallowing)
Primitive reflexes
Appear to be non-functional
Evolutionary left-overs?
Many only seen in newborns, disappearing with development
Useful as indicators of normal neurological development
These primitive reflexes serve as indicators of normal neurological development.
Ie if they last too long or don't appear at all.
Reflexes in newborns
Important to distinguish between spontaneous non-functional movements and
actual reflexes. The key point being that in new browns, reflexes are functional
interactions with the environment.
Reflexes are dominant during the first month of their life (during piagets
sensorimotor stage) and assist in primary needs. Infants act primarily as passive
responders to their environment. Many of these reflexes dissapears as child
develops and are controlled by lower brain regions and become functionally
overtaken by more sophisticated behavioural control systems as the neocortex
develops.
Newborn behaviour
Spontaneous movement
Reflexes
Triggered by specific exogenous (external) environmental stimuli
Functional interactions with the environment (newborns are NOT helpless)
Reflexes dominant during 1st month of life (1st sub-stage of Piaget's Sensorimotor
Stage) - passive responders
With development...
Active control over behaviour
Many reflexes lost with increasing development
Main survival reflexes in newborns
10. Reflexes with clear survival value for either the early stages of life alone, or ongoing
throughout the entire lifespan.
Breathing reflex
Description
Constriction of pupils to bright light; dilation to dark or dimly lit surroundings
Significance
Protects against bright lights; adapts visual system to low illumination
Developmental Course
Is gradually modified by experience over the first few months of life
 19

Eyeblink reflex
Description
Eye blinking in response to irritation or bright light
Significance
Protects eye
Developmental Course
Permanent
Pupillary reflex
Description
Constriction of pupils to bright light, dilation to dark or dimly lit surroundings
Significance
Protects against bright lights, adapts visual system to low illumination
Developmental Course
Permanent
Rooting reflex
Description
Turning cheek in direction of touch
Significance
Orients child to breast or bottle
Developmental Course
Gradually weakens over first 6 month of life
Sucking reflex
Description
Sucking on objects placed in the mouth
Significance
Allows child to take in nutrients
Developmental Course
Gradually modified by experience
Swallowing reflex
Description
Swallowing
Significance
Allows child to take in nutrients and protects against choking
Developmental Course
Is permanent but modified by experience

Main primitive reflexes in newborns

Reflexes that appear to serve no current adaptive function, or whose function is unclear.
Babinski reflex
Description
Fanning and then curling toes when bottom of foot is stroked
Significance
Presence at birth and then disappearance in first year indicate normal neurological
development
Developmental Course
Usually disappears within the first 8 months to 1 year of life.
Grasping reflex
Description
Curling of fingers around objects (such as a finger) that touch a baby's palm
Significance
 20

Presence at birth and later disappearance indicate normal neurological

development. (May be a forerunner of the useful behaviour of voluntary grasp.)
Developmental Course
Disappears in first 3-4 months; is replaced by a voluntary grasp
Moro reflex
Description
Loud noise or suddenly change in position of baby's head will cause baby to throw
arms out wards, arch back and then bring arms towards each other as if to hold
onto something
Significance
Presence at birth and later disappearance indicate normal neurological
development
Developmental Course
Dissapears over the first 6-7 months, however child continued to react to
unexpected noises or a loss of bodily support by showing a startle reflex which
does not disappear.
Swimming reflex
Description
Infant immersed in water will display active movements of arms and legs and
involuntarily hold breath (thus staying afloat for some time)
Significance
Presence at birth and later disappearance indicate normal neurological
development. May provide as protection against drowning
Developmental Course
Disappears in first 4-6 months

Stepping reflex
Description
Infants held upright so that their feet touch a surface will step as if to walk
Significance
Indicate normal neurological development
Developmental Course
Disappearance in first 8 weeks unless infant has regular opportunities to practice
it

Instincts - Introduction
Description
Comparison to reflexes: Difference between reflexes and instincts
Greater complexity in stimuli: instincts have greater complexity in stimuli that
trigger them ie it's not just activation of sensory neurons but may also include
object recognition.
Greater complexity in response (entire behavioural sequences): Also greater
complexity in response ie instead of small muscle groups it can be entire
behaviours ie running Away.

More complex interactions with other mechanisms: These allow for more complex
interactions
Ethological terminology and description of the instinctual process (Lorenz, Tinbergen)
Believed that each instinctual behaviour has its own source of action specific
energy (the driving source behind a behaviour). They believed this energy was
 21

inhibited most of the time by innate releasing mechanism, which acts as a lock and
only in the presence of a specific stimulus, is that behaviour activated.
Behaviours have Action Specific Energy (ASE)
Inhibited by Innate Releasing Mechanism (IRM) (a 'lock')
Two types of releasers ('key'): There's are two kinds of sensory info from the
environment that can trigger an instinct:
Social releasers: Behaviour in a conspecific, tend to be specific behaviours in
conspecifics (animals of the same species)
Key Stimuli: Any other environmental stimuli, any other non social stimuli
that trigger an instinctual response.
Leading to Fixed Action Pattern (FAP)
Criticisms
Criticism of the 'Energy' concept
Later work found FAP's less stereotyped and inflexible > Modal Action Patterns
Stimuli - Non-social (Key Stimuli)
Components of an instinctual functional process:
Either simple stimuli or configurational relationships between stimuli: patterned
combinations of multiple simple stimuli
Example: Ringed Plover:
Ie ringed plover eggs appear in such a way that triggers the mother bird to sit on
the eggs.
Light brown eggs with darker brown spots
Incubation triggered by the configurational stimuli of dark spots on light
background
Will incubate white eggs with black spots over its own if given a choice
Supernormal (or super-optimal) key stimulus: a stimulus that triggers an instinctual
response in preference to the thing that is supposed to trigger it. That is, a stimulus
which releases an instinctual behaviour more effectively than the original stimulus
that is intended to cause that behaviour.
Example: Cuckoos (Kilner, Noble & Davies, 1999): Cuckoos lay their eggs in other
nests
Response (FAP/MAP): The response end of the process
Fixed Action Pattern properties (Moltz, 1965): Four main characteristics
1. Fairly stereotyped (little variation across instances or individuals),
predominately occurs in the same way
2. Independent of immediate external control (ballistic): Those behaviours will
continue once they have been triggered irrespective of any changes in the
environment. That is, you can't interrupt a fixed action pattern half way through
Example: Graylag goose egg retrieval:
Retrieval of eggs that roll outside the nest by drawing egg toward nest
with bill
FAP continues to completion even if egg is removed!
Response (FAP/MAP)
3. Can occur spontaneously (vacuum activity)
The longer the interval since last FAP occurrence, greater chance of FAP
occurring WITHOUT release by stimulus
Suggests some other internal motivational 'force' or energy build-up required
4. Primarily non-modifiable through learning
Reaction Chains
Reaction chain: An entire process is formed form a collaboration of separate instinctual
 22

processes each one triggering the next

Seemingly complex behaviours formed from a sequence of simple stimulus-response
processes
E.g. Stickleback mating behaviour
Conflict between instincts
Core difference between instincts and reflexes:
Instincts are typically triggered by more complex sensory info and many also draw
on a wide set of behaviours.
What happens if we are simultaneously exposed to two different stimuli that are
connected to the same set of muscles? Ie an instinct to run or move forwards. We
must therefore make a decision
Decision mechanisms
Motivational conflict: 2 or more key stimuli at same time. Which FAP is triggered?
Hess (1962): four ways an organism deals with motivational conflict:
1. Successive ambivalent behaviour: Alternation of incomplete responses representing
the two motivational states, incomplete responses performed one after the other ie you
go to break and then you accelerate
2. Simultaneous ambivalent behaviour: Both behaviours displayed (if possible), if
possible, both behaviours occur: ie when cat arches it's back it is simultaneously
attacking and escaping.
3. Redirected behaviour: Appropriate responses (for example, attack) occur, but not to
the appropriate object, because of a conflicting motive (for example, fear),
appropriate response occurs but towards the wrong target. Ie attacking a log
4. Displacement: Two equally strong motives inhibiting each other, leading to build-up
of energy, which may trigger unrelated FAP, two equally strong motives inhibit each
other triggering an unrelated fap ie fish want to attack or escape and instead they build
a nest
Human Instincts
Eibl-Eibesfeldt
Started in comparative vertebrate ethology (mammalian communication)
Then: Cross-cultural comparisons of human communication behaviour
Two main books
Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns (1972)
Human Ethology (1989)
Eyebrow flash
11. Smile and then raise eye brows
12. Universal human greeting behaviour
13. Common to all cultures, both primitive and modern
14. May act as an 'appeasement gesture', I have recognised you or reduce threat upon
approach to inhibit aggression
Staring as a threat signal
Indication of intention to attack
Ellsworth, Carlsmith, and Henson (1972)
Design: Staring at other driver at red light
Hypothesis: "if a stare has negative or threatening cue properties for people, then
it should tend to elicit attempts to withdraw or escape from the situation. If escape
is temporarily impossible [due to the red light], tension may build up, so that when
the opportunity to escape does arise, the response may be exaggerated" (p303)
Cuteness
Eibl-Eibesfeldt; Konrad Lorenz
 23

Key stimuli in infants that trigger nurturing behaviour in adults

Large eyes/head in proportion to body, small mouth and jaw-line, chubby cheeks
Why do we find these pictures 'cute'?
Two interesting things:
These characteristics are the same across many species and mean that human
nurturing behaviour is therefore directed towards many different species
Acting as super normal key stimuli
Commercial exploitation of the 'cuteness' instinct
The evolution of Mickey Mouse - from rat to child
Facial expressions
Facial expressions as unlearnt, universal human instinctual responses
Facial expressions occur under similar circumstances across cultures (i.e. same
triggering situations/stimuli)
Facial expressions seen in children born blind, deaf or retarded
Facial expressions as fixed action patterns

Nature versus Nurture?

Intersection between genetics and learning
The Nature/Nurture Debate
Recall the three 20th Century themes
Mechanistic > Genetic/hard-wired
Appetitive > Learnt
Rational > Cognitive
Two major debates
Hard-wired/learnt versus cognitive = determinism/free-will debate
Hard-wired versus learnt/cognitive = nature/nurture debate
Are our actions determined by innate ('genetic') mechanisms or by experience?
Particular controversy during the 20th Century...
20th Century controversy
Hard-wired (recap):
Early instinct theorists Ethologists
Modern evolutionary approaches (evolutionary psychology, neuro-ethology, etc.)
Learnt:
In psychology
Behaviourism Learning theory
In sociology
Key issue
If psychological/behavioural differences (e.g. between races, sexes) are hard-
wired, then they are
Natural
Immutable (fixed), Can't be changed
Excellent reference
Perry, G., & Mace, R. (2010). The lack of acceptance of evolutionary approaches
to human behaviour. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 8(2), 105-125. doi:
10.1556/JEP.8.2010.2.2.

Timeline: History of 20th Century nature-nurture conflict

Mainstream biology Darwinian evolution introduced.
Religious backlash There was a strong religious backlash against this theory of
evolution, due to its questioning of religious views regarding the origin of species and
 24

its denial of the superiority of humans over animals.

Extreme nature: The rise of Social Darwinism Darwins work triggered a
widespread intellectual focus on understanding all aspects of human behaviour through
the framework of evolution (hence the dominance of instinct approaches at this time).
Many misunderstood Darwin's theory as implying that evolution is a natural, linear
progression where the weak are eliminated and the strong survive. This idea of evolution
as being about the survival of the fittest (an idea encouraged by Spencer rather than
Darwin himself), was picked up by some and inappropriately applied to social, political
and moral theory, culminating in Social Darwinism - a group of theories which used
evolution to justify such things as right-wing capitalist ideologies, inequalities in
power/wealth, racist immigration policies, and the 'natural' superiority of white/Western
people. For example, Francis Galton believed evolutionary theory provided justification
for eugenics attempts to improve the genetic health of human populations by
preventing people with undesirable qualities from passing on their genes. Galton's
writings formed a popular movement which encouraged discrimination, forced
sterilisation, and were used to justify the genocidal atrocities carried out by the Nazi
regime. Darwinian evolution was also first introduced to America through Social
Darwinism, in part underlying Americas ongoing difficulty in accepting the theory.
Social Darwinist ideas were also adopted within the emerging field of anthropology,
with societal evolution seen as a linear progression from savagery to barbarism to
civilisation.
Mainstream biology The views of Social Darwinism were strongly refuted by Darwin
himself, and later by Darwinian biologists. Darwin opposed racist ideologies in
anthropology during the American civil war, and emphasised similarities between the
races, pointing out that the majority of variation in human characteristics exists within
racial groups, not between them.
Mainstream biology Evolutionary theory started to mature into our contemporary
understanding of the process, particularly due to the synthesis of Mendelian genetics and
Darwinian theory, providing the first full explanation of the mechanisms of inheritance -
what is termed the 'Modern Synthesis'. Earlier simplistic instinctual approaches matured
into the field of ethology, which while still focussing primarily on hard-wired
instinctual systems (nature), did recognise that many such systems are often mediated by
learning (nurture).
Extreme nurture: Sociology Sociology was founded by Emile Durkheim, with a focus
on environmental/cultural determinism in contrast to the earlier evolutionary focus on
innate, universal characteristics. Behaviour was considered to be shaped by culture
unless proven otherwise. Anthropology departments began to follow this approach, in
part to distance themselves from their earlier Social Darwinist stance.
Mainstream biology Our understanding of evolution continued to mature with further
significant advances in biology. One critical advance was the discovery of the double-
helix structure of DNA by Watson and Crick (1953), significantly furthering our
understanding of genetics, inheritance, and processes behind evolution (e.g. sources of
variation, etc.). A key theoretical advance at this time was Hamilton's (1964) gene-
centred theory of kin selection the idea that it is the cross-generational survival of
genes themselves, rather than the survival of individual organisms, which drives
evolution.
Extreme nature: Popularist books in biology There was a popular resurgence of
strong nature-based approaches to understanding human physiology and psychology,
triggered by the publication of popularist books like Desmond Morris (1967) The
Naked Ape.
 25

Mainstream biology E.O. Wilson (1975) introduced the field of Sociobiology in his
book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. He was attempting to move biology away
from the simplistic instinctual ideas explored in ethology and their misleading
application to humans by Desmond Morris and others. Sociobiology was based in
Hamiltons earlier gene-centred kin-selection theory (popularised by Richard Dawkins,
1976, in The Selfish Gene). Sociobiology was well received within biology itself, and
essentially marked the birth of the modern idea of the interaction between genes and
environment.
Extreme nurture: Sociobiology debate and rise of Postmodernism in the social
sciences There was a strong negative response to Wilson's book from left-wing Marxists,
wrongly considering it as a return to the politically motivated biological determinism of
Social Darwinism, and thus to racism, eugenics, Nazi policies, etc. Also, from the mid-
1970s onwards, the social sciences began to be infiltrated by Postmodernism the
philosophical belief that truth is relative to the observer and thus that there is no
universal scientific 'truth'.
Mainstream biology: Current view Nature-nurture is a false dichotomy: Genes do
not operate in isolation from environmental factors, including culture, and their
interaction is the primary consideration (Perry & Mace, 2010). The term
sociobiology was dropped because of its previous bad press. Disciplines investigating
behaviour from an evolutionary context were labelled as evolutionary psychology,
behavioural ecology, gene-culture co-evolution, etc.
Sociology/anthropology: Current view In many areas of sociology, anthropology and
the social sciences more broadly, the cultural relativism and cultural determinism that
developed within the fields from the 1930s onwards still predominate. Some
sociologists and cultural anthropologists are still unreceptive to the gene-environment
interaction view that characterises contemporary biology.

Current view: Nature AND Nurture

Overly simplistic to label traits as 'innate' or 'acquired'
Rather, ask
In what ways can the environment shape the effect a specific gene has upon an
organism's physical and psychological traits, both during development and
ongoing during the organism's lifespan?
15. In what ways is the organism's ability to learn shaped and limited by underlying
genetically guided brain mechanisms and motivations?
Genetic-environment interactions in development
Examples of gene-envt. interaction in development
Water-flea (Daphnia pulex)
Formation of defensive armour
Genes that create it are only switched on in the presence of a certain chemical in
the environment
Many reptiles
Gender determined by genes and envt Gender of reptiles is determined by
temperature
Moore (1984); Moore (1992):
Development of spinal chord control of penis during copulation in male rat pups
Male rat pup releases chemical (genetic)
Elicits mother to lick genital area (environmental)
Changes in gene expression in developing spinal chord (genetic)
 26

Epigenetics
Changes in gene expression influenced by factors other than the genes DNA, most
often environmental
study of gene environment interaction
Genetic-environment interactions in reflexes
Non-associative learning in reflexes
Learning driven by stimulus exposure alone, not temporal association between stimuli
Habituation and Sensitisation
Tendency of a response to decrease (habituation) or increase (sensitisation) with
repeated exposure to a stimulus.
Gill-withdraw reflex: The functional process
Neuroanatomy of gill withdraw reflex in Aplysia
24 tactile sensory neurons
6 motor neurons controlling response
Each sensory neuron has
Monosynaptic connection to each motor neuron - DIRECT
Polysynaptic connections to the other motor neurons (i.e. via interneurons)
The quality/intensity stimulus that determined whether sensitisation or
habituation occurs. It learns to ignore a stimulus that doesn't pose a threat if
the touch is mild, however if it is intense it becomes more sensitive and
withdraws more. That is, the relevance of the stimuli is not fixed

Other examples of habituation

Startle reflex
Humans, and studied extensively in rats
Unexpected auditory or tactile stimulus sharp jumping response
Habituation on repeated exposure; If stimulus is non threatening
Davis (1989): Neural circuitry of auditory startle reflex in rats
Auditory nerve > auditory pathways to the brainstem > motor pathways >
motor neurons
Habituation occurs in early portions of this circuit
Orienting response
On new sight/sound, animal (e.g. dog) will
Stop activity, lift head/ears, turn in direction of stimulus
Habituation if stimulus of no consequence
Thompson & Spencer (1966): Principles of habituation (cross-species)
The Course of Habituation: Initial large decrease in response getting smaller with
repeated presentations
The effects of time: Response recovers after delay in stimulus presentation
 27

Relearning effects: Habituation proceeds more rapidly in a second series of

presentations.
Effects of stimulus intensity: Strong stimuli make habituation more difficult or
impossible. Weak stimuli better for triggering habituation.
Effects of overlearning: Repeated presentation of stimulus past point of no
behavioural response long term retention of habituation ('below-zero' habituation).
Stimulus generalisation: Habituation sometimes transferable between similar
stimuli

Genetic-environment interactions in instincts

Associative learning in instincts
Attempts to categorise instinctual behaviour according to degree of flexibility

Mayr (1974): Closed vs open programs

Closed programs: Genetically established pattern of responding NOT
modifiable through learning
Open programs: Genetically established pattern of responding, modifiable
through learning
many behaviours result from an interaction between open and closed
programs. Basic genetic process whose function can be modified through
experience with certain boundaries
Seligman (1970) and Seligman and Hager (1972): Preparedness
Prepared behaviours: Purely instinctive or easily learnt
Contraprepared behaviours: Difficult to learn as they've been "prepared against"
evolutionarily.
Unprepared behaviours: Can be learnt without influence from genetic guidance or
restraint, ie classical and operant conditioning
Language learning as a 'prepared' behaviour
Noam Chomsky
Biological preparation to learn language
'Language Acquisition Device' = innate grammar
Genetically fixed mechanism which provides the child with a basic understanding
of grammar
Filial imprinting
First described by Spaulding in 1873; systematically investigated by Lorenz
Process by which young animal (esp. birds) recognises object as parent and forms
attachment
VIDEO: Filial imprinting
Filial imprinting uses learning
Restrictions on learning in filial imprinting
Relies on learning, but in a highly controlled, restricted way:
1. Time course
Critical period (actually sensitive period), peaking around 13-16 hours for Mallard
ducklings
Filial imprinting doesn't usually occur outside this time frame
2. Number of times learning can occur
Some exceptions in some species, but most = one pairing only
Connection becomes fixed
3. Stimulus qualities
Key stimulus' for filial imprinting = movement
 28

Releasing stimulus was movement, the shape colour and sound was irrelevant
Note
Infant > parent bond appears a highly complex social relationship, but driven by
simple, unconscious mechanism
Sexual imprinting
Lorenz
Filial imprinting as tool to aid observation of wild Greylag Geese
Sexual imprinting
Physical qualities of the parent learnt by young a template defining qualities to be
sexually attracted to in adulthood
Sexual imprinting would achieve:
Appropriate mating: members of their own species
To encourage mating with familiar individuals
Suggested evolutionary purpose
Ensuring appropriate mating
Genetic similarity
The similarity/variability trade-off
Are organisms most strongly sexually attracted to their closest relatives? No... There is a
strong avoidance of incest in many species to avoid the negatives of inbreeding.
Inbreeding removes the benefit of sexual reproduction.
Inbreeding
Lower adaptability to environmental change
Perpetuation of poor functioning genes
Evolutionary trade-off: Selection pressure
These selection processes fight against each otheragainst inbreeding (incest
avoidance)
but towards genetic similarity (sexual imprinting)
Incest avoidance and sexual imprinting in humans
Incest avoidance
Edvard Westermarck (1891): The Westermarck effect
Innate instinctual mechanism to protect against inbreeding
Sexual desensitisation to people exposed to early in life
Wolf (1993): Evidence includes
When two people are exposed to each other regularly in early years of life, they
will develop sexual desensitisation. There is some evidence to support this Non-
biologically-related children raised together from birth to adulthood in communal
environments rarely if ever marry.
Non-biologically-related boys and girls brought up together for purpose of
marriage 2.5 x higher divorce rate, 1/5th lower fertility
 29

Week 4: sensory sensations and consciousness

Sensory sensations and hedonism
Comparing reflexes/instincts with other motivators
Forms of sensory input to Functional Processes
Instincts/reflexes > sensory sensations > drives/emotions
Stimuli that activate reflexes or instincts tend to be fairly simple, that is they are
triggered by simple direct activation of particular sensory neurons.
Drives and emotions tend to be more complex higher level processes involving
integration of information across many systems.
Greater opportunity for variation amongst instinct actions over reflex actions.
Nevertheless, they are both still fairly rigid behavioural responses
The kind of responses we see after activation of a sensory sensation such as a feeling, are
more diffuse. Rather than specific fixed responses, sensations depend on the
motivational context which could trigger a wide variety of responses.
Sensory sensations sit in between the simple sensations of reflexes and instincts and the
more complex motivational mechanisms of drives and emotions. Like reflexes, they are
triggered by simply activation of sensory senses but like drives and emotions, this may
lead to a broader range of potential behavioural responses.
Type Stimuli complexity Response
Trigger effectors in a reflex
Reflexes Simple
arc
Instincts Simple/Moderate Triggering FAPs

Diffuse responses to
Sensations Simple
'pleasure/pain'
Range of responses including
Drives, Emotions Complex (object recognition) FAPs, operant-conditioning,
cognitive planning
Two ways sensations/drives/emotions differ from reflexes/instincts, they are
characterized by:
Conscious experience: With reflexes and instincts, once they have been triggered
the entire process is fairly automatic. No involvement of consciousness. However,
sensations drives and emotions have a conscious aspect.
Affective (hedonic) valence
Hedonism and sensations
Affect = feeling
According to motivational theory, hedonism suggests that we will seek out
behaviours that lead to pleasure and avoid those that lead to punishment.
Unlike instincts and reflexes, sensations emotions and drives can be classified as
positive or negative in some way. Ie drives like hunger and thirst are characterised
by unpleasant feelings. Emotions can be positive or negative. Sensations can be
positive or negative ie sweet tastes or bitter, extreme heats etc.
The ability to classify them, is what we mean when we say they gave affective or
hedonic valence.

Sensory sensations
Key to understanding sensory sensations is to remember that they are tied to
 30

specific sensory mechanisms. Thus we can categorise the sensory mechanisms

which give rise to our sensory sensations.
1. Audition
Pressure receptors detecting sound-waves
2. Vision
Rods (brightness)
Cones (colour)
Photosensitive ganglion cells (involved in circadian rhythms)
3. Somatosensory
Thermoreceptors (temperature)
Mechanoreceptors (presssure/touch)
Nociceptors (pain)
4. Taste
Chemoreceptors: Sweet, salt, bitter, sour, savoury (umami)
Sensory neurons that fire when they come into contact with certain chemicals.
5. Smell
Numerous chemoreceptors?
Two separate organs. The olfactory epithelium and the vomero nasal organ.
Olfactory sensory system is most complex of all sensory systems in terms of
the number of different types of olfactory chemoreceptors we have.
Hedonic value and sensations
Troland (1932)
Help us categorise the different hedonic values associated with particular sensory
systems.
Nervous system tuned to pleasurable vs aversive events.
He thought there were three categories of sensory stimulation.
Beneception: when a stimulus creates a pleasant sensations > Positive sensory
experience
Nociception: Nociception: stimuli produce unpleasant feelings ie pain, bitter
tastes, bad smells
Neutroception: stimuli that are neither pleasant not unpleasant such as vision
or audition. Most of the time what we hear or see is not inherently positive or
negative. Also, standard cutaneous touch is most of the time neither pleasant
or unpleasant.
Beebe-Center (1932)
Beebe center agreed with troland. We can therefore place experienced on a
hedonic continuum.
Pleasant vs unpleasant sensations depend on the way in which a sense organ reacts
to stimulation.
'Bright pressure' > Pleasant feelings
'Dull pressure' > Unpleasant feelings

P.T. Young: Sign, intensity and duration

Young (1959)
Young further developed the continuum. He considered the continuum to be distress
at the one end, indifferent in the middle and delight at the positive end.
Much if his research focused on food preference.
Hedonic continuum
 31

Organisms perform behaviours to, and learn behaviours that, maximise positive affect
and minimise negative affect.
He though there were three properties of affective processes represented on the
continuum:
Sign: Positive (+) affect > Approach, negative (-) affect > withdrawal
(approach vs withdrawal/escape behaviours)
Intensity: Usually studied in preference tests (whichever is preferred is usually
considered more hedonically intense /positive.)
Duration: E.g. Continuation after stimulus removal? (ie if I drop a brick on
my foot, even when I remove the brick the pain will continue)

Sensory sensations in functional context

Hedonic judgement as relevance mechanism
In the case of sensory systems, the motivational component which encapsulates the
relevance of our environment is this hedonic continuum. It's activation of pleasant or
unpleasant systems

Confirming hedonic-sensation associations

Confirmation of hedonic association with sensory sensations
Non-nutritive substances (e.g. saccharine) still trigger response
Most experiments investigate preference in satiated animals
Stellar, Hyman, and Samet (1954)
Rats with severed oesophagus still show typical taste preferences
How do we know that the pleasurable or un pleasurable feeling is being triggered
directly by simple activation of the sensory system itself? Evidence includes:
1. Non-nutritive substances, that is substances that have no nutritional value still trigger
preference responses in a similar way to substances that do have nutritional value.
2. Most of the animal research on sensory preferences tend to use satiated animals. That
is, animals that have had plenty to eat and drink suggesting that any choices they
make is influenced by the actual taste itself rather than being determined by drives
such as hunger of thirst.
3. Stellar, hyman and samet disconnected the stomach from the mouth, and they still
showed the same preferences for taste despite the fact the food wasn't reaching the
stomach. This strongly suggests that taste sensations alone are strong enough to
trigger approach or avoidance behaviour irrespective of drives.
Purpose
 32

Bus and schmit think that sensory preferences are vital to survival. We are
more advanced than trial and error processes in diet. The idea is that directly
linking sensory mechanisms to positive or negative sensations, enables us to
have quick automatic responses to judge the relevance of these stimuli. Ie are
they harmful?

Stimuli: Contact versus distance receptors

Receptor type Contact receptors Distance receptors
Examples Taste, smell, somatosensory Vision, audition
Minimal (stimuli is Longer (stimuli is detected at
Response time impinging upon the distance, so have longer to
organism) react)

Do all of our sensory systems have a particular affective connection with pleasure or
pain. The answer is no. While some are positive and some are negative, there are also
neutral.
Contact vs distance receptors
Contact vs distance receptors account that direct activation is sometimes relevant and
sometimes not. Those things in the environment that come into direct contact with the
body vs those that we are exposed to at a distance.
Contact receptors
16. Contact receptors include sensory systems such as taste and touch, whereas
distance receptors include vision and audition. The key is that contact receptors are
more often associated with strong affective judgements And it is assumed that this
occurs because the stimuli are causing direct activation and therefore a quick
decision needs to be made on the relevance of the stimulus ie is it dangerous or
not. Petri and govern, therefore believe that hedonic value has evolved with contact
receptors to enable quick responses to the environment.
17. Stronger affective judgement as stimuli directly impinging upon organism
18. Hedonic value (pleasure or pain) may therefore have evolved in conjunction with
stimulation of the contact receptors to quickly direct behavior (Petri & Govern,
2004, p. 222).
Distance receptors
19. Distance receptors give us longer to react and judge the relevance, and thus
requires more higher level cognitive processes.
Exception to the rule
Hedonic explanations of behaviour in relation to sensory sensations, may be most
useful when discussing contact receptors. However there is an exception to this
rule, technically all stimuli are contact stimuli. Ie with vision, photons hit your
retina and with sound, sound waves. Even though most of the time it's neutral,
sometimes objects in the distance do constitute a direct threat. Ie bright light can
create pain and loud sound can create pain. Thus, more accurate to say that hedonic
value has evolved in association with a given sensory sensation, when contact with
the stimulus constitutes a direct threat/benefit
All stimuli are 'contact' stimuli? When a distance stimulus DOES constitute a
direct threat:
Bright light > pain
Intense sound > pain
Better to say
Hedonic value is associated with sensory sensations when stimuli contact
 33

constitutes a direct threat/benefit to the organism.

Responses
Some specific: Rosenstein & Oster (1988)
4-10 hour-old infant facial expression responses to sweet, sour and bitter tastes
(little/no response to salt)
Activation is immediate and innate, and initiates direct behavioural responses.
Mostly general direction control
Young: Young thought there were three ways we can describe motivational influences
of the hedonic continuum on behaviour:
1. Positive affect > Approach, Negative affect > withdraw
2. Behaviour activated and directed to maximise positive affect and minimise negative
affect (behaviour directed towards positive over negative sensations)
3. Lead to stable motives and dispositions over time (i.e. learning theory): The more you
do this, the more it will lead to stable motives and dispositions. (Operant
conditioning)
Suggestion is that in most cases, positive and negative sensations lead to approach or
withdrawal behaviours and learning mechanisms can add to this in order to fine tune
our responses
Decisions
Comparison of position on hedonic continuum - preference tests
If we have two stimuli that activate two opposite ends of the continuum, the organism
will try avoid the negative and avoid the positive stimulus. However, if there are two
that are stimulating either both positive, or both negative, we find that organisms
prefer sensations associated with a higher more positive hedonic value. In other
words, sensations that are further up on the hedonic continuum. That is, decisions are
always made in comparison to the hedonic value of the stimuli.
Eg Strong positive > weak positive
Weak negative > strong negative
Organism preferences
Prefer positive over negative
Approach stronger positive more than weaker positive
Avoid stronger negative more than weaker negative
Decisions always made through comparison of available stimuli

Stimuli-relevance association
 34

Valence and intensity fixed?

Are sensory intensity and hedonic intensity equivalent? If you increase the intensity of
activation, do you get a simple linear increase in the amount of pain experienced ie small
stone, small pain, brick, intense pain. Is the relationship between the weight of the
object, and amount of pain felt linear? If this is the case, there are two implications:
1. You must assume there is a fixed association between the activation of a particular
sensory system and its hedonic value/valence. That is, it will always produce pleasure
or pain
2. Must assume linear relationship between stimulus intensity and hedonic intensity
Example: Young and Greene (1953)
As concentration of sugar solution increases, rats continue to prefer more
concentrated sugar solution over less concentrated.
Rats choose the more intense sugar solution. Thus, increase in sugar solution
reflects increase in pleasure for rat and therefore approach behaviour, then this can
provide evidence for linear relationship between stimulus intensity and the hedonic
value and thus intensity of approach behaviour.
However, there are other stimuli that do not have this linear relationship
Valence and intensity NOT fixed
Hedonic continuum not always equivalent to sensory stimulation. Hedonic valence
associated with stimulus may depend on stimulus intensity.
If a stimulus increases in intensity, amount of pleasure/pain will not always increase
accordingly.
Furthermore, hedonic valence may switch from positive to negative depending on the
intensity.
Young and Falk (1956)
Rat preference for salty over distilled water dependant on salt concentration.
they found that they liked salt up to a certain point of intensity where they switch
from finding it pleasurable to adversative.
Pfaffmann (1958)
Pfaffmann showd this on a graph by measuring electrical activity of rat chorda
tympani. Relevance of stimulus changes depending on the intensity
Linear relationship between salt concentration and nerve activity
Non-linear relationship between nerve activity/salt concentration and hedonic
value (indexed by preference)
Preference decreased significantly after -1

Modulation by other motivational mechanisms

 35

Taste: Young and Falk (1956)

Rat preference for salty or distilled water depends on level of thirst
(Concentration = % sodium chloride in solution)
Smell
Smell of food when hungry versus when full.
Sense-relevance connection and learning?
Can the relevance associated with a particular sensory system change through learning?
These changes are the same for all species, suggesting that although they may not be
fixed, they are still hard wired. Thus, while the connection between sense and relevance
may change, it does so with the same basic rules. However, does this change through
learning?
VIDEO: Nature and nurture in taste sensations
Foods rich in high levels of sweetness indicate good sources of nutrients.
Sweet tastes go first, we usually avoid bitter foods.
Own experience is also involved. Ie vegetables are bitter but as we eat them, our
experience with them overcomes our dislike for bitter.
The more we taste something, the more we begin to like it. Dietary range should
therefore we broad from a young age.
Some research has also shown that babies who are exposed to particular flavours in the
womb, show preference for those later on.
Also learn through observation

Pain
Function of pain
Function
Informs us of injury to body
Alters behaviour to prevent further damage, giving injury time to heal
Pain notifies us of the presence of an adversive stimulus and motivates us to escape
that stimulus.
Was thought:
Was thought that pain was similar
Pain receptors > pain interneurons neurons > brain (pain),
But not that simple
Sometimes maladaptive
Pain can often be maldaptive. Ideally, we need a system that informs us of the pain
and then allows us to act on that rather than just overwhelming us with ongoing
sensations of pain. Thus, the relationship between activation of pain and hedonic
sensations is quite flexible. That is, pain experiences can be modulated.
Debilitating pain prevents adaptive responding
Systems evolved to modulate experience of pain
Pain receptors
Pain receptors separate from non-pain somatosensory receptors
Pain receptors are separate from those in our skin that measure temp and pressure. In
fact, past 42-43 degrees, our thermoreceptors hit a ceiling in their levels of excitation and
thus can't respond any more than that. That is, we can't accurately detect temperature
above that threshold. Past this threshold, the relevance of a stimulus changes past this
point. Who cares if the hot water is 70 or 80, all you really need to know is that it is
aversive.
Nociceptors: have quite high activation thresholds. They start to fire after 43 in a fairly
linear fashion in respect to intensity.
 36

1st pain
A delta - A fibres
Axons are myelinated allowing for quick response. They come in two types.
Type I A fibres: dangerous mechanical/chemical stimulation - dont fire in
response to high temperatures
Type II A fibres: dangerous temperature stimulation - detect high
temperatures but not mechanical/chemical
nd
2 pain
C receptors: Dull, aching or burning pain
Axons are un-myelinated and thus slower. Lingering sensations.
Mostly polymodal receptors (respond to dangerous levels of mechanical,
chemical and temperature stimuli
These systems are independent as they can be blocked independently of each other. Ie
blocking c pain stops dull pain but not sharp pain
Detected environment?
Exogenous = cutaneous pain (skin)
Endogenous = visceral pain
Referred pain: endogenous pains do not quite make it to the brain in the same way,
resulting in us feeling internal pains as being physically located on our skin
Best example is anginal pain (pain coming from the heart which is
experienced as a pain in the upper chest and down the left arm)
Modulators of pain
Different modulators of pain can be characterised into two groups based on whether the
mechanisms are working through the peripheral or central nervous system:
Peripheral modulators
Gentle tactile stimulation > reduces pain experience
Analgesic effects of acupuncture
Gentle rubbing, massaging, vibrations
Provides diffusion of pain experience
Central (higher level brain) modulators
Stress induced analgesia: High stress levels may have an analgesic affect.
~65% men wounded in battle report no pain (Beecher, 1959; Melzack, 1961;
Warga, 1987)
Animal's pain thresholds increase with stress (Jessell & Kelly, 1991)
Attention?
Sports-people (e.g. boxers) continue playing after injury.
Presence/absence of the word 'pain' in instructions to anxious participants
modulated reporting of pain from electric shock (Hall & Stride, cited in
Melzack, 1961)
Attention: pain messages not registering in conscious awareness in some
situations.
Cognitive expectations?
Placebo effect: Placebo > pain relief in 37% of patients with pathological pain
(Weisenberg, 1977)
Stimulation-Produced Analgesia (SPA)
Electrical stimulation to part of midbrain > blocking of pain in rats (Reynolds ,
1969)

Gate control theory of pain modulation

 37

Gate control system:

Melzack and Wall (1965)
Pain modulation system in spinal cord
Modulation of pain occurs in spinal cord
Efferents
Transmission (T) cells: pain > brain
Tcells: cells that send pain info to brain
Modulator
Substantia gelatinosa (SG)
20. SG+ opens pain gate by exciting T-cells: Sg plus cells open gate by exciting T
cells sending pain signal to brain
21. SG- closes gate by inhibiting T-cells: Sg plus cells close gate by inhibiting T
cells cutting off the message from the brain.
Afferents: Perception of pain is influenced by three different inputs to the gate:
Small fibres (S fibres) from pain receptors > SG+ excitation > T excitation - Small
Fibres (a fibres) come directly from pain receptors and directly excite T cells as
well as sg plus cells
Large fibres (L fibres) from nonpainful tactile stimuli > SG- excitation > T
inhibition - Large fibres (l fibres) come from non pain tactile receptors and excite
T cells as well as sg minus cells thus inhibiting pain. Explains acupuncture and
rubbing.
Input from central (brain) processes > SG- excitation > T inhibition - Feedback
from the central nervous system (central control - brain) the mechanism by which
the third possible modulators listed on the previous page such as stress, may be
able to close off the pain gate.
Neurotransmitter system (Endorphins)
Neurotransmitters thought to be most likely involved in modulating pain gates are
endorphins. They are endogenous (naturally occurring in body) opiate neurotransmitters
with powerful analgesic affects.
Endogenous opiate neurotransmitters (endorphins) with powerful analgesic effects
The neurotransmitters most likely involved in modulating pain control "gates".
Evidence
Found at same sites in brain that exogenous opiates (e.g. morphine) effect
Removal of pituitary gland decreases analgesic effect of acupuncture (Pomeranz,
Cheng & Law, 1977).
Mice deficient in opioid receptors do not show analgesic effect of acupuncture
(Peets & Pomeranz, 1978).
Naloxone (inhibits opiate activity) decreases pain-reducing effects of:
Stimulation-Produced Analgesia
Acupuncture
Placebos
When pain sensations go wrong
Without these modulator mechanisms, pain can get out of hand and become maladaptive
Non-functional pain
Long-term distress from ongoing conscious pain experiences

VIDEO: Complex pain

Chronic pain: overstimulation of nervous system
Chronic pain causes changes in wire of brain.
Clarifying consciousness
 38

Do we need conscious awareness of sensations?

Reflexes and instincts

No conscious sensations - Entire functional process is non consciousness
Functional process does not require consciousness to complete
Sensations, drives, emotions
All have a conscious experience - 'what it is like' to be in that motivational state
Is conscious experience functionally important or not? What 'role' does it play in the
functional process?
What is consciousness?
Long-standing question
Many debates, positions and uncertainties
Three 'big' questions - 1st way or studying consciousness
The neural correlates of consciousness: Physical/structural underlay
The easy problems of consciousness: Function
The hard problem of consciousness: The problem of subjective experience -
how the brain creates the experience of consciousness
Two forms of consciousness 2nd way of studying consciousness
Arousal
Awareness
David Chalmers (1995): The easy and hard problems
Easy problems
Easy problems regard the functions of consciousness: All these questions can be
understood through experiments. That is, they are functional in nature.
Functional problems; explainable cognitively/computationally
Include:
the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
the integration of information by a cognitive system;
the reportability of mental states;
the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
the focus of attention;
the deliberate control of behavior;
the difference between wakefulness and sleep.
Hard problem
Trying to explain how brain produces subjective conscious experience
Other terms include phenomenal experience or Quaila.
Nagel (1974): The 'what it is like' to be a conscious organism
Easy problems can be investigated independently of hard problems
 39

Arousal versus awareness consciousness

"Arousal consciousness" levels of consciousness

"Awareness consciousness" - Whether someone does, or does not have self conscious
awareness of something. Ie can I describe my thoughts. Obviously awareness
consciousness needs a Level of arousal consciousness.

The role of conscious awareness in motivation

Function of conscious awareness: Two scenarios
Scenario 1. Equivalence of consciousness with motivation and decision-making

There is a stimulus that triggers a motivational mechanism, associated with a hedonistic

state which then informs our responses to a stimulus. That is, a conscious sensation
informs our decision
Scenario 2. Conscious experience in parallel with motivation and decision-making

Conscious experience does not play a functional role in the response. That is, the
stimulus triggers a response like a reflex independently of the conscious. It is a mere
observer.
Testing the two scenarios
Scenario 1: Removal of conscious awareness WILL disrupt the functional process

Scenario 2: Removal of conscious awareness will NOT disrupt the functional process
 40

'Turning off' conscious awareness?

Examples of non-conscious functional processes (other than reflexes/instincts)
Normal phenomena
Most sensory experiences occur unconsciously (subliminally) until they
surpass a certain intensity, which we then become aware of. Ie normal light
versus very bright light
Techniques
Subliminal (sub-threshold) stimulus presentation
'Attentional blink'
'Repetition blindness'
Demonstrated
Formation of memories
Influencing decisions/behaviour (e.g. implicit priming)
Abnormal phenomena
Blindsight
22. Patients who have suffered damage to the v1 causing blindness. However, in
some cases you can still process visual information.
23. Lawrence Weiskrantz (see Weiskrantz, 1986)
24. Seen in some patients with primary visual cortex (V1) damage
25. Forced-choice task
S asked to identify symbol on card (e.g. square or triangle)
(S usually protests)
Many patients are correct above chance
Supporting scenario 2
Previous slide's examples suggest:
Removal of conscious experience does not (necessarily) break functional process
Provides some evidence supporting scenario 2.
E.g. for Blindsight

Consciousness and sensations

Role of consciousness may be different for different motivational mechanisms - Ie
scenario 2 might be correct for drives and emotions ect
Sensations? - In cases of sensory sensations, they tend to fall with scenario 1. We must
have conscious experience of sensations to respond appropriately. The feeling of a
sensation and its motivating force are inseparable
Conscious awareness appears vital for functional processes (scenario 1)
 41

Makes sense introspectively

E.g. reduction of pain experienced as BOTH
Reduction in unpleasant conscious experience of pain
Reduction in motivation to respond to stimulus
Dissociation
Dissociation: "A disturbance or alteration of normal integrated functions of
consciousness, memory or identity" (Bob, 2008)
Clearest demonstration of relationship between conscious experience and motivational
impact of a given sensory stimulus can be seen in examples of conscious dissociation.
Protective mechanism?
Considered to be a protective mechanism. As such, it forms the basis for a range of
psychiatric disorders.
All of these disorders involve a detachment of normal conscious awareness from
engagement with the environment.
Psychopathological examples
Dissociative Identity Disorder (formally Multiple Personality Disorder): early
fragmentation of conscious sense of self. Child retreats into imagination leading to the
development of multiple selves.
Dissociative Amnesia: selective loss of memory for traumatic events
Dissociative Fugue: Df: loss of memory for specific recent events ie how did I get
here??
Depersonalization Disorder: Dd: rare, characterised by periods of extreme detachment
from reality.
Hypnosis
Dissociative states can be triggered by hypnosis. Can alter conscious experience of
stimuli and behavioural experiences to stimuli
Temporary dissociative state many people can enter/leave by themselves or
through hypnotist
Hypnotic induction deep relaxation and heightened suggestibility
Suggested ideas accepted without question - form subject's conscious experience
Summing up
Suggestion of non-pain means hypnotised subject will NOT
experience conscious sensation of pain
be motivated to respond appropriately
Correlative evidence for scenario 1
Behaviour motivated by sensory sensations appears to require an hedonically-
valenced (positive or negative) conscious experience.
 42

Week 5 Lecture: Drives

Drives
Thus, a drive activates and directs behaviour towards exogenous stimuli in the
environment in order to satisfy an underlying bodily need.
The concept of drives
Most of the previous motivational systems tend to be triggered largely by stimuli in
the exogenous environment. Drives are different in that they are predominately
triggered by endogenous stimuli.
Reeve, 2009 (p77)
Reeve (2009) distinguishes between needs and drives.
Need is a physiological condition, a bodily need such as hydration and nutrition.
A drive is the psychological consequence of the need. That is, the conscious
manifestation of the underlying unconscious biological need.
Activate/direct behaviour to exogenous stimuli which will satisfy the need
Three motivational systems that are classed as drives: Sex drive: motivating
sexual behaviours hunger > eating; thirst > drinking; sex drive > sexual
behaviours
Homeostasis
Are we motivated to get more or less of something, or are we motivated to maintain
an appropriate level of something ?
Hedonism
Hedonistic account of motivation, argues that we are always going to approach
stimuli that promote positive things and withdraw from those that create negatives
Approach positive and avoid negative stimuli
Always 'want more positive
Homeostasis
Homeostasis account says that the judgement of relevance of a stimulus depends
upon comparing the current levels of the stimulus with some preset optimal level.
Trying to maintain a level. Discrepancy from this level motivates us to want more
or less.
Measure stimuli according to pre-set optimal levels
Discrepancy motivates responses to increase or decrease stimulus levels to
maintain optimum
Introduction to hunger: Energy use and storage
Why do we eat?
Why do we eat?
Hunger - Most research on drive of hunger.
Hunger is a key factor behind eating behaviour.
Functions to ensure body is provided with sufficient energy and resources.
Most hunger and thirst research is approached from an endogenous and
homeostatic perspective. The idea is that the hunger drive is responding to
levels of the endogenous environment.
Purpose of hunger drive: Provision of energy and resources to the body?
Most hunger (and thirst) research approached from an endogenous
homeostatic perspective
Yes, but not only
Eating/drinking triggered by exogenous stimuli as well.
Food and energy
Processes involved in digestion
 43

Food contains carbohydrates, fats and proteins.

carbohydrates > glucose
proteins > amino acids
fats > triglyceride fats
Energy: The body's need for hunger can be divided into three groups:
Resting metabolism (60-75% of energy use): the way the body uses energy for
bodily maintenance is oxygenation
Thermic effects (10% of energy use): regulate the use of energy in digestion and
storage of food
Physical activity (15-30% of energy use): the use of muscles involuntarily and
voluntarily.
Problem
Core issue between energy intake and use is that the body needs a constant supply
of energy. However,we don't eat constantly. Thus we need systems to store excess
energy.
It's believes that there are two different systems that regulate the storage of energy,
particularly glucose:
Short-term energy
Excess glucose is converted by the liver into glycogen and temporally stored in the
liver and muscles. It can then rapidly reconvert this stored glycogen back into
glucose when needed.
However, these glycogen reserves are not enough to cope with more serious
periods of food shortage or famine. Immediate use of glucose (energy to brain,
muscles, body)
Conversion of glucose to glycogen> stored in liver > rapid re-conversion to
glucose when required
Long-term energy store
Long-term energy store: So dietary fats, excess glucose and proteins are converted
into triglycerides and stored in fat cells called adipose cells.
These stored can be converted back into glucose when short-term stores become
depleted/Conversion back to glucose if short-term reserves depleted
Two homeostatic systems regulating hunger
Short-term regulation
It's thought that there is a short-term regulation system balancing energy intake and
expenditure by monitoring glucose levels and triggering eating behaviour when
those glucose levels drop. This is thought to regulate day-to-day, meal-to-meal
energy supply. It controls our inter meal interval (how often we eat) and meal size
(how much we eat).
Balance energy intake and expenditure by monitoring glucose levels - triggering
eating when levels drops below optimum.
Day-to-day, meal-to-meal regulation: How often we eat (inter-meal interval), how
much we eat (meal size)
Long-term regulation
The long-term regulation system regulates the amount of fat that is stored in fat
cells. This system is thought to detect the amount of stored fat and then control
these levels by influencing eating behaviour. The aim being to try to maintain the
body at a preset weight (set point hypothesis)
Regulation of long term energy stores
Detects amount of stored fat; controls feeding to keep body weight stable
These short and long term systems are both homeostatic energy systems. Systems aiming
 44

to maintain the energy levels. Both affect our hunger levels in order to do so.
Endogenous theories of eating: Short-term regulation
Peripheral ('local') theory of short-term regulation
Periphery theory: cannon focused on the early periphery rather than the brain. They
thought it was changes in stomach contractions which determine eating behaviour.
Experiment where Washburn swallowed a baloon which was inflated and attached to a
marking pen which recorded the level of his stomach contractions through measuring the
amount of air that was being pushed out of the baloon by the stomach. He also indicated
when he felt a subjective sensation of hunger. His hunger pains lined up with his
stomach contractions, leading them to think contractions were the basis for hunger
signals and thus the key for triggering eating behaviour. However, this only shows a
correlational relationship.
Source of input to short-term regulatory systems = periphery?
Early theory: Cannon and Washburn (1912)
Changes in stomach contractions > eating
Central theories of short-term regulation
Grossman and Stein (1948):
Further research shows the previous theory was inadequate. Grossman and stein
found that if you sever the vagus nerve (the major neural connection between the
stomach and the cns) you prevent information about stomach contractions from
getting to the brain but you don't experience a reduction in hunger sensation. This
suggests it's not just the contractions stimulating hunger.
Vagus nerve severing > no stomach contraction info reaches brain, but no
reduction in hunger sensation.
Central (brain) theories
People turned to central theories of short-term regulation. Something in the
bloodstream being measured directly by the brain. Perhaps the are specialised
sensory receptors in the brain and they control hunger.The 'local' theory inadequate
Specialised brain cells detecting changes in energy levels; controlling motivation.
Several brain areas implicated, but most focus on hypothalamus
Hypothalamus
26. The hypothalamus is a sub cortical brain structure in the centre of the brain.
27. Involved in/homeostatic purpose
Central in control of blood flow throughout body
regulating heart and kidney function
salt concentration in the blood
motivating drinking behaviour and salt consumption
Regulation of sexual and reproductive behaviours, gender identity, sexual
orientation, menstral cycles.
Coordination of endogenous responses to threat by regulating stress hormones and
autonomic nervous system activity.
Most importantly, regulates energy metabolism by monitoring blood glucose
levels, eating behaviour, digestive functions, metabolic rate and body temperature.
28. Evidence for this:
It's placement, rich in blood vessels adjacent to number of structures outside blood
brain barrier and thus is well suited to detect chemical changes in the blood stream.
It has endogenous outputs such as the ability to modulate nervous activity, and the
pituitary gland which controls hormone levels.
Damage or stimulation to various parts of the hypothalamus affect exogenous
behaviours related to food intake.
 45

Inputs?
Endogenous
Endowed with blood vessels
Adjacent to brain structures outside blood-brain barrier
Outputs
Endogenous
Activation of ANS
Pituitary gland (thus endocrine system)
Exogenous
Damage/stimulation affect feeding, drinking, sexual behaviour,
aggressiveness, fear
Role of ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH)
Hetherington and Ranson (1940)
Hypothalamic damage > hyperphagia (uncontrolled appetite)
These animals only ate up to a certain point, eventually their weight would
stabilise and maintain itself another way.
Later work localised effect to the VMH
Role of lateral hypothalamus (LH)
Anand and Brobeck (1951)
Lesions in LH prevent eating (aphagia) and prevent drinking (adipsia)
Animals die without experimenter intervention
If kept alive, animals eventually regain eating/drinking motivation, but
maintain lower body weight (Teitelbaum & Stellar, 1954)
This led to
Centre hypothesis
Suggests there are satiety and hunger centres working together to maintain energy
homeostasis by regulating eating behaviour.
VMH: satiety centre?
Believed that vmh was a satiety centre detecting when energy intake was sufficient
and turning eating behaviour off.
LH: hunger centre?
'Turns on' eating when energy is required
Lateral was a hunger centre detecting when eating behaviours were low and
turning hunger on
Believed that the ventromedial and lateral nuclei of the hypothalamus represented
the upper and lower ranges of the optimal level in short term regulation.
Generated considerable research to identify the inputs triggering both systems
Glucose levels considered first
Endogenous triggering stimuli: Glucostatic theory of hunger
Mayer (1955)
Mayer believed their were receptors in the hypothalamus sensitive to changes in
ratio of blood glucose
Thought that:
Glucoreceptors in VMH: Decrease in detected glucose levels > eating
Glucoreceptors in LH: Increase in detected glucose levels > inhibits food
intake
Popular for a long time, but then questioned because obesity only occurred when damage
was done to vmh and certain surrounding fibres.
VMH
Lesions required to trigger obesity include both VHM AND surrounding
 46

fibres
LH
LH glucose deprivation must be extreme to induce feeding in rats (emergency
system?) - Glucose deprivation to the lateral hypo has to be extreme to reduce
feeding. Thus, lateral hypo may only act as an emergency system only
occurring when glucose levels have dropped dangerously. Furthermore,
lesions to these areas have complicated effects on eating behaviour.
LH lesions produce general motivational deficits
Glucoreceptors may exist in VMH and LH but they are not the primary mechanisms of
short-term regulation
Back to the periphery?
Evidence for multiple peripheral systems
Modern view is that there are multiple peripheral systems measuring a number of things
and sending them to the hypothalamus.
Stomach
Stretch receptors in stomach wall - there are mechanisms in the stomach that act as
satiety signals (info about contraction and expansion of stomach.)
Ghrelin - appetite hormone.
Grhelin levels highest just before a meal and decrease after food intake.
Artificial increase of Grhelin increases appetite as well as food search and
hunger behaviours. Reduction in these levels leads to suppression.
Receptor sites in stomach but also intestine and other organs
Increase in Ghrelin > increased appetite
Decrease in Ghrelin signals end of meal decreased appetite
Duodenum - Suppresses eating behaviour and secretes hormone that contains the
chemical Cck which signals the brain to stop eating.
Possible site of 'glucoreceptors'?
Injections of glucose into duodenum suppresses eating in rabbits (Novin,
1976)
Cholecystokinin (CCK)
Duodenum secretes hormone (enterogastrone) containing cholecystokinin
(CCK)
Studies show CCK signals brain to stop eating
Genetically obese mice have only 25% of the brain CCK levels as normals
(Straus & Yalow, 1979)
Role and importance of CCK still under debate
Liver - provides satiety signals and initiation of eating
Satiety signals to stop feeding
Another possible site of glucoreceptors?
Injection of glucose into vein feeding liver (hepatic portal vein)
Suppresses feeding
Changes firing rate in hypothalamic neurons
Initiation of feeding (Novin, 1976)
When 2-deoxyglucose (2-DG) which blocks glucose utilization is injected into
hepatic portal vein it mimicks low glucose levels and leads to rapid onset of
feeding.
Suggests liver monitors glucose levels > hypothalamus > initiates/suppresses
feeding behaviour
THUS
Multiple systems involved in short-term regulation
 47

Endogenous Theories of Hunger: Long-term Regulation

Long-term regulation
Mechanisms controlling stable body weight - Stimuli being detected in the endogenous
environment that's controlling the long term regulation system are fat levels.
Lipostatic theories - Most of the theories are lipostatic theories, that is most theories
assume there's a receptor system that's monitoring and triggering the regulation of body
fat levels.
Hypothalamic set-point theory (Keesey, 1986)
LH
'Normal' (set-point) level of body weight consistently maintained by LH
Reduction in eating/drinking from LH damage due to a lowering of set-point
Recovered LH-damaged animals eat normally, but maintain lower body
weight
Animals deprived of food before LH-lesioning INCREASE food intake
behaviour after lesioning.
VMH
VMH may also control set point. Damage > raising of set-point.
VMH damaged animals regulate higher set point
Ventromedial defined upper limit of body weight
LH and VMH most likely work together to determine upper and lower set points for fat
storage for the long term regulation system rather than the short term system
Stimulus in long-term regulation
Detection of body fat levels? Most likely monitoring some aspect of fat cells
Zhang et al. (1994): Leptin
Hormone produced by fat cells
Released into bloodstream in direct proportion to amount of energy in fat
stores
Current theory: Leptin (and insulin) levels relay energy store information to brain
Chemical being detected is the hormone leptin. Leptin is produced by fat cells
and is released into the blood stream in direct proportion to the amount of
energy being stored. Ie lean people have lower levels of leptin but obese
people have high. Thus leptin levels are directly indicative of the amount of
fat being stored within the body.
Other research also implicates insulin levels as playing a role. Thus leptin and
insulin are thought to be the endogenous stimuli detecting and relaying long-
term energy store information from fat cells to the brain. Evidence for this
comes from clinical cases. Ie people with low levels of leptin have higher
appetites and are prone to obesity. Artificially increasing their leptin levels,
leads to a reduction in food intake and body weight.
Exogenous factors in Eating Behaviour
Eating behaviour beyond the hunger drive
Other factors influencing eating behaviour
Level of hunger modulates the relevance judgements we make towards various
food stimuli.
Alters the hedonic value we associate with food stimuli
Hunger also influences learning. We show preference towards sacrin even
though it has no nutritional value just because it's similar to sucrose, which
does have nutritional value. When we aren't hungry, learned preferences are
based on taste alone. hence prefer sacrin. However when we are hungry we
prefer caloric value hence prefer sucrose.
 48

Hunger modulates relevance judgement of food stimuli

Motivation to eat modulates reaction to food stimuli
LaBar, Gitelman, Parrish, Kim, Nobre, and Mesulam (2001)
etc performed an fmri looking at activation in the amygdala which plays an
important role in modulating emotional reactions to stimuli. Hungry subjects
shown pictures of food showed higher amygdala activation than satiated
subjects. Ie smell of food may be negative or positive depending on how
hungry you are.
Salience of food-related stimuli increased by hunger

Harris, Gorissen, Bailey, and Westbrook (2000)

Rats develop learned preferences for almond odour paired with sucrose/saccharin
when not hungry, but only sucrose when hungry
Not hungry: learned preferences based on taste alone
Hungry: learned preferences based on caloric value
Non-hunger eating modulation
Eating typically not motivated by hunger
Most animals and humans eat before glucose levels have lowered substantially
Environmental and learning cues start/stop eating as well
Food stimuli and taste
Hedonic pleasure from taste can trigger eating when not hungry
Variety increases quantity of intake
Rolls, van Duijvenvoorde, and Rolls (1984)
4 foods (sausage, bread and butter, chocolate dessert, bananas)
Subjects given 4 courses of either:
Different food per course
Same food for all courses
Group with more varied courses ate 44% more food (took in 60% more
energy)
Varied diet increases food consumption and energy intake
Why? Hetherington and Rolls (1996): Sensory specific satiety
Varied diet increases food consumption and energy intake. This is known
as sensory specific satiety.
Satiety for specific tastes and/or eating sensations
Hedonic value of a given food decreases in comparison to other foods
once satiety reached for that taste/eating sensation.
Role of memory: Food cues and meal history
Memory plays role in determining when and how much we eat
Conditioned to eat at certain mealtimes
Woods et al. (2000)
Animals fed at specific times of day produce relevant
hormones/neurotransmitters at those times in anticipation for the food.
Memory of when we last ate and how much (Rozin, Dow, Moscovitch, & Rajaram,
1998)
Gave 3 meals to amnesic patients and normal controls, 30 mins apart
Controls refused 2nd and 3rd meals
Amnesics ate some or all of additional meals
suggests we use memory of how long ago since last meal as trigger?
Summary
Modulation of eating
 49

Highly complex interactions between multiple systems

Eating behaviour influenced by...
Homeostatic mechanism: hunger drive
Most well-understood drive system
Endogenous stimuli measurement influencing motivation to eat, ensuring glucose
and fat levels kept within a set range
Other motivational systems beyond hunger that start/stop eating
Hedonic mechanisms: E.g. taste sensations
Roles of memory
Social factors?
Emotional modulation of eating behaviour?
When Drives go Wrong
Two possible ways we might see a failure of set point.
Common means of failure of homeostatic regulation
Over-riding by other stronger psychological systems
Inappropriate homeostatic 'optimal' levels
Under-eating: Anorexia
Anorexia nervosa
Extreme reduction of food intake
Wasn't recognised until middle of 20th century.
Average death rate of 20% in long-term sufferers
Demographics
Female to male ratio of 10:1
Female prevalence of 0.4%
Typically begins in adolescence
Predominantly in Western nations but also increasing in Asian cultures
Upper-middle-class/upper-class socioeconomic backgrounds
Strongly implies a cultural/social component rather than genetic
Symptoms
DSM 5 Diagnostic Criteria
Restriction of energy intake relative to requirements, leading to a significantly low body
weight in the context of age, sex, developmental trajectory, and physical
health. Significantly low weight is defined as a weight that is less than minimally normal
or, for children and adolescents, less than that minimally expected.
Severity measured by Body Mass Index
Mild: BMI 17 kg/m2
Moderate: BMI 1616.99 kg/m2
Severe: BMI 1515.99 kg/m2
Extreme: BMI < 15 kg/m2
Intense fear of gaining weight or of becoming fat, or persistent behavior that interferes
with weight gain, even though at a significantly low weight.
Disturbance in the way in which ones body weight or shape is experienced, undue
influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation, or persistent lack of recognition of
the seriousness of the current low body weight.
Additional symptoms
Physical
Disruption to menstrual cycles
Other physiological/neurological effects (e.g. shrinking of brain)
Psychological: Attitudes
Distortions in attitudes towards food and eating
 50

Disturbances in body image

High dissatisfaction with appearance
Intense fear of obesity
Physiological: Behavioural
Extreme dieting
Excessive exercise
Purging behaviours (vomiting, laxatives)
Etiology: Physical causes
Original view
Hormonal/endocrine disorders caused by damage to the pituitary gland. Some
cases caused by brain tumors and high serotonin levels.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter whose levels are influenced by diet. Thus it is
believed that by eating less, they are trying to reduce levels of serotonin to reduce
symptoms of high serotonin such as anxiety etc.
Physical failure of homeostatic weight-control mechanisms
Largely discredited now, but
Some severe cases caused by brain tumours
Kaye and Weltzin (1991)
Self-medication to alleviate symptoms from naturally high serotonin levels?
Etiology: Psychological causes

Relationship between anorexia and appetite:

Anorexia derrived from Greek word a orexis meaning no appetite.
Dominant approach since mid 20th Century
Lack of eating not due to a reduction in appetite
Preoccupation with food
Sense of control thought to play important role
High knowledge of food
May cook for others
Hoard food and recipies
Occasional binge eating
If appetite ok, why restriction in food intake?
Ploog and Pirke (1987)
Ploog and pirke suggested that weight loss and maintenance and control may be
highly rewarding. Presence of hunger may be rewarding.
From a motivational perspective, other motivations overide and compete with the
normal homeostatic hunger motivation rather than a malfunction in the hunger
system.
29. Weight loss and maintenance of control over environment are rewarding
30. Hunger associated with weight reduction may be a reward!
Over-eating: Obesity
Obesity in Australia
Eating disorders driven by other motivational systems overriding normal hunger
motivations. In contrast, research exploring obesity have viewed the problem as
primarily a disorder of hunger motivation.
Obesity is a long term unbalance between energy intake and usage. That is, taking in
more calories than needed.
In many developed countries we consume around 30% more calories than we need.
BMI: measure of fat and muscle content
larger proportion of men overweight 62%/45%
 51

Calorie
energy required to raise a gram of water by one degree
University student requirements (calories per day)
Males: 2600-2800
Females: 2000-2200
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
Risk factor for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, some cancers, high
blood pressure, high cholesterol
Costs
2003: 7.5% of total burden of disease/injury
2005: ~$21 billion cost
Measured by Body Mass Index (BMI)
2004-2005: 54% Australian adults overweight
Causes of obesity - Etiology
Petri and Govern (2004)
4 possible causes in the literature
Famine preparation
Cyclic maintenance of obesity
Externality
Genetic predisposition
Famine preparation
Evolutionary theory of obesity
Margules (1979)
Ability to store excess fat is adaptive
Obesity just a consequence of this
An adaptation to store as much evergy as possible during times of high food
availability to protect against periods of famine.
In pre-history, weight-gain kept in check by low food availability
Evolution of food-intake systems more concerned with food under-availability (no
evolutionary pressure to develop protection against over-eating)
Limits:
Hard to find evidence
Fails to account for individual difference in societies with high food availability
Cyclic maintenance of obesity
Weight gain encourages further weight gain
Rodin (1981): Gained weight is harder to loose, because:
Increased insulin levels (hyperinsulinemia) increase in fat storage ability,
increase in appetite?
Decrease in exercise
Fat tissue less metabolically active than lean tissue thus you need less calories
to maintain high body weight.
Dieting lowers metabolic rate so attempts to lose weight may make losing
weight harder.
Obesity maintains itself cyclically through these mechanisms
Externality
Schachter (1971)
People susceptible to weight gain may be more strongly influenced by
environmental cues - Stronger influence from external environmental cues
triggering eating
Evidence: Overweight Ss
 52

eat more than normals when told current time is close to usual dinner time
(Schachter & Gross, 1968):
appear more strongly influenced by taste taste in selection of food and amount
eaten (Hashim & Van Itallie, 1965, Nisbett, 1968)
Less willing to expend energy to obtain food (Schachter, 1971)
Hedonic value may be greater. Get more pleasure.
Later evidence shows these effects may be modulated by internal changes (stress levels,
insulin levels, etc.)
Limit:
Evidence is not clear
Affects of external factors may be due to changes in internal systems
Difficult to identify causal directions between motivational symptoms and
characteristics of obesity
Genetic predisposition: Evidence
Evidence
we can breed obese animals -Obese mice strains have been bred
Higher number of fat cells in severely obese people (Hirsch & Knittle, 1970)
High heritability (Holland, 1998) - Genetic tendency to store excess fat in some
people.
Common symptom of some genetic disorders
Twin studies have found inheritance to be strong factor in determining obesity.
Because it's seen across many cultures it's seen to be likely genetic
Many of symptoms are thought to result from abnormalities in hypothalamus.
Prader-Willi syndrome
Complex genetic disorder affecting 1 in 10,000/15,000
Males and females, cross-cultural
Symptoms:
Motivational: Hyperphagia (excessive appetite) and subsequent extreme levels
of obesity.
Physical: Some physical alteration in facial features; shortness of stature
Cognitive: Some mental retardation
Hormonal: Low levels of sex hormones
Most symptoms thought to result from hypothalamic abnormalities (human
analogy of hyperphagic over-eating in rats with VMH damage?)
Genetic predisposition: Mechanism?
People prone to obesity have mutations in genes controlling leptin/leptin receptors hence
they don't feel satiety
Dont feel sated after eating (no decrease in appetite)
Instead, often stop eating because
Salt levels in bloodstream
Physical pain of full stomach
VIDEO: hunger hormones in obesity
Is it all about the genes?
Genetics (species-common)
Species wide taste preferences for foods high in caloric value (was adaptive when
such foods were scarce, but not adaptive now)
Genetics (individual differences)
Genetic differences underlying individual differences in motivational response to
high caloric foods
Plus
 53

Physiological factors underlying cyclic maintenance of obesity

Is it all nature? Does nurture play a role?
VIDEO: Epigenetics in obesity
People who are overweight have weaker hunger hormones.
Fullness hormones only rises a little bit. Thus they never feel full.
Thus they consume more food and the wrong food.
Gastric bypass can change this.
Fatty and sweet tastes drive them.
Bypass surgery changes their reactions and choices of foods.
Concordant twins have a certain gene but one has it turn on and the other doesn't. Ie fat
gene.
Epigenetics: science that looks at how environment can turn Genes on. Stress can create
different destinies.
 54

Week 6 Lecture: Arousal

Arousal and Motivation
Concept of Arousal
Core concept: Responsivity to environment
The concept of arousal is more about general level of responsiveness. How
attentive we are it stimuli in the environment and how vigorously we are producing
a behavioural sponge of such stimuli.
Deckers (2010): arousal = mobilization of energy that occurs in preparation or during
behaviour.
Two historical questions regarding arousal:
1. How many forms are there
2. What is the relationship between arousal and motivation
Forms of arousal
Arousal continuum

Arousal is a unified concept enabling us to position someone on an arousal continuum

ranging from coma to sleep, waking, alert and stress. However, it is more complex than
this because there is little correlation between different ways of talking about arousal. Ie
level of arousal in neural circuits (EEG) compared to the physiological activation of the
body and the behaviour itself.
Lacey (1967)
Atropine > sleep-like EEG activity in animals but normal behavioural
responding
Physostigmine > alert EEG patterns but animal behaves as if drowsy
Comatose patients sometimes show normal EEGs
Awake normals sometimes display sleep-like EEGs
Little relationship between level of brain activity and autonomic nervous
system activity
This independence of different ways in talking about arousal led Lacey to
consider that arousal is a multidimensional concept. He believed there were
three forms of arousal which are independent although their activity does often
occur together.
Multidimensionality of arousal
Behavioural arousal: (seen in organism behaviour)
Autonomic arousal: level of body physiological activity (seen in ANS
changes)
Cortical arousal: brain arousal(measured by EEGs and other brain
imaging techniques)
Neurophysiology of arousal: EEG
EEG: different levels of activity that correspond to different states of cortical arousal as
index of arousal
Beta waves: 14-26 Hz (cycles per second)
seen in the cortex during waking activity - during alert and attentive periods.
Characterised by asynchronous (desynchronized) firing in neurons (neurons acting
independently - not firing in time) - Think of cocktail party
 55

Alpha waves: 8-13 Hz

Alpha waves are seen during resting states. Non-active alertness. Still awake but
not highly alert or reactive. Usually measured when the eyes are closed.
Neural activity starts to become a bit more synchronous - Think of people
meditating together
Theta: 4-7 Hz
Drowsiness
Delta: 0.5-4 Hz
Deep sleep

Relation of arousal to motivation

Do the different types of arousal have quantitative effects on motivation (modulating
amount of activity) or are they part of the relevance judgement of motivational systems.
That is, do they have a qualitative effect in determining the direction of motivation.
Quantitative view point:
Arousal: Views arousal as functioning essentially to modulate the level of activity
of our motivational systems.
Stimuli: With respect to stimuli, it may determine your level of attention to stimuli.
Ie low arousal = low attention to stimuli.
Response: This may therefore be reflected in our levels of behavioural arousal in
judging the environment and making a response.
Smith et al gave subjects coffee and asked them to press a key as soon as they saw
a square appear. Subjects with caffeine had faster reaction times suggesting that a
higher state of arousal increases performance. However sometimes high states of
arousal lead to poorer performance ie stress or anxiety. Wang et al demonstrated
this by getting subjects to shoot baskets in the presence of a single person or being
viewed by many people. Those viewed by many people scored fewer baskets.
Yerkes-Dodson law
Two possibilities:
Possibility one: Ideal arousal level for optimal performance
optimum performance curve. Inverted u function.
There is a middle ground level of arousal that allows for optimal performance. Too
little or too much arousal and performance drops.
Possibility 2: task dependant?
optimal level of arousal for performance differs across tasks.
Yerkes and Dodson looked at these possibilities in 1908. They trained mice to
learn it discriminate between a white and black box under three difficulty
conditions and stress conditions (When the mice made the wrong choice they
received either a weak, moderate or intense electric shock). They found that
performance depended on both of these factors. When the task was easy, an
increase in shock resulted in improved performance. When the task was hard,
increasing shock improved performance initially but then it started to drop rapidly
as intensity was increased. At the medium level of task difficulty they got the
 56

inverted u function with medium intensity shock providing best performance.

Performance as a function of task difficulty and shock level:

Yerkes Dodson law: states that the relationship between performance and arousal
works through an inverted u function but also depends on task difficulty. For
harder tasks, the optimal level of arousal for performance is lower than for easy
tasks.
Yerkes Dodson law suggests that depending on task difficulty, we can often
identify optimal levels of arousal and therefor suggests that the role arousal plays
in motivational behaviour is just to modulate the performance of motivational
systems (quantitative).
Arousal as Motivation
Arousal as a motivational system
Arousal may have a qualitative function determining the intensity relevance of a
stimulus in the environment and triggering a motivation to act in a certain way
towards that stimulus.
And level of arousal may determine the direction of behaviour - Level of arousal =
relevance judgement
Variation in affective valence
Evidence for this depends on whether arousal is associated with affective valence
which we know plays an essential role in motivating behaviour. Thus the question
is, is arousal always positive or negative or is it neutral.
Different arousal levels associated with different hedonic valence - Physiological
arousal tends to be associated with a position on the hedonic continuum.
Optimal level of stimulation theory
Zuckermann suggested that the relationship between arousal and affective valence
may be an inverted u function.
For each of us, we may have our own optimal level of arousal which may alter
across the day and time.
Thus, when we are in the middle, we are experiencing our optimal arousal levels
and deviations from this are either negative or positive.
Therefore, we are likely to do things that give us optimal levels of arousal and visa
versa. Ie if you're feeling under aroused (board) you do something to change that.
If you're feeling over aroused (stressed) you change it.
Believed that individual differences in arousal may account for differences in
extroversion and introversion.
Conclusions
Evidence suggests
Quantitative role: Arousal modulate activity of other motivational systems
Qualitative role: Arousal is also motivationally relevant itself level can
determine/alter hedonic valence
Arousal is not a unified concept - different types
Arousal systems
Cortical arousal: Sleep/wake
Physiological arousal: Stress
Sleep: Anatomy and physiology
Introduction to sleep
Early research by Kleitman in 1920's
Sleep process is fairly well understood, but function uncertain.
Question of whether sleep is qualitative (motivational mechanism in itself acting as
 57

a drive) of quantitative (modulate activity of body and brain).

Displays properties of both.
Sleep
Approx. 1/3rd of our lives spent asleep
Large individual differences in amount required. Average 7-8 hours.
Sleep process well understood - function of sleep still uncertain
Arousal or drive?
Sleep as arousal
Modulates activity of other motivational systems
Sleep as low-arousal? Too simplistic. Brains highly active during (REM) sleep
when we are dreaming.
Sleep as drive
Lack of sleep is motivating - 'drive-like' and is associated with psychological
drive of tiredness.
Sleep stages
Stages 1-2
(Alert/active wakefulness: beta waves)
a. Relaxed wakefulness (alpha waves)
b. Stage 1 (theta waves): lasts 10-15 mins
Fast, irregular waves; low amplitude; desynchronised neural activity
Sleep kicks in
c. Stage 2
Presence of sleep spindles (14 Hz wave bursts lasting at least 0.5 sec)
Presence of K-complexes (sharp high amplitude wave spikes)

Stages 3-4
Slow-wave sleep
Synchronised neural activity - Firing in time with each other.
d. Stage 3: 20-50% delta waves
e. Stage 4: More than 50% delta waves (approx. 30-45 mins after falling asleep)
Stage 5
f. Stage 5: REM (theta, beta and alpha waves)
Odd one out as it moves away from slow regular delta waves seen in deep sleep
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep: active cortical state where most dreaming
occurs
Brain activity quite similar to awake/alert and thus is often described as
paradoxical sleep.
Progress through stages
 58

Throughout the night we progress down and up through these stages. We move from
shallow to deep sleep then back to shallow, followed by a period of rem and then back
through the cycle again. The entire cycle takes around 90mins, but varies amongst
people. We see more deep sleep earlier on in the night and more rem sleep later on as we
approach the morning.
Progress
Cycle through 2 > 3 > 4 > 3 > 2 > REM
Approx. 90 minute, but highly variable
More deep sleep early in night; more REM later
NREM vs REM Stages
NREM sleep (stages 1-4)
Autonomic nervous changes in NREM sleep
Dilation of blood vessels
Decrease in blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate.
Bodily activity slows down as you progress from stage one (shallow sleep) to
stage 4 (deep sleep).
No eye movements during non-rem.
Dreams
Dreams still reported 7% of the time when woken up from stage four sleep.
However these dreams seem to be a series of non emotional random thoughts
compared to the more life like, emotionally loaded dreams described during
rem sleep.
REM (stage 5)
ANS changes
Increase (and greater variability) in blood pressure, heart rate, respiration
Increased blood flow to brain
Loss of skeletal muscle tone (inhibition of motor neurons; 'temporary
paralysis') - The brain shuts of motor activity so we don't live out our dreams
body looks more active.
Eye movements
characterised by rapid movement of our eyes.
Dreams
Reported 80% of time when woken from REM
More bizarre/lifelike/emotionally-loaded
Neuroanatomy of sleep: Early investigations
31. Bremer (1937)
Early investigations into the anatomy of sleep discovered that the brain stem plays
an important role in controling the sleep wake cycle.
If you cut the brain stem between the medulla and the spinal cord, towards the
base, you still get normal sleep wake cycles.
if you cut the brain stem higher up, at the level of the coleculi, just above the pons
and the medulla, you lock the animal into a state of constant sleep; no spontaneous
waking
 59

Reticular Activating System (RAS)

Later research identified the reticular formation which passes through the medulla, pons
and up to the thalamus, forming a Reticular Activating System (RAS) as the key organ in
the brain involved in controlling the sleep wake cycle.

Role of RAS in Arousal

What are the inputs and outputs of the RAS.
Sends outputs to
Sends fibres diffusely throughout cortex and thus is in an ideal position to
modulate the overall level of arousal throughout the cortex
Evidence for this comes from the fact that if you stimulate the RAS, the cortex
lights up with beta waves similar to when an organism is exposed to an intense
exogenous stimulus like a loud noise. (Moruzzi & Magoun, 1949)
There are two pathways leading out of the RAS
The first is the reticular formation sending information to the thalamus, which
then sends to the cortex - Reticular formation > thalamus > cortex
Reticular formation sending information to a variety of sub cortical brain
structures including the lateral hypothalamus, the basal ganglia, the basal
forebrain, the cortex and hippocampus - Reticular formation > lateral
hypothalamus, basal ganglia, basal forebrain, cortex, hippocampus
So the RAS can dictate overall levels of arousal between the cortex and other
motivational systems, the hypothalamus and learning through the hippocampus and
basal ganglia.
Receives inputs from
The RAS receives inputs from a wide range of external sensory systems such as
muscles and internal organs. Information from these sources can activate the RAS,
increasing level of arousal in the cortex essentially waking us up.
External sensory systems, muscles, internal organs (Hokanson, 1969)
Cortex - We also see inputs to the RAS coming from the cortex itself suggesting
that the cortex can activate the RAS so as to keep levels of arousal high and keep
itself activated, even without the presence of external stimuli. This makes sense as
to why our mind is sometimes active when we don't want it to be ie before an
 60

exam. The mental activity sends information to the RAS saying don't go to sleep.
Thus Level of cortical activity is controlled by RAS, but the cortex is also able to
influence the RAS to maintain wakefulness.
Summary
Reticular formation in brainstem (pons and medulla) activated by sensory
information/cortex > activates cortex to arouse from sleep; modulate
sleeping/waking
NREM vs REM brain structures
There are different brain structures involved in controlling nrem vs rem sleep.
NREM brain structures
Ventrolaterial preoptic area (VLPA) of hypothalamus (uses GABA)
Main structure includes the ventrolateral preoptic area of the hypothalamus
(vlpa).
Evidence for this is that distraction in this area for rates leads to an absence of
sleep. Stimulation in cats causes drowsiness and animals deprived of sleep
then allowed to sleep freely, show increased neural activity in this area.
The main neurotransmitter that neurons in the vlpa use is GABA (gamma
amino beautric acid).
Thought to inhibit major ascending arousal systems - GABA is one of the
main inhibitory neurotransmitters in the brain. Thus, the vlpa is thought to act
as a gate controlling whether spousal signals get through to the cortex or not.
Required for deep, delta-wave sleep
Thought to inhibit major ascending arousal systems
Locus coeruleus; raphe nuclei; tuberomammillary nucleus
Activity in these regions inhibit rem sleep allowing nrem sleep stages to
continue where as deceased activity in these areas during non rem sleep makes
rem sleep possible. Thus, these areas play a role in mediating the transition
between nrem and rem stages of sleep
REM
Peribrachial area of pons (brainstem) - Acetylcholine is its neurotramistter.
Area is highly activated during rem sleep and If area is destroyed, rem sleep is
significantly reduced.
Also plays an important role in initiating the desynchrony of cortical activity
that we see during rem sleep - Cortical arousal and desynchrony seen in REM:
Peribrachial area > reticular formation > basal forebrain > cortex
As well as triggering rapid eye movement and inhibition of motor neurons
(temporary paralysis) - Rapid eye movement: Peribrachial area > tectum
Inhibition of motor neurons: Peribrachial area > subcoerulear nucleus and nucleus
magnocellularis in medulla
Neurotransmitters involved (not assessable)
Acetylcholine
Ach-producing cells in basal forebrain and pons > cortex > desynchronised EEG
Increasing/decreasing Ach levels increases/decreases arousal level
Norepinephrine
Norepinephrine-producing cells in pons activate cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum,
pons, medulla
Levels are high during waking, lower during sleep, very low during REM sleep
Involved in 'vigilance' (see discussion on stress)
Serotonin
Serotonin-producing cells in pons and medulla activate cortex, hippocampus,
 61

thalamus, hypothalamus, basal ganglia

These cells most active during waking, less during sleep
Possibly involved in maintaining current activities; suppressing sensory
information interrupting current activities
Histamine
Histamine-producing cells in hypothalamus activate cortex, thalamus, other
hypothalamus areas, basal ganglia, basal forebrain
These cells active during waking, less during sleep
Other neurotransmitters implicated in the workings of the RAS.
Don't need to remember the details of these!!!!
Control of sleep process
Two separate processes involved in falling asleep and waking up:
Falling asleep
Sleep chemical promoting sleep
Pieron (early 1900's)
Injected normal dogs with cerebrospinal fluid from sleep-deprived dogs
Slept for several hours
Pappenheimer (1976)
Pappenhemier showed the same effect across species by injecting fluid
from goats into rates.
Cerebrospinal fluid from sleep-deprived goats creates drowsiness in cats
and rats
Most likely neurotransmitter adenosine
Further research identified adenosine as the chemical most likely involved
in this process.
1. It is produced by brain metabolism during waking. Levels build up the
longer we are awake.
2. Inhibits pons neurons responsible for cerebral arousal - It affects the
RAS by inhibiting neurons in the pons which are responsible for
cerebral arousal. So essentially, as levels of adenosine build up, the
RAS is being more and more inhibited, corresponding to an
increased sense of being drowsy. This process appears to be
homeostatic. So high levels of brain metabolism cause a build up
of adenosine which increases the inhibition of the pons causing us
to sleep. Once we sleep, brain metabolism decreases, leading to
decrease in adenosine levels resetting the homeostatic state.
3. Caffeine blocks adenosine receptor sites making us to believe that
energy is a result of caffeine preventing adenosine levels from
inhibiting the RAS as it normally would
Homeostatic-like process: Increased likelihood of sleep with increase in time
awake
Waking up
Circadian process determining waking time

Sleep Research: The Function of Sleep

Sleep research
Sleep depravation studies: deprive subjects of sleep and get them to perform a task and
see what affect the task has.
Sleep deprivation
Depriving people of sleep affects their cognitive performance but the degree
 62

depends on the type of task

Webb (1986): Effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance
Short tasks + adequate motivation = little effect
Longer, more cognitively-demanding tasks influenced
Blagrove (1996)
Deprivation increases suggestibility.
Rechtschaffen and Bergmann (1995) and others
Extreme sleep deprivation = death in rats

VIDEO: Sleep Research

Repairs nerve cells and body, encodes memories and improved learning.
Sleep debt: chronically deprived of sleep, working memory slows down, erros, someone
who only sleeps 4 hours a night is as impaired as someone who is kept awake for 48
hours.
Lack of sleep as dangerous as alcohol
Type 1: immune to sleep depravation (15-20%). Brain shows more activation during
sleep depravation. They recruit more brain to compensate for sleep debt.
Dolphins and whales hardly sleep. Rats however need a lot of sleep.
Evolution has moved sleep functions to waking.
One night of ten hours sleep after a busy week is not enough to bring a person back to
normal functioning.
Function of sleep
Why do we sleep? - On the surface, sleep appears to be unproductive.
Rechtschaffen (1971):
If sleep does not serve an absolute vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the
evolutionary process ever made
Theories of Sleep
Sleep as rest
Sleep as a drive: We sleep because we are tired?
BUT: Inactive people require same amount of sleep as active people
Rial, Akaarir and Roca (2007): Trivial function of forced rest - sleep does serve
drive function and sleep is just an evolved mechanism forcing a daily rest period
irrespective of activity levels.
BUT: Sleep systems highly complex
A result of inefficient or left-over evolutionary processes?
Restorative hypotheses (e.g. Hartmann, 1973)
Sleep = bodily restoration
E.g. Cell division and protein synthesis rates increase during sleep - Give body
chance to rebuild itself.
Theories of Sleep
Efficiency hypotheses
Behaviour is inefficient at different times of day. Sleep prevents activity during
these times when our behavioural efforts would be wasted
Dement (1972)
Circadian rhythms at lowest level of efficiency during sleep
Sleep evolved to shut off behaviour during periods of low bodily efficiency -
An adaptive mechanism allowing resources to be conserved during inactivity.
Limit: Causal direction?
Is lowering of bodily efficiency a consequence or cause of sleep?
Do our bodies shut off because we sleep or do we sleep because our bodies are
 63

working less efficiently

Between-species variation in required sleep
Position in food-chain - danger
Animals lower in the food chain (e.g. large herbivores) sleep less than those higher
up (e.g. carnivores)
Sleep increases vulnerability to attack
Food nutritional value
Position in food chain also correlates with nutritional intake.
Carnivores sleep more than omnivores who sleep more than herbivores.
Carnivores need to eat less often than herbivores due to higher calories of meat.
Thus another theory is that animals with nutritionally poor food source don't have
time to sleep as much as they need to eat more constantly - Higher caloric value in
meat than in vegetation
Between-species variations exceptions?
However there are exceptions to these rules.
Koalas
Very poor diet nutritionally
Sleep for up to 22 hours a day!
Still interpretable through the 'danger' and 'nutritional' hypotheses
Habitat (treetops) = little to fear from predators
Energy conservation from sleep = decrease in amount of food required
Sleep Research
The Function of Dreams
Dream deprivation
32. Subset of sleep deprivation research
Championed by William Dement
Observe eye movements during sleep
Wake Ss' at commencement of REM sleep
Allow to return to sleep
Dreams are important: Brain needs to 'catch up' on lost REM:
Findings show that brain needs to catch up on lost rem sleep
'REM pressure': The longer a subject is deprived of REM during the night, the
more often they must be woken up.
'REM rebound': Dream deprived subjects allowed to sleep normally dream much
more than non-dream deprived subjects for a number of days after the deprivation
period.
Dream deprivation findings
In animals
Shift in eating patterns, increased aggressive and sexual behaviour suggesting that
there may be a link between dreams and other motivational mechanisms.
In humans
Dement: Increase in irritability and anxiety, difficulty concentrating
Greenberg and colleagues (1983)
Decreased Ss' access to emotionally important memories - . Thus they
suggested rem sleep may play a role in connecting emotionally important
events in the present with memories of such events from the past.
Rem sleep considered important in brain and memory organisation.
Organisational hypothesis
Amount of REM higher in young mammals than adult
Organisational hypothesis supported by the fact that the amount of rem sleep one
 64

engages in is higher during childhood than adulthood

Lewin & Singer (1991): Newborns spend 50-70% of sleep in REM, dropping to
30% by 3 months.
Dement (1972): Role of REM in development of early brain structure/organisation
In adulthood?
Greenberg (1970): REM functions to transfer daily information from short-term to
long-term memory - important role in organisation and consolidation of memory.
Bertini (1973) and Dewan (1970): Dreams act as a 'programming device',
integrating new information with existing memory structures
Scrima (1982): Recall of complex associative information higher in narcoleptic
patients (patients who fall asleep uncontrollably) after isolated periods of REM
sleep than after periods of NREM or wakefulness.
Emotional content important for memory storage
Pearlman (1970)
Ss watched anxiety-producing film before normal or REM-deprived sleep,
then again on next day
Normal Ss > less anxiety in response to second viewing than first
REM-deprived Ss > same anxiety to both
Emotional content of new information has a key factor determining how that
information is sorted and stored during the dreaming process.
Emotional content acts as a tag determining the appropriate location in
memory for storage.
These findings suggest that dreams function to integrate new experiences into
our existing memory structures allowing us to adapt to and deal with
emotionally arousing events.
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Week 7: Basic emotions: natural kinds

What are emotions?

First definition by william James.
Yet to be adequately defined - No concrete definition.
Ledoux said that we all know what it is until we are asked to define it.
Most definitions define it in terms of its different parts involved.
Definitions of emotion
Feelings
Emotion as a conscious 'feeling-state the what it is like to experience an
emotion
Thus emotions have a conscious state associated with them - Different emotions
feel different
Folk psychological definition
Feeling + Emotion
Believes in experience but also response.
Emotion is defined in terms of subjective experiences or feelings, goal-directed
behaviour (attack, flight), expressive behaviour (smiling, snarling), and
physiological arousal (heart rate increases, sweating, defecation
Hothersall, 1985 - highlights that there are three common emotional responses.
Endogenous - physiological arousal: activation of autonomic nervous system
involved in fear
Exogenous - Expressive bahaviours: communication and display of emotional
states ie facial expressions and body language + Goal directed: overt behaviour
such as running away
Entire Process
Emotion as an inferred complex sequence of reactions to a stimulus
Includes cognitive evaluations, subjective changes, automatic and neural arousal,
impulses to action and behaviour desired to have an affect upon the stimulus that
initiated the complex sequence
suggesting emotions need cognitive appraisal/judgement)
Relevance judgement: represented in connection between sensory information and
motivational system. The way we associate a stimulus with an emotion.
Appraisal element asks how a stimulus becomes associated with an emotion
The connection could be innate (hard wired) learned (classical conditioning) or
constructed cognitively.
Plutchik, 1982, cited in Shiota and Kalat, 2012
Working definition of emotion
Emotion = systems providing generalised functional responses, trigger-able by a wide
range of stimuli
Tooby and Cosmides (2008)
Emotions = superordinate neural programs which:
Activate sub-processes helping to resolve a situation
Inhibit sub-processes interfering with resolution of the situation
Emotions provide an overarching control mechanisms that trigger and mediate
other lower level functional processes such as directional mechanisms,
prioritising self-protection goals.
E.g.: Footsteps behind you = Fear
Activates
animal detection = yes
 66

distance judgement = close

kin-detection = no
self-protection behaviours
Inhibits
E.g. mating systems

The Nature of Emotion

Natural kinds or human constructs?
Natural kinds vs human constructs
Easy to ask for others
Instincts question of how many is an issue. Everything was labeled as an
instinct
Sensations can group different sensations in terms of sensory modality
Drives set range of stimuli and responses associated with them, ie hunger,
thirst and sexual motivation
Emotions - it's complex because there are many responses and many stimuli
that can trigger an emotion. Furthermore, there are different words we use to
describe emotional states.
How many emotions are there?
Large vocabulary of emotion-related words
Some similar, some different across cultures
Common problem for theories of emotion, instincts and trait approaches to
personality
Two possibilities
Emotion words refer to natural kinds
Emotion words refer to human constructs
Emotion words referring to natural kinds
Natural kind (or 'natural type')
Something that actually exists in the world, rather than depending on human
construction.
Philosophical concept
Distinct naturally-occurring types of entity; not dependant upon human
language/construction
To say an emotion word refers to a natural kind, is saying that the emotion maps
with parts of the brain that create that emotion. That is, there is a system for
happiness.
In this case, we can ask how many are there?
Emotions as discrete entities
Watson (1924): 3 (fear, rage, love)
Ekman (1980): 6 (happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, anger, fear)
Fischer, Shaver & Carochan (1990): 5 (love, joy, anger, sadness, fear)
 67

Cattell (1957): 10 emotional factors (sex-lust, fear, loneliness, pity, curiosity,

pride, sensuous comfort, despair, sleepiness, anger)
Emotion words referring to human constructs
Emotion words describe interactions between underlying states
Considering emotional words as human constructs is saying that emotional
words refer to the interaction between the various true natural kind systems.
Best way to describe this is to look at the dimensional approach to emotions:
Dimensional approach
Emotion words as labels for positions on multiple dimensions of underlying
systems.
Wundt (1897): thought the natural kind of emotional systems that exist in the brain
are:
Pleasantness-Unpleasantness; Calm-Excitement; Relaxation-Tension
He thought the systems were dimensional so we could talk about a position we
were at during a point of time, between the systems. That is, emotion words
are human constructs we use to describe different combinations of activation
of these three dimensional systems
E.g. On Wundts approach, anger = unpleasant, excited, tense - These three
dimensions are the natural kinds and the emotional words are labels used to
describe the combinations of activation
Schlosbergs Dimensional Theory
Schlosberg (1941, 1954)
Though there were three dimensions:
Pleasantness-unpleasantness
Attention-rejection
Sleep-tension (level of arousal) determined level of intensity
Natural kinds are the three dimensions, and the various words we use to
describe emotion are labels we use to define different relationships between
different levels of activation

Plutchiks (1980) psychoevolutionary synthesis

Incorporates both the discrete entity and dimensional approaches - which he refered to as
Psychoevolutionary synthesis
Primary (discrete entity) emotions
8 basic (prototypical emotions) - He believe there were 8 basic natural kind
emotions and that all other labels we used are formed from combinations of these
natural kind emotions
All other emotion words refer to combinations of these prototypes
Structural (dimensional) aspects
He also thought there was a structural dimension to the relationships between these
basic emotions.
 68

The 8 primary emotions = 4 pairs of polar opposites

All emotions vary in similarity to each other
Each emotion can exist in varying degrees of intensity or levels of arousal
The emotion wheel

Inside are discrete emotion systems.

Polar opposites on opposite side of each - Anger opposite of fear
Emotions blend together in a similar way that coloured pigments blend.
When someone experiences two adjacent primary emotions at the same time, they
experience an intermediate feeling in between - If surprise and sadness =
disappointment, Joy and anticipation= optimism
Showing the 8 primary emotions, polar opposites, and the dyads that result when
adjacent primary emotions are mixed.
Thus, even though there are only 8 discreet emotions, the combination of
activations of those emotions produces the emotional experiences that we use
emotion words (the outside words) to describe.
So it shows how interactions between the primary emotions create a combined
feeling to which our society has assigned a particular emotion label - But what
happens if you experience two opposite emotions at the same time, ie fear and
anger.
Plutchik thought there are two options:
Conflict: feeling of confusion ie do I laugh or cry
Behaviourally immobilised: ie do I run away because I'm scared or run
towards because I'm angry.
The emotion solid
 69

The emotion wheel therefore has another dimension of arousal to turn the emotion wheel
into the emotion solid.
The idea being that we can not only talk about the 8 primary emotions, but we can also
talk about the different levels of activational arousal or of those primary emotions. Ie low
arousal fear is what we call apprehension. Highly activated fear is terror, Low activation
sadness is pensiveness and highly activated is grief.
Thus even though we only have 8 basic emotions, by talking about the different
activations and arousals (discrete emotional approach and the dimensional aspects), you
can create a system that enables you to label a wide range of emotional experiences.
33. Emotion Wheel + vertical arousal/intensity dimension
A taxonomy for classifying emotions
Emotions with similar feel next to each other
Emotions with opposite feel opposite one-another
Points to note
Similar to trait approaches in personality.
Functioning to try to categorise our language and is useful that it shows us how
emotions can be represented as positions on various dimensions.
A classification system, rather than a model of emotional functioning/process (akin
to trait approaches to personality)
Based upon folk-psychological language of emotions (i.e. words we use to
describe feeling states).
Yet represents emotions (other than the 8 primaries) as continuums, so allows for
emotional experiences we dont have words for.
Universality debate
If the 'basic emotions' are natural kinds they are innate, genetically determined and
should be seen universally across all human cultures
The Universality Debate

Cultural relativists:
No such thing as human nature, no common emotions between cultures. It all depends
on learning and cultural contents.

Nature nurture: cultural similarities and differences.

 70

Universalists
Universalists believe emotions are universal and each one has their own unique
hard wired expression
All genes, no culture - environment is irrelevant
Common (universal) expressions of emotion seen across all cultures
Cultural Relativism
No such thing as human nature - no common emotions between cultures
La Barre (1947): There is no natural language of the emotional gesture
Birdwhistell (1963): What shows on the face is written there by culture
Nature-nurture interaction
Innate determinants of Emotional Expression
Sources of evidence for universality
Darwin (1872)
The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals
initiated study of emotion
Darwin; Eibl-Eibesfeldt: Arguments for innateness
He believed there were innate emotions and hard-wired expressions attached to
emotions
Ie there is continuity between animal and human expressions of emotion.
Babies also display similar emotional expressions.
Similar emotional expressions to adults
However, new borns don't display some emotions such as happiness
straight away. They do open their eyes wider in response to happy tones
though.
Newborns do not laugh/smile (Mastropieri & Turkewitz, 1999)
Smiling/Frowning emerge at 2-3 months (Izard, 1994)
Fear at 6 months
Anger expressions emerge more gradually
Average timing of these developments however is equal across all
cultures supporting that its genetic.
Furthermore, blind babies still display those expressions
People of different races and cultures display similar emotions.
Cross-cultural facial expression research
Paul Ekman (& Friesen)
Developed Facial Action Coding System (1978): comprehensive descriptions of
how muscles construct those expressions.
Facial Expressions of Emotion Stimuli & Tests (1976): Feest: main tool used to
test whether people can identify and differentiate between emotions
Ekman thought there were 6 universal basic emotions. He also added interest as a
7th.

Standard method
 71

Subjects shown pre-selected photos of posed facial expressions and asked to match
the label with the expression.
Literate culture results
Ekman, Sorenson & Friesen (1969)
Results from literate cultures using standard measure
They used translated labels for non English speaking labels.
Happiness identified best
Some consistent tendencies to misinterpret particular emotions
Results showed they were very good at labeling and distinguishing
Limit
However, not extremely valid because they used only literate people - Scared that
they were influenced by western culture. Possible that general exposure taught them
the expressions.
Non-literate culture results
Ekman, Sorenson & Friesen (1969)
Thus, they found groups who had little exposure - Fore group of the SE Highlands of
New Guinea
Translated their standard method
This was problematic because it assumes direct cross over. That is, they
assume the language will have an exact equivalent.
They therefore created the dashiell method
Ekman & Friesen (1969)
Dashiell method
Emotion story given to the subject; subject asked to pick the person in the
story from 3 photos
Three emotion expression photographs are shown to them, and then an
emotion story is played out to them.
They are then asked to identify which of the three people is the person being
refered to in the story.
The stories used the closest words to the meaning, and by putting them in a
picture it made it less unambiguous. Ie her friends have come and she is
happy. His child has died and he feels sad. He is sitting in his house alone and
there is a wild pig.
Non-literate culture results
Accuracy for standard method happiness - very high but accuracy drops
significantly for fear, disgust surprise etc.
Accuracy was much higher for the dashiell method amongst all categories
Take home message is that while the labels may differ, the emotion categories
appear to be the same and elicited by the same kind of things. Antecedents the
same ie death of loved one.
Criticisms
Russell (1994)
Subjects were given a limited set of options to choose from which may have cued
responses. That is, positive vs negative emotion thus happiness may be picked out
easier because it's the only positive emotion.
Ecological validity of photos used as they are posed lifeless displayed.
Possible priming of answers through prior subject training
Results of some studies not reported
Why did Ekman change methods half way through?
 72

Ekmans response
Addressed Russells concerns
Suggested he may have been biased in the evidence he provided
Ekman explains that he had to train them to help them understand that they could
not ask other people for help, they wanted to know their individual knowledge.
Conclusions
Conclusion is that there is evidence for small number of discrete, natural kind, universal
emotions and each of these has its own unique facial expressions.
Matsumoto (2001)
Did review of literature and concluded finding was supported by 27 studies
Additional set of observations which further supported this idea and found that
there is:
Cross-cultural similarity in physiological responses to these 'universal'
emotions - Autonomic nervous system is similar across cultures.
Universality in the antecedents of emotion
Universality in self-reported emotional experience way we describe
emotional experiences
Universal facial expressions correspond to emotion taxonomies in different
languages most languages do have equivalent words to English words
How many are there?
Debate over :
disgust? (Royzman & Sabini, 2001) is it an independent emotion
Confusion, surprise, interest (Rozin & Cohen, 2003) are they different from each
other?
Not necessarily single emotion > single facial expression
There is nothing that says all natural kind emotions much have an expressive
pathway. Just because there is no expression for an emotion, doesn't mean it
doesn't exist
Some expressions draw on similar components if emotional expression ie surprise
and fear have wide eyes etc.
Component Process Theory (Ortony & Turner, 1990; Scherer, 1992)
Component process theory suggests that facial expressions may be combinations of
more elementary approvals ie anger a combination of:
novel stimulus (wide eyes)
displeasure (turned down mouth corners)
desire for change (furrowed brows)
high power (tense lips)
Therefore
Thus there is evidence of universality but number of emotions their relation is still
debated
Cultural (learnt) determinants of Emotional Expression
Emotion labels
Different cultures have different labels for emotion
We see some emotion labels in some cultures that don't exist in other cultures ie:
Schadenfreude (German): schaden (damage) + freude (joy)
Happiness at the misfortune of others
Combination of guilt/shame + happiness?
Similar labels in other languages
Dutch: leedvermaak (leed, suffering or sorrow, and vermaak, entertainment)
Hungarian: krrm (kr, loss or suffering, rm, joy)
 73

Swedish: skadegldje (skade, pain or suffering, gldje, joy or happiness)

Norwegian: skadefryd (skade, pain or suffering, fryd, glee).
Even the concept of emotion is not universal ie some cultures don't even have a word for
emotion
Amae (Japanese)
To depend and presume upon another's love or bask in another's indulgence"
A sweet feeling of dependency
Feeling rules
Feeling rules are self-directed rules based on what's considered acceptable to feel within
a culture
They are about the internal manipulation of emotion ie what is and isn't appropriate
These influence our descriptions of experiences
Hypercognized (emphasised) vs hypocognized (de-emphasised) emotions
Levy: Tahitian culture
Hypercognize anger
Hypocognize sadness
Shaver, Wu & Schwartz (1992)
Sad aspects of love hypercognized by Chinese, hypocognized by Americans
Shame & guilt hypocognized in USA, hypercognized in China
Collectivist vs individualistic Societies
Individualistic = individuality praised, so hypercognize pride, anger, etc
Focus on expression of emotions
Individualistic emphasis the emotions which define independence ie pride and
anger
Collectivist = interdependancy praised, so hypercognize shame, guilt, etc
Self interest put aside
Collectivist emphasise emotions related to social cohesion ie shame and guilt.
Ie Japanese people emphasise Omay, which is a feeling of being in debt to
others.
Thought that there are common feeling rules amongst individualistic and
collectivist cultures
Display rules
Display rules are about the external presentation of emotions. Ie in most western cultures
men should not cry.
Social scripts ie in beauty pageants know they should act happy for the person who won
Cultural rules for appropriate expressions of emotion (Ekman & Friesen, 1969) - cultural
rules for how we are expected to mask our true emotions.
Ekman, Friesen & Ellsworth (1972
Development of display rules
Disappointing Gift paradigm
Display rules seen by age 3; not verbally understood/ expressed until age 6
Japanese Display Rules
Ekman proposed in private, Japanese people and American people have same
underlying emotions but in public they should be shaped by display rules.
Thus, they had Japanese people and American people watch an emotional
neutral film compared to an emotionally stimulating film unpleasant and
stressful film.
No difference in expression for neutral film in public and private. There was a
difference in stressful film. Private condition they showed the same facial
expressions. In public condition, Japanese subjects presented a more neutral
 74

facial expression. This provides evidence that Japanese subjects obey by

display rules
Ekman's integration
Ekmans neurocultural model of emotions he tried to combine all findings
Belives that each of the 7 basic emotions are linked neurally to a specific set of
facial muscles (interest added as number 7) and that stimuli for emotion differ, and
whether the expression is displayed is mediated by cultural display models which
may enhance or dim emotions.
Emotion elicitors may be different culturally
Cultural display rules govern what is expressed
Mixing of emotions leads to a complex mixture of facial expressions
Introduction to Studying Emotion
Emotion can understood through the role it plays in mediating the relationship between
sense and response.
Studying emotion requires.
Manipulating emotionally-inducing stimuli
Measuring responses
Iv = stimulus
DV = response
Independent Variables in emotion studies
Introduction
Emotion as an independent variable
Establish groups differing in current emotion (IV)
Compare groups on performance on some task (DV)
Emotion often treated as an Iv and comparing effects on a task
Research design in emotion studies
True experiment
Random subject allocation into groups > Emotional variation across groups
determined by experimental treatment
True experiment would involve subjects being randomly allocated
Quasi-experiment
Quasi would group them based on pre existing differences in emotional state
Pre-existing groups > Emotional variation across groups determined by pre-
existing emotional variation
Emotion experiment methods (Gerrards-Hesse, Spies & Hesse, 1994)
1. Pre-experimental classification of subj. emotion
Measuring a subjects current emotional state. Done at beginning of experiment
with questionnaire. Is easy but not reliable. Used as baseline or control measure.
2. Comparison of clinical vs non-clinical subjects
Ie different patients such as depression or anxiety and compare them it normal
group to investigate effect of chronic emotion on a DV
3. Naturally occurring emotions
Use naturally occurring emotions and using specific events that usually illicit a
certain response
Testing on rainy/sunny days (e.g. Parrott & Sabini, 1990; Schwarz & Clore, 1983)
After subject success/failure in mid-term exams (Russell & McAuley, 1986;
Parrott & Sabini, 1990)
After watching exciting/unexciting soccer game (Schwarz, Strack, Kommer &
Wagner, 1987)
After watching happy/sad/aggressive movie (Forgas & Moylan, 1987)
 75

4. Mood Induction Procedures (MIP's)

Attempt to manipulate emotional state of subjects through presenting stimuli etc
Characterised through:
a. Free generation of emotional states
b. Presentation of Emotion Inducing material
c. Guided mental generation of emotional states
d. Presentation of need-related emotional states
e. Generation of emotional physiological states
MIP's a. Free generation of emotional states
Experimenter tries to get participants to try to activate an emotion mentally ie through:
Hypnosis MIP
Subjects enter a trance; then instructed to recall a memory and/or imagine a
situation, in which they felt the target emotion.
Imagination MIP
Same as Hypnosis MIP, except without the hypnosis. Subjects simply instructed to
imagine and remember emotional situations/events in order to elicit the required
emotional state.
MIP's b. Presentation of Emotion Inducing material
Present subjects with an emotion inducing stimuli
Film/story MIP
Subjects watch a film clip or read a short story that has emotional content or
themes.
Gift MIP
Relies on the assumption that people are elated when they receive an unexpected
gift such as a chocolate bar, or a small amount of money.
Music MIP
Active (consciously listening to it ) or passive listening to (background music)
emotionally-charged music
Picture MIP
Presenting a series of emotionally relevant pictures.
Facial expressions as stimuli can trigger emotions within us and thus are often
preferred as stimuli because they are not influenced by learning as much - Very
unambiguous
MIP's c. Guided mental generation of emotional states
Emotion inducing material + explicit instruction to attain emotional state - Stimuli and
imagination combined.
Veltin MIP
Common approach
Ss presented with positive/negative statements regarding self-evaluation and bodily
sensations
Asked to 'feel the mood' described in the statement.
Film/story + instruction MIP
Presentation of emotional film/story plus instructions to try to experience the
emotion being portrayed in the film/story.
Music + instruction MIP
Presentation of emotional music and the instruction to experience the emotion
MIP's d. Presentation of need-related emotional states
34. Emotions arising from satisfaction/frustration of social/cognitive needs (e.g. need for
achievement, need for affiliation, etc.)
 76

Success/failure MIP
Assumes a universal need for achievement
Manipulate feedback regarding performance on some task to induce mood
negative or positive feedback should stimulate positive or negative mood. Or give
easy or impossible task
Social interaction MIP
Assumes a universal need for social acceptance
Manipulate apparent social success/failure to induce mood
And will respond equivalently to positive or negative social situations
MIP's e. Generation of emotional physiological states
Different emotions activate similar autonomic nervous system activity and our cognitive
appraisals determine the emotion we experience
Drug MIP
Placebo or physiologically-activating drug (real drug) (e.g. adrenalin) given to
subjects
Cognitive 'context' provided to alter subject interpretation of physiological arousal
as a given emotion
Facial Expression Feedback MIP
Interpretation of own facial expression thought to alter subject's perception of their
mood
Asked to relax and contract particular muscles which should influence the subjects
perception of their mood
Dependant Variables in emotion studies
Introduction
What happens if emotion is DV.
Common responses
Endogenous: Physiological activation
Exogenous: Expressive/communicative behaviours (facial expression, body
language, etc.)
Exogenous: Goal-directed behaviours (e.g. attack or withdraw)
Also
Exogenous: Self-report
(Neuro-imaging)
Self-report as DV
Self report: Report current or previous emotional states on a scale
Emotion scales, e.g.:

Advantages
Self-report is most common means of measuring emotion because it's the easiest.
Disadvantages
Relies upon language
Can't use with non-linguistic subjects ie animals
Cross-cultural use requires translation of emotion words/concepts
Lacks precision
Individual variation in standards of emotion reporting
(Problem for between-subject designs, less so for within-subject designs)
Self-report is determined by some other motivation because it is not directly
triggered by emotions
 77

Driven by desire to follow instructions and cultural display rules

Assumes accurate self-knowledge
Cognitive interpretation involved in reported emotions (e.g. Dutton & Aron,
1974; Schachter & Singer, 1962; Valins, 1966) - cognition can alter the way
people report their states.
We may not have a direct pathway between the emotion and sufficiently
explaining the emotion
Physiology many emotions
Activation of sympathetic nervous system (SNS)
Preparation for fight or flight
Increase blood and oxygen flow to muscles
Decreases digestive activity and sexual arousal
Advantages
Content of measurement is unambiguous - ie heart rate means the same thing to
everyone more so than the word nervous
Differences are more qualitative/meaningful than self-report
Disadvantages
Many reasons why body physiology changes, not just emotion. E.g.:
Exercise > heart rate increase
Cold blood vessel contraction in hands (like in fear)
Individual differences in physiology. So again, best used for within subject designs
(often comparing a baseline to treatment condition)
Neurophysiology
2. EEG
Momentary changes in emotional activity within the top layers of the cortex
Advantages
Relatively inexpensive
High temporal resolution (millisecond) very good at detecting time changes
Disadvantages
Only measures surface level activity and most emotion processing goes on deeper
in the brain than EEG can detect
Each electrode sums activity across a large area (i.e. poor spatial resolution)
dont know where in the brain an effect is occuring
Neuroimaging
fMRI
Measures brain activity based on changes in oxygen uptake
Advantages
Excellent spatial resolution (2-3mm, throughout the brain) better than EEG
Can look at activation of all different parts of the brain
Reasonable temporal resolution (around 1 sec response time), though poorer than
EEG
Disadvantages
Expensive
Noisy
Large equipment
Subject must lie motionless in a noisy device
Inappropriate for young children, claustrophobics and animals
Limits the kinds of tests you can run and lowers ecological validity
Caution required in interpretation
E.g. amygdala lights up more in response to pictures of snakes than flowers >
 78

amygdala could be for snake detection, animal detection, movement tracking,

or fear.
Uncertainties overcome by combining results from multiple studies (e.g. Phan,
Wager, Taylor and Liberzon, 2002)
Facial expressions as DVs
Elders gc has supported that there are small amount of primary emotions that trigger
universal facial expressions
Facial Action Coding System: EM-FACS (Ekman & Friesen, 1984)
standard tool used to describe and differentiate facial expressions at level of
muscles.
Identify muscles involved in expressions
Describe duration and intensity of muscle contraction
Ie Anger involves lowering of eye brows, narrowing of distance between eye
brows and tightening of lips
Disadvantages
Intensive coding time (up to 60 minutes to code 1 minute of video)
Conscious versus unconscious control
Most emotional expression facial muscles consciously controllable > fake
expressions
Some not/hard to...
Universality suggests that facial expression can be influenced by social
display rules. True vs fake emotional expressions
VIDEO: Fake versus true facial expressions
Men better at detecting lieing
Fake smiles are controlled by cerebral cortex (conscious part) only triggers
muscles in cheek
Genuine (controlled automatically) makes mouth muscles and cheek and eye
muscles contract
Genuine smile: fold between eye brow and eye lid moves down ward
Real smiles tend to be symmetrical and fake smiles not. Monalisa asymmetrical.
Eyes of real smile and mouth of a fake.
Spotting hidden emotional meaning
Conscious versus unconscious control over muscles
True vs fake expressions
E.g. true ('Duchenne') smile vs fake ('photograph') smile
True smile includes contraction of additional muscles (esp. around eyes) which are
hard to control consciously
Micro-expressions
Involuntary, brief expressions of true emotion, quickly masked by fake,
consciously-controlled expression
Ekman (2001): Micro-expressions are the most valid tool for identifying hidden
feelings (especially nervousness)
Normal emotion is continuation of micro expression. Only becomes micro when
we are motivated to conceal true emotion
With training most people can learn to detect micro expressions
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Week 8: Basic Emotion - The Emotional Process

Theories of the Functional Emotional Process
Components of the Emotional Process
Emotions are often attached to an object or situation (stimulus driven)
They also have a conscious feeling associated with them
Stimulus appraisal (the way in which a stimulus becomes associated with an emotion)
could be hard wired, innate, learnt or cognitively constructed
Clarifying the definition of emotion
Which are necessary for 'emotion'?
What is the functional relationship between them?
Common responses to emotions
Endogenous response of physiological activation
Exogenous of goal directed responses and expressive responses

Folk Psychological Approach

Do we have to have a conscious experience of a sensory sensation ie pain, in order for
the relevance to be judged and to respond. For sensory sensations, the answer is yes.
For sensory sensations, hedonic value is the functional part
Folk psychological approach:
The feeling is the thing that causes behaviour - Intuitively we feel like feelings
drive actions
I feel angry therefore I attack. I feel afraid, therefore I escape

James-Lange Theory
James (1884)-Lange (1885) Theory (Peripheral or Bodily Feedback response)
James (1880): The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry,
angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble
Stimulus triggers physiological response and feeling of emotion is simply our
awareness of how our body is responding.
Suggests conscious feeling is not necessary for response.
Feeling comes after response
Problem with this theory is that motivation is fundamentally about stimulus
appraisal
 80

Cannon (Bard) Emergency Theory

Emotion and physiological arousal are triggered simultaneously by the thalamus
Walter cannon: discovered that autonomic nervous system plays role in flight of fight
Cannon also proposed alternative to James Lang theory - Muscle and physiological
responses are too slow to response. Cognition so and feelings are triggered
independently rather than being dependent on each other.

Schachter's cognitive-physiological theory

Schachter (1964): Both physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal are necessary for
the full experience of emotion
Object triggers physiological and cognition, whereby we are trying to figure out
relevance of stimulus.
He thought body responds similarly for all basic emotions, so that level of
physiological activation determines strength of emotion.
Physiological response determines strength of emotion
Cognitive appraisal determines what emotion we feel

The Role of Stimulus in Emotion

Stimulus types
The 'object of emotion': Least controversial component of emotional process - The idea
that there needs to be an object that triggers an emotion is least controversial.
Exogenous
Concrete, physical objects
Endogenous
We do have emotional reactions to endogenous stimuli, we are talking about the
way we feel about beliefs we have ie self knowledge
Abstract concepts (e.g. fascism, democracy)
The self (self-esteem, pride/guilt)
Secondary or self conscious or social emotions: Pride, guilt, shame, embarrassment
Points to Note
Stimulus appraisal
Innate (e.g. automatic emotional responses to facial expressions)
Learnt (e.g. classical conditioning) ie Little Albert
Cognition
Therefore There can be significant individual differences in emotions that are attached
to a stimulus
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The Necessity of Object

Is object necessary? E.g. fear vs anxiety:
Quantitative difference?
Some (most?) say anxiety = less intense fear
Qualitative difference?
Reber (1985)
Fear = present danger
Anxiety = imagined danger
Freud (1949), English & English (1958)
Fear = object known
Anxiety = object unknown, not sure why they feel that way
Objectless emotions?
Mood/global affect/temperament?
Long-term tendency to feel happy/sad with little apparent reason
Free-floating emotions
Persistent, diffuse, low-level emotion with no clear object
Self-investigative process may choose an object, given the current context - You
know your emotionally active but your not sure why so you choose an object to
explain it
However
With strong, clear emotions, the object is usually known
Perhaps objectless emotions = complex causes + weak reactions > difficulty in
constructing self-knowledge
That is, objectless emotions may be emotional experiences with complex causes
that have triggered a number of low intensity emotions. Thus objectless emotions
may have objects but may be more difficult to determine
35. Distinction between the actual object of an emotion and self-knowledge of the object
The Role of Exogenous Responses in Emotion
Relationship between behaviour and feeling
James Lang, it's only once we have physiological response, cognitive appraisal kicks in
Folk-psychologically, behaviour comes at the end of the process (cognitive >
physiological). Strange to say:
After I ran up to her and flung my arms around her, I realized that I loved her.
After I threw coffee in his face, I realized I was angry with him.
But, behaviour CAN occur before feeling
Impulsive behaviours
Uncertainty as to the cause of a behaviour
Can behaviour actually cause feeling?
Experiment
Hold pen/pencil
Between your lips (pointing out of your mouth)
Between your teeth (across your mouth)
Rate cartoons
Rating Scale
1. Mildly amusing
2. Moderately funny
3. Very funny
 82

Facial Feedback Hypothesis

Facial feedback hypothesis: how funny you find them will depend on where you have the
pencil
Subjects use feedback from facial muscles to judge emotional responses. Awareness of
muscles informed their judgements
You can achieve same find of effect by getting subjects to put their faces in certain
positions
Memory recollection is also matches faces ie more positive with smile
In this case like James Lang theory, behaviour can precede emotions
Strack, Martin & Stepper (1988)
Ss held pens in their non-dominant hand (control), lips or teeth
Teeth-condition Ss rated cartoons as funnier than controls
Lips-condition Ss rated cartoons less funny than controls
Larsen, Kasimatis and Frey (1992)
Ss rate pleasantness/unpleasantness of a set of photos while keeping golf tees
attached to their eyebrows touching (i.e. forced frown). Most photos rated as less
pleasant.
Replications:
Hess, Kappas, McHugo, Lanzetta and Kleck (1992)
Duclos and Laird (2001)
Soussignan (2002)
Laird (1984)
Subject facial muscles arranged by experimenter into smile or frown
Reported experiencing thoughts/memories/emotions in line with their facial
expressions
So
Behaviour > feeling
Body posture
Flack, Laird and Cavallaro (1999)
54 college students asked to adopt certain postures and facial movements
Asked about emotional feeling
Close match between reported feelings and emotion represented by postures and
facial expressions theyd been asked to adopt.
Confusion between fear and surprise
Facial Feedback Hypothesis
Limitations of facial feedback studies
Facial expression also changes heart rate, breathing, etc. so causality is uncertain
(Levenson, Ekman and Friesen, 1990)
Possible demand characteristics
Keillor, Barret, Crucian, Kortenkamp and Heilman (2002)
People with permanent facial paralysis report feeling normal emotions
Mobius syndrome
Rare congenital condition unable to smile
Still report feeling happy/amused
So
Facial feedback not essential for emotion, but seems to contribute
 83

The Role of Endogenous Responses in Emotion

Physiological activation
Critchley, Wiens, Rotshtein, Ohman and Dolan (2004)
Individual differences in sensitivity/awareness of bodily physiology and this
awareness corresponds to emotions experienced
The more you notice your own arousal level, the more intensely you feel emotions
(esp. negative)
High sensitisers experience emotions more intensely particularly negative ones.
Hohmann (1966)
25 paraplegics and quadriplegics categorised according to remaining visceral
sensation
Intensity of emotional experience correlated with height of spinal chord lesion
Found in fear, anger, grief, sexual excitement
For paraplegics etc, brain no longer receives info about the areas of the body.
The higher the lesion, the more they resported decrease in intensity of emotions.
Idea being that sensory feedback one receives plays a part in determining
emotional response.
If you cut off the physiological feedback from the body, emotions are reduced in
tension
Importance of Physiology
So: Physiology > feeling
However, physiology alone is not enough
Pure autonomic failure
Rare condition whereby ANS fails to influence the body
Patients report same type of emotions in objectively emotional situations but
feel them less intensely
They had an emotion of some sorts (emotional appraisal is fine) but intensity
is reduced
Other cases support this idea further where patients autonomic nervous system
does not communicate to them at all, no effect on their heart rates etc. they
report the same type of emotions but less intensely
These findings suggest that physiology is important in experience of emotion but not
essential.
Importance of Physiology
Maranon (1924)
Injected 200 Ss with adrenalin > palpitations, flushing, tremor, accelerated
breathing
If James is right, they should report emotions
70% only reported the physiology and an as if emotion
30% only reported experiencing true emotion, but only after emotional induction
(talking about sick children or death of parents after injection)
What is missing?
The Role of Cognitive Appraisal in Emotion
Role of cognition
Role of cognition prominent in the 1960s
When talking about cognition in emotion, we talk about self knowledge - beliefs about
the emotions we are experiencing
Folk-psychological:
We automatically know what emotion we are experiencing
 84

Bem (1972):
We don't have direct connection between emotion and why we are feeling it, we
have to cognitively construct it.
We use the same clues to figure out our own emotions as we do when figuring out
others emotions.
We use info about physiological activation of body, the context we are in and use it
to construct what emotion we must be feeling.
Attribution of arousal
Why are people not fooled by physiology alone? Perhaps attribution of the cause
Schachter & Singer (1962)
Ss given vitamin injection to improve visual acuity - actually saline solution
(placebo control) or adrenaline (treatment)
Treatment group either informed, ignorant or misinformed of physiological effects
of the injection
Ss seated awaiting eye test with a confederate displaying either happiness or
anger
Dependant variables
Self-reported emotional feelings: 0-4 point scale
Behavioural observation ratings
Attribution of arousal
Results
TREATMENT (epinephrine) Euphoria Anger
GROUP CONDITIONS (happy confederate)* (angry confederate)*
Accurate information less happy less angry
symptoms are to be expected Rating: 0.98 Rating: 1.91
from the vitamin Behaviour: 12.72 Behaviour: -0.18
more happy more angry
No information Rating: 1.78 Rating: 1.39
Behaviour: 18.28 Behaviour: +2.28
Inaccurate information more happy
vitamin will cause itching Rating: 1.9 (condition not run)
and numbness Behaviour: 22.56

*Rating scales: higher score = greater happiness/less anger

*Behaviour scales: higher score = happy behaviours in happy cond.; angry
behaviour in angry cond.
In the treatment, happy condition, subjects who had received no or false
information about the effect of the injection, rated themselves as happier than those
who were given correct information
Those given adrenaline and exposed to angry person, rated themselves as less
happy
These provide evidence for shactors cognitive theory of emotion. If happy person
is near by you rate yourself as happier and behave accordingly, however angry
person causes you to act less happy. This suggests it's not just physiology alone but
a cognitive appraisal is also needed. All provides evidence for shactors
Believed that people knew they had had the shot so they attributed arousal to that
and not emotion. Thus, maybe cognition plays role in attribution of physiology.
Limitation of shakters experiment
its artificial.
 85

Dutton and Aron (1984): Bridges Experiment

Attractive female meets males on bridge and gives them number, they were wondering if
likeliness of male calling her would depend on the bridge they were on.
Dutton & Aron (1974)
Additional support for the role of attribution of arousal
High ecological validity
Two bridges
Scary bridge 70m over deep canyon
Safe bridge 3m over river
High Bridge Experiment1: Girl on bridges
36. Comparing results
Between bridges
Results (calling rates):
50% on scary bridge
12% on safe bridge
BUT: Perhaps males crossing scary bridge more adventurous/less anxious? So
\Comparing results
Between position on scary bridge
In second trial, girl stood at end of the bridge
Results (calling rates)
65% experimental
30% controls
Assumed that males misattributed bridge-caused anxiety for attraction to girl
Expected arousal
Valins (1966): Playboy experiments
Male college students told heart rate would be measured and played back to them
Viewed 10 semi-nude Playboy centrefolds; asked to rate attractiveness
Heart-rate playback speed manipulated
Centrefolds rated more attractive if heart-rate changed (increased or decreased)
The physiological arousal doesnt even have to be real just believed to be real
Replication: Crucian et al. (2000)
So:
Cognition > feeling
Criticisms and Summary
Criticism of the attribution of arousal theory
Studies are hard to replicate
Cognitive attribution theory implies different emotions are all associated with the
same general physiological responses this is not the case
Conclusions up to now
Cognition does seem to play an important role in experience of emotion - supports
Schachters theory
Expressive, behavioural and physiological data support James-Lange theory
But inadequate due to lack of cognition
Perhaps: Ideal is some combination of Schachter and James-Lange?
In the combination, the idea is that expressive behaviour, physiology and
cognition, all precede conscious experience of emotion
Data regarding behaviour, physiology and cognition suggest feeling plays a
much lesser role than the common-sense view would suggest
The Role of Feeling in Emotion?
Is feeling needed?
 86

If feeling comes AFTER appraisal and physiological/behavioural responses, what is its

purpose?
What would we NOT have without a conscious experience of emotion?
Without conscious experience of emotion, we lack self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge of emotion
Self-knowledge of emotion enables us to communicate our emotions, and higher
cognitive processes can use that knowledge to do something about it ie avoid those
situations.
Constructed, not experienced
Constructed using information from behaviour, physiology and cognition
Allows for
Reporting of emotions
Higher cognitive processes using knowledge of emotions (e.g. planning,
conscious decision-making, problem-solving, etc.)
Beliefs about the selfs emotions can act as objects of secondary emotions ie
guilt
Summary of emotional process two separate functional processes occurring at
different time intervals
Time 1: Initial functional process is unconscious
Unconscious appraisal and response to a particular stimulus occurs. We become
physiologically activated, expression of fear on face and engage in impulsive
behaviour like running. All of these are functional responses to the stimulus. In
order for a functional response to be triggered, there must have been some kind of
motivational mechanism judging the relevance of that stimulus
Exogenous stimulus
Unconscious automatic emotional appraisal
Automatically triggers set of functional responses

Time 2: Self-knowledge and conscious experience of emotion is constructed

We re-perceive the outcomes from that initial functional process we receive
endogenous sensory information regarding physiological activation and facial
expressions, we receive exogenous info regarding the situation and any goal
directed behaviours we may perform, we take all this info in and using cognitive
processes we construct an understanding of our experiences (self knowledge)
which we use to form secondary emotions, and also we process information
through higher level cognitive systems like decision making which determine more
conscious decisions ie, cultural display rules
Fits well with Ekmans model
 87

Introduction to happiness
The function of happiness
Function of negative emotions (reasonably) clear
Anger/fear = threat, danger or frustration
Disgust = contamination threat
Motivates appropriate responding
Negative emotions are clearly initiated by situations that represent threat or
frustration. Thus they have a clear motivational purpose.
Function of happiness?
No apparent behavioural motivation
Ekman says happiness has its own expressive response. Happiness doesn't seem to
be a functional response. That is, it has no effect on our physiology like other
emotions. It doesn't motivate any particular goal directed behaviour.
Yet primary goal for most people
American Declaration of Independence: "pursuit of happiness"
Core to utilitarianism
Research and theory on Happiness
Initial research focus on negative emotions
Happiness often ignored because it's not maldaptive.
Recent topic of interest ('positive psychology' movement)
What is happiness?
Absence of negative emotion/sensations or presence of particular
stimuli/situations/events?
Research suggests that positive emotion is more than the absense of negative
emotion, in fact that they work in different ways in the brain so there is no
continuum
No Separate systems
Short term vs long term?
Happiness as 'reward' system?
Happiness as a mood/personality trait?

Happiness as reward?
Thinking of happiness as a reward system may explain why it's doesn't trigger functional
behaviours.
May act as positive hedonic signal, serving the purposes of conditioning, a mechanism
enabling us to learn what's good for us etc.
function of happiness therefore to reinforce and direct learning.
The reward circuit
Nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area:
Enhanced neurotransmitter (dopamine) release during - Reward circus uses
dopamine as neurotransmitter and more dopamine is released during
 88

reinforcing experience
anticipation of reinforcer
Reward circuit activated by wide range of stimuli including:
Eating chocolate
Eye contact with attractive person
Humour
Listening to your favourite music
Nucleus accumbens esp. activated by
Drugs (e.g. cocaine)
Sex
Food
Video games
Quickly learns relationships between rewards and the events predicting the reward
Activity predicts reward-seeking behaviour
So activity in the reward circuit does predict reward seeking behaviour. Thus
primary role is in anticipating reward, not so much about pleasure gained during a
reward but rather in directing behaviour towards a reward.
Ie reward system is more activated when we see something just out of our
reach.
Nucleus accumbens activation increases linearly with increase in magnitude of
possible reward (Knutson et al., 2005) Ie the more you want it, the greater the
activation.
Happiness as mood
Happiness as a persistent sense of general well-being and contentment
Diffuse neural foundation thought to be based upon
Endorphins (bodys natural opiates)
Oxytocin (the cuddle hormone)
Diener & Diener (1996); Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith (1999)
Defined as
high life satisfaction
Frequent experience of overall positive affect
Infrequent experience of negative affect
Focus for the rest of the module
Measures of happiness
37. Reliance on self-report
Pavot and Diener (1993): Satisfaction With Life Scale
Scale: 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree)
Example items
In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
The conditions of my life are excellent.
I am satisfied with my life.
So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.
If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.
Watson, Clark and Tellegen (1988): Positive scale from the Positive and Negative Affect
Schedule (PANAS)
20 single word items
10 negative (e.g. scared, distressed, ashamed)
10 positive (e.g. determined, excited, enthusiastic, active)
Asked how well each word describes their feelings over
A day
 89

A week
A month
In general etc.
Self-reported causes of happiness
Kalat (2007): Self-reported causes of happiness in undergrads
Friends and family (most common answer)
My boyfriend/girlfriend
A feeling of success or accomplishment
Relaxing
Playing sports, being active
Enjoying nature
Music and humour
Religion
Making others happy
Markus, Ryff, Curhan & Palmersheim (2004)
Relationship with family and friends
Physical health
Financial security
Self-development
A satisfactory job
Faith
Enjoying the activities of life
Happiness as a disposition or reaction to events?
Heller, Watson and Ilies (2004)
"Bottom-up": Happiness is controlled by life events.
"Top-down": Happiness is controlled by personality or cognitive disposition.
The "bottom-up" approach to happiness
Introduction
Happiness as driven by certain events, people, objects, relationships.
Personal relationships
Married people happier than unmarried (DeNeve, 1999)
Undergrads with strong romantic relationships and close friends happier than those
without (Diener & Seligman, 2002)
Coombs & Fawzy (1982): Stress levels decrease after getting married
Close relationships - may buffer us and support us through difficult situations.
But: causal direction?
Happy people more likely to attract others
Most likely a two-way effect
Happiness as absence of negative life events
Illness
Happiness correlates with health
Again, causal direction likely to go both ways
Money and happiness
Does wealth = happiness?
How much more money would you need to be happy?
Newspaper survey (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999)
People desire twice their current income
Suggests perceived benefit depends on current circumstance
Do people become happier when they gain wealth?
No correlation in Western countries between income size and level of happiness
 90

Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith (1999)

Lottery winners happier in short-term, not long-term
Money and happiness
3. Are people in wealthier countries happier than those in poorer countries?
Inglehart (1997): Yes
But: Richer countries also tend to have:
Better health care
Greater life expectancy
Greater political freedoms
Fewer human rights violations
Greater equality for women
In general though, poverty = unhappiness (Myers, 2000)
4. Where is the ceiling?
VIDEO: Science of Happiness
Positive psychology
Focusing on what makes people happy rather than sad
Different components of happy reflected in different parts of the brain.
Money can buy happiness through emotional happiness ie happiness we feel when we
buy something new
Using money as defensive resource ie buying washing machine when ours breaks
What brings sustained happiness
Relationships
Volunteers/altruism
Gamma oscillations associated with happiness are dramatically enhanced during
meditation
Two weeks of meditation can produce changes in the brain
We can re-wire our brains
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Our mind can be our best
fiend or worst enemy. We can change our brain by transforming our mind.
Evidence to show that volunteering produces similar results to meditation
Happiness as a contrast effect
Happiness also relative to recent experiences or future expectations
Whether we respond to a particular event positively or negatively is relative to our
past experiences. Ie someone who has never experienced bad things might not
know that they are happy to because they have nothing to compare it to
Lu (2001)
Appreciation of happiness requires knowledge of sadness
Larsen, McGraw, Mellers and Cacioppo (2004)
Ss' sad if given a reward smaller than expected, happy if loose something smaller
than expected
Medver, Madey and Gilovich (1995)
Video recordings/interviews from 1992 Olympic games
Bronze winners appear happier than Silver winners
Silver metal is objectively better than bronze, but is closer to first place. Where as
bronze may just be relieved that they made it into the metal talon.
Contrast effect
Emotional reactions to events dependant on comparisons between actual and
expected outcome
The "top down" approach to Happiness
Predisposed to happiness
 91

Suggests that general life satisfaction depends on personality factors.

Happiness as genetic?
Lykken and Tellegen (1996): monozygotic twins more similar in level of life
satisfaction than dizygotic twins
Personality traits linked to happiness
High Extraversion
Report higher levels of long-term life satisfaction (Costa & McCrae, 1980)
Greater cheerfulness tendency and strong emotional responses to positive
events (Larsen & Ketellar, 1989)

Low Neuroticism
Low sensitivity to negative emotional states (esp. anxiety)
Score higher on life satisfaction scales
Lower scores of neuroticism = more happiness
Conscientiousness (DeNeve, 1999)
People high in consciousness = higher life satisfaction
Control and Goals
Control
Strong sense of control > happier and healthier (Lachman & Firth, 2004)
Goals
People with clear life goals (esp. with benevolent aims) report higher happiness
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1999)
Mediated by achievability of goals (Nickerson, Schwartz, Diener, & Kahneman,
2003) - Having goals may predict greater life happiness but only if they are
realistic, otherwise there will be an opposite effect
College student goals, followed up 19 years later
College goals of wealth = lowest level of happiness, because most weren't rich
Important to be realistic about goals
 92

Week 10: Specific Basic Emotions (Fear and Anger)

Behavioural Consequences are core symptoms of a number of psychological disorders

Introduction to fear and anger

Introduction
Fear and anger
Most 'prototypical' basic emotions (Kalat & Shiota, 2007)
Fairly clear functional purposes - Easiest to comprehend
Antecedents (triggers) and consequences (responses) fairly well defined and
accepted
Typical responses
Behavioural Consequences are core symptoms of a number of psychological disorders
Fear > withdraw/avoidance
Core symptom of anxiety disorders
Anger > aggression
Core symptom of sociopathy disorders
Fear and anger: Commonalities
Cannon (1929): 'fight or flight'
Qualitatively distinct exogenous responses, but:
Common trigger?
Avoidance/withdraw and aggression: Behavioural options in response to threat?
Common endogenous response? The 'stress' response
Bodily preparation for action stress response
Endocrine and Sympathetic branch of Autonomic Nervous System:
Increase blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate, sweating
Movement of blood from internal functions towards muscles
If there is a common trigger for fear and anger, and endogenous response, it
suggests that instead of being separate emotions, they may be different parts of a
common threat response system
Fear and anger: Differences
Primary difference between fear and anger is that they both trigger different forms of
behavioural responses:
Overt responses
Fear > threat avoidance
Anger > threat neutralisation/intimidation
What decides which response will occur? (flight or fight)
May depend on characteristics of elicitors
Proximity
Differentiation of power/power hypothesis more likely to attach if upper
hand
Avoidability of threat
 93

Initial response: withdraw/escape

Last resort: attack
The role of power
High power > anger; low power > fear (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson,
2003).
Explanation for universal gender differences in fear vs anxiety (males = more
anger)? (Fischer, Mosquera, va Vianen, & Manstead, 2004) Females more fear
More to threat response than 'fight or flight'
Bracha, Ralston, Matsukawa, Williams and Bracha (2004)
'Fight or flight' too simplistic
Four threat responses seen in animals: 'freeze, flight, fight, and fright'.
Overly simplistic because there are many other responses
Freeze: first response to avoid being detected

Physiological response in emotions: 'Stress'

Definition of Stress
Stress = high arousal most strongly associated with fear and anger
Physiological changes resulting from body's attempt to cope with/adapt to marked
deviation from normal state
Preparing body for "fight or flight Stress response is adaptive in short term
Hans Selye (1950, 1956, 1973)
Medical student in 1925
Noted that bodily responses to noxious or foreign material were nonspecific
Stress as a homeostatic mechanism
Non-specific body response to excessive demand
Stressors (stimuli/situations causing stress) move individual away from
optimal level of bodily functioning
Stress = adaptive response to return to optimal conditions by dealing with
stressor
Types of Stressors
Systemic stressors
Challenge to integrity of physical body (e.g. heat/cold, pathogens)
Anything that physically affects body ie bacteria, viruses
38. Psychological stress
Examples
Body tries to deal with these stressors in the same way
Anxiety about events/people
Anticipation of upcoming events
Major life changes
Intensely arousing stimuli (loud noises, crowds, etc.)
Body's reaction very similar to both
 94

Physiology of stress
Stressors effect the endocrine (hormone) system, particularly bloodstream levels of
Hydrocortisone (cortisol)
Epinephrine (adrenalin) and norepinephrine (noradrenalin)
Two major hormone glands
Pituitary (managed by hypothalamus)
Adrenal (above kidneys)
Adrenal cortex (secretes hydrocortisone)
Adrenal medulla (secretes epinephrine and norepinephrine)
Neural systems involved
Hypothalamus (pictured)
Sympathetic nervous system
Functional processes in stress (dont need to remember this)
Stressor detection activates hypothalamus
Hypothalamus > SNS > adrenal medulla > epinephrine and norepinephrine
Hypothalamus releases corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) > Pituitary releases
adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) into bloodstream > adrenal cortex releases
cortisol
Detection of stressor activates the hypothalamus, which then has two roles. Firstly
it will activate the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system which then
activates the adrenal medulla to release epinephrine and norepinephrine. The other
role is it releases CRH, which activates the pituitary gland to release ACTH into
the bloodstream, which activates the adrenal cortex to release cortisol.
Cortisol and epinephrine mobilise the body for action by increasing blood sugar
levels, breathing rate, heart rate and blood pressure in order to prepare for dealing
with the stressor.
There is also a feedback loop to the hypothalamus, as cortisol levels increase
within the blood stream, ACTH production switches off to prevent further cortisol
release
General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)
Hans Selye (1950, 1956, 1973)
Stage 1: 'Alarm reaction'
Stressor has just been detected
Two different processes are triggered,
Immediately - the stress response (general non specific mobilisation of body to
globally deal)
Other more specific localised responses also occur which are more specific to
the nature of the stressor itself, ie running away, inflammation
Stage 2: Stage of resistance:
General 'whole body' mobilisation to stressor stops
Focus on localised responses
Stage 3: Stage of exhaustion
If stressor continues, and localised responses fail to address stressor,
general mobilisation returns
Can lead to diseases of adaptation adaptive in short term but not long
Ulcers, high blood pressure (increased risk of heart attack), kidney
disease, other somatic symptoms
Susceptibility to illness
Ie long term anxiety
 95

Life change as stressor

Major life change events correlated with illness (widely supported finding)
Considerable research using 'Social Readjustment Rating Scale' (Holmes & Rahe, 1967)
Major life changes related to illness, rated by severity of adjustment required
Mostly negative, but some positive. All require coping/adaptation.
Any major life change, good or bad, requires adaptation and is thus a stressor.
Life change key cause of stress

Life changes typically seen 2 years prior to illness

Increased number of life changes increases likelihood of illness
BUT
Correlations are small (many other factors underlying illness)
Large individual differences
Individual differences in coping with stress
Possible buffers of effect of stress include
Personality
'Hardiness' (curiosity/exploration, acceptance of change, high self-efficacy) and
exercise, low form of neuroticism > Buffered from negative effect of stress
Controllability of stressor (perceived)
Internal locus of control: feeling of ability to control and influence what
happens in the world > lower correlation between life changes and illness
(Johnson & Sarason, 1978)
Explanatory style (Peterson et al., 1988): Pessimism at 25 leads to poorer health in
middle age than optimism.
3. Expressive style (Labott & Martin, 1987): Coping through humour better than
coping through weeping.
Environment
Controllability of stressor (actual)
SRRS items rated as less controllable more strongly correlate with illness
(Stern, McCants & Pettine, 1982)
Social support theory
Correlation between social relationships and health
Social support through positive relationships buffers individual from effects of
stress
 96

Summary: Is stress good or bad?

Bad
Stress typically considered as negative
Ongoing stress has health consequences
But remember... Negative consequences only seen during long-term stress
Good
Body's attempt to deal with a stressor
Optimal arousal levels for performance
Moderate stress levels improve performance
Stress important for creativity/performing arts
Fear and flight
Introduction
Fear is an adaptive mechanism coordinating defensive response to threat by
Orienting attention towards the threat
Preparing the body physiologically for action
Communicating the presence of danger to others (e.g. vocalisations, facial
expressions)
Controlling overt behaviour to avoid detection by (e.g. freezing), or flee from, the
threat
Universal, cross-cultural
People universally describe stressors as unexpected, unpleasant, externally caused
and uncontrollable
Common facial expression of fear
Scherer (1997): universal description of fearful situations as unexpected,
unpleasant, externally caused and uncontrollable
Fear vs anxiety vs sadness
Probability of occurrence and outcome of threatening event
Fear vs sadness
Fear: word used to label short-lived dread caused by upcoming negative event
with uncertain outcome and subsides quickly
Anxiety: Longer-lived response to possible expected/predicted event with
uncertain outcome
Sadness: Caused by previous (or certain upcoming) occurrence of negative event
and similar to happiness
Fear anxiety pre-empted event - Fear and anxiety are the same thing occuring
under different conditions

Fear: Elicitors
Hard-wired stimulus-fear connections Seen across all cultures
Loud noises (or abrupt sudden movements) > startle reflex - seen in all cultures,
animal species and through all developmental periods
Separation from loved one (especially parent-child)
Activation of pain receptors
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The dark
Biologically-prepared fears
Biological preparation to quickly learn fear to threatening stimuli from
evolutionary past (Ohman, Eriksson, & Olofsson, 1975)
Possible examples
Intentional animate objects (snakes, spiders, dogs, etc.)
Heights/edges
Enclosed spaces (where breathing may be restricted)
Sharp objects
Blood
True 'specific phobias'
Only formed to these stimuli
Form extremely quickly (e.g. one pairing)
Learnt stimulus-fear connections
The role of cognition
Fear: Responses
Fear activates neurobiological system called behavioural inhibition system, which
increases attention while inhibiting action. Corresponds to bracket et al threat category of
freezing. We see this across many species.

Adaptive versus maladaptive fear

Too little > Risk-taking
Too much > Constant avoidance; frequent/persistent 'stress' activation; persistent state of
distress
Some (not all) DSM 5 anxiety-related disorders:
Generalised Anxiety Disorder
Panic disorder
Panic disorder
Specific phobia
Social phobia
Agoraphobia
Separation Anxiety Disorder
Neuroanatomy of fear
Introduction
Implicated in fear and other emotions
Insular cortex (possible role in disgust and emotional responses to sensory
sensations like pain and taste)
Prefrontal cortex (decisions, cognition, emotional regulation/control of emotions)
Hypothalamus (triggers 'stress' physiology/response)
Amygdala
Most studied structure regarding emotion
Bilateral structure in temporal lobe, attached to hippocampus
Plays an important role in memory thus ideal for creating associations connections
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between stimuli and response

Input from
Vision, hearing, pain, other senses (Uwano, Nishijo, Ono, & Tamura, 1995)
Output to
Pons, other areas controlling startle reflex (Fendt, Koch, & Schmitzler, 1996)
Prefrontal cortex (Garcia, Vouimba, Baudry, & Thompson, 1999)
Other brain areas (Gifkins, Greba, & Kokkinidis, 2002)
Amygdala and fear: Early research
'Klver-Bucy Syndrome'
Removal of both anterior temporal lobes > emotional changes
Animals loose emotional association with objects (Klver & Bucy, 1939)
Loss of response to hard-wired fear associations
Monkeys with amygdala damage approach aggressive monkeys and unfamiliar
humans (Kalin, Shelton, & Davidson, 2004)
Rats/mice normally freeze upon smelling a cat
Tranquilizer > decreased amygdala activity > indifferent to cat odour
(Mcgregor, Hargreaves, Apfelbach, & Hunt, 2004).
Destruction of amygdala > fearlessly approach cat (Berdoy, Webster, &
Macdonald, 2000)
Amygdala damage leads to loss of ability to learn new and spend to existing
fear associations
Amygdala and fear: Humans
Patients with amygdala damage
E.g. Urbach-Wiethe disease - Calcium accumulates in amygdala and damages only
amygdala
Loss of normal skin conductance response to slide previously paired to loud noise
Reduced startle reflexes
Approach strangers at random when in need of help
Rate all faces equally regarding friendliness/trustworthyness (Adolphs, Tranel, &
Damasio, 1998)
Impaired at recognizing facial expressions of fear (Adolphs, Tranel, Damasio, &
Damasio, 1995)
Patient can draw all emotional expressions but can't draw fear.

39. FMRI: Amygdala activation
When people see/hear signs of danger (Phelphs et al., 2001)
When viewing fearful or angry face vs neutral face
Angry face > amygdala activation when viewed facing the subject front on vs
viewed side-on (Sato, Yoshikawa, Kochiyama, & Matsumura, 2004)
During fear conditioning (e.g. LaBar, Gatenby, Gore, LeDoux, & Phelphs, 1998)
Social learning of stimulus-shock association (Phelps, O'Connor, Gatenby, Gore,
Grillon, & Davis, 2001) - Activated during fear learning or social fear learning
(learning from observation of others)
Amygdala: Broader Role in Emotion
Attentional effects
Normals look at eyes in faces (Gamer & Buchel, 2009), Amygdala patients look at
nose and mouth (Adolphs et al., 2005)
Normals pay more attention to emotionally-charged words - Amygdala damaged
patients don't (Anderson & Phelps, 2001)
Role in memory
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Normal bias for remembering emotionally salient information

fMRI: Amygdala activation during exposure to emotional stimuli predicts later
memory (Canli et al., 2000; Canli et al., 1999).
Not seen in amygdala damage patients
Amygdala implicated in emotional memory only
We remember more strongly, things that have more emotional meaning
Works through connection with hippocampus?
Phelps (2004; 2005): Amygdala:
Directs attention towards stimuli with existing emotional associations
Facilitate long term memories by triggering long-term episodic retention
of emotional information
Kwon and Choi (2009)
PTSD rates in US soldiers wounded in battle
40% of soldiers who did not have amygdala damage developed PTSD
Amygdala brain damage = None
Anxiolytics
Anxiolytics (tranquilizers): Drugs that decrease experiences of anxiety or fear
Benzodiazipines, E.g.:
Valium
Librium
Xanax
Work by increasing activity of GABA (main inhibitory neurotransmitter
throughout the brain)
Mimic effects as amygdala damage
Alcohol
Also decreases amygdala activity (essentially an anxiolytic)
Explains loss of social inhibitions, approaching strangers, increase in violent
behaviours
Anger and aggression
Theories of Anger
Anger is more difficult to elicit experimentally than fear
Threat
E.g. Bracha et al.'s (2004) 'freeze, flight, fight and fright' responses to threat
Anger triggered by lack of escape from threat > attack
But, recall the role of power. Can't all be threat-related.
Bradshaw suggests anger only relates to response of fight
Anger more common emotion experienced in people with greater power and less
fear.
Theories of Anger: The Role of Attribution
Personal injustice, blame and control
Anger more likely to occur when event is directed towards you - when you feel a
sense of personal injustice
Lazarus (1991): demeaning offense against me and mine
Personal injustice
Ohbuchi et al. (2004): Personal injustice > anger more than witnessing social
injustice
Blame
Kuppens, Van Mechelen, Smits and De Boeck (2003): Anger requires:
Personal injury/injustice,
Caused by someone
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Actions were deliberate and controllable

Role of cognitive attribution of intentions
People report feeling angry only when they have someone to blame for
the injustice. That is, cognition plays an important role in anger
Control
Must perceive the actor to have control over their behaviour
Theories of Anger: Frustration and negative affect
The frustration-aggression hypothesis
Anger and aggressive behaviours caused by anything that interferes with attaining
expected goal/gratification
E.g. Infants display anger-like facial expressions in response to arm and leg
restraint (causing frustration) (Sternberg, Campos, & Emde, 1983)
Cognitive Neoassociationistic model (Berkowitz, 1990)
ANY unpleasant event/sensation (frustration, pain, extreme heat, etc.) > anger and
aggression regardless of its nature
E.g. Rats shocked together will attack each other > or other available object
(Keith-Lucas & Guttman, 1975)
In humans: Factors that increase aggressive behaviour
Hot weather (Preti, Miotto, De Coppi, Petretto, & Carmelo, 2002)
Personal feelings of being uncomfortably hot (Anderson, 2001)
Physical pain (Berkowitz, Cochran, & Embree, 1981)
Exposure to inescapable loud noise (Geen, 1978)
Exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke (Zill mann, Baron, & Tamborini,
1981)
All these theories suggest anger is triggered by any negative event regardless of
our cognitive appraisals of what caused it. Anger comes first and then blame
Main disagreements in anger theories
Cognitive appraisal is NECESSARY for anger
Causal attribution theories argue that for anger to occur, we need an appraisal
of hostile intent.
Negative experiences may make anger worse, they don't directly cause anger.
For anger to occur, we must have someone to blame (an appraisal of hostile).
Aggression can occur easily, but anger is harder to trigger

Cognitive appraisal is SUFFICIENT but NOT NECESSARY for anger

Cognitive neoassociationistic model argues that negative events can trigger
anger
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Anger: Responses
Fact that aggressive behaviors can be triggered outside of context of anger makes it more
diffuse. Difficult to determine whether aggression is triggered by anger or something
else.
Endogenous: Physiological activation
'Stress' response
Exogenous: Expressive/communicative
Anger facial expression
Exogenous: Goal-directed
Aggression (usually directed towards elicitor of anger)
Two types of aggression
Hostile aggression: Harmful behaviour motivated by anger
Instrumental aggression: Harmful/threatening behaviour used in order to achieve a
particular end (e.g. bullying, theft, killing prey)
Cute aggression?
Dyer (in press)
College students viewed pictures of cute, funny or neutral animals
Given bubble-wrap to pop measure of aggressive behaviour?
Students exposed to cute pictures popped more bubbles
Appears to support the frustration-aggression hypothesis?
Aggression NOT a clear indicator of anger
Adaptive versus maladaptive anger
40. Adaptive functions of anger anger is a tool
Neutralise/scare away a threat (core function)
Ensure social equity
Mild anger displays improve relationships (Kassinove, & Dundin, 2002)
Status conferred to people who express moderate amounts of anger (Tiedens,
2001)
Mild anger in negotiations gets you what you want (Van Kleef, De Dreu, &
Manstead, 2004)
Maladaptive anger
Strong displays of anger are socially damaging
Extreme levels > excessive aggression and violence
Social and legal consequences
Become disorders such as Anti-Social Personality Disorder
VIDEO: Anger and aggression: Watch!
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Week 11: Self Conscious Emotions: Maybe listen to this again

Differentiating basic from self-conscious emotions
Basic versus self-conscious emotions
Basic (primary) emotions
E.g. anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise (interest)
Called primary because:
Appear to be biologically based, universal
Simple evaluations of objects
Display in facial expression
Elicited by a large range of stimuli easy to measure and elicit
(Therefore, more research on basic emotions)
Self-conscious (secondary, or social) emotions
Eg. shame, pride, guilt, embarrassment
What makes a self-conscious emotion different from a primary
Differences
1. Lack of dedicated expressive exogenous responses
Lack of unique facial expression (exception of blushing for embarrassment?)
Self-conscious emotion expression through face most likely due to
Display rules or cultural emblems?
Piggy-backing off basic emotions (shame/guilt = sad? Pride = happy?). But
pride = happy + ?????, Secondary emotions involve complex cognitive
evaluations involving the self and belief. This means they require theory of
mind
2. Emerge later in life
No evidence of self-conscious emotions before 18-24 months
3. Complex cognitive evaluations of...
The self (hence, 'self-conscious') > requiring self-concept
Interpretation of yours and others beliefs > requiring theory-of-mind
4. The object of self-conscious emotions
The 'object' of self-conscious emotions

Reflexes and sensory sensations judge pure activations of sensory receptors themselves:
little perceptual processing needs to occur. The object triggering the motivational
judgement is simple activation of sensory receptors themselves.
With instincts, the object triggering them tends to be more complex. Usually requires
recognition of pattern of sensory info in a particular way, ie cuteness instinct
Wide range of stimuli can trigger basic
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beliefs are not endogenous or exogenous, they are abstract concepts

Pride, shame, embarrassment, guilt all require self- and other-evaluation.
Object = evaluation of beliefs about yourself with respect to
your own standards
your perception of other's standards (from experience, culture, etc.)
self-conscious emotions rely on high cognitive abilities of self concept and
theory of mind, because stimuli are abstract concepts (beliefs about ourselves
and others)
self-conscious emotions involve evaluation of self with respect to standards
(yours, or others)
How many 'self-conscious' emotions?
How many self-conscious emotions?
More difficult than basic emotions as no dedicated expressive pathways.
Embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride. Can we distinguish between them?
Pride = positive; others = negative (Pride is positive, embarrassment shame and guilt
are negative), suggesting pride is separate
Differentiating between embarrassment, shame, and guilt
They are similar. All three:
Are unpleasant for the individual
Include the belief that we've violated a moral code or social convention
Make us want to hide/withdraw in some way
Different elicitors?
Different elicitors? Keltner and Buswell (1996)
U.S. college students asked to recall a recent experience in which you felt guilt, shame
or embarrassment
Different themes?
Embarrassment
When one is the focus of attention due to mistake, accident, or positive event,
but where actions have not broken social/moral codes. Can be positive
Poor performance
Clumsiness
Cognitive error
Inappropriate physical appearance
Failure of privacy
Being teased
conspicuousness
Shame
Poor performance: doing something less well than others or your own
expectations
Hurting someones feelings
Failure to meet others expectations
Failure to meet own expectations
lying
Guilt
Hurting others
Failure to perform ones duties
Lying, cheating or stealing
Neglecting a friend or loved one
Hurting someones feelings
Infidelity
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Breaking a diet
Shame and guilt break a social convention or moral rule
Different elicitors? Tangney et al. (1996)
41. Ss think of an experience where they felt each emotion
42. Rate intensity of feeling, how long it lasted, how expected the event causing the feeling
was, number of aspects of the event.
43. Ss rating patterns for embarrassment differed from shame/guilt

Cultural differences in self-conscious emotions

Introduction
The self-conscious emotions appear to be universal, but cultural differences in
Display rules and cultural emblems
Emotion labels
Feeling rules
Individualistic: Hypercognise pride, hypocognise shame/guilt
Collectivist: Hypocognise pride, hypercognise shame/guilt
Specific elicitors
Recall that self-conscious emotions reflect people's
self-evaluations
relative to social standards
Cultural differences: Social standards
Social expectations (group standards) differ between societies.
Fessler (1999): Dusun Baguk of Malaysia experience:
'malu' (roughly equivalent to our embarrassment or shame) when
Eat during a period set aside for fasting
Dress too ostentatiously
Walk too fast
Are in the presence of a more prestigious person (role of status)
'bangga' (roughly equal to 'pride') when
Appropriately receive attention for doing something well (e.g. display of skill
or wit, hosting a good feast for guests)
Cultural differences: Self-evaluations
Self-conscious emotions are reactions to self, so how the 'self' is defined is important.
E.g. cultural differences in pride...
Individualist
US, self seen (and praised) as a unique, independent personality; individuality
praised; conformity not regarded highly.
Pride felt at self achievements
Collectivist
Many East Asian countries, self defined by relationships with other people/groups
you belong to.
Pride felt at other/group achievements
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Self defined through relationships with others

Stipek (1998)
Chinese and American participants asked about pride levels if they or their child
were accepted to a prestigious university.
Both said pride at both, but Chinese said more proud if child accepted; Americans
said more proud if self accepted
Chinese react emotionally to behaviours of close relatives as though they were part
of the self
Embarrassment
Embarrassment responses
The most distinctive negative self-conscious emotion
Typical expressive responses of embarrassment
"I don't want you to see me right now"
Avoid eye contact
Hide face
Smile, but with tense lips as if trying to suppress smile
Blush: Temporary increase in blood flow to face, neck, upper chest.
Drummond et al. (2003)
People are embarrassed by the fact that they are blushing.
Tell someone they are blushing and they will blush more.
Blushing exacerbates and facilitates embaressment
Function of embarrassment
Kalat and Shiota (2007), p228
"The emotion felt when one violates a social convention, thereby drawing
unexpected social attention and motivating submissive, friendly behavior that
should appease other people.
Thought to have function of deterring aggression. An appeasement gesture. Way of
communicating inferiority and apologising for something. Similar to how younger
animals demonstrate submissiveness.
Functions to deter aggression
Interpreted as 'appeasement gestures'
Subordinate behaviour to deter attack from a superior
Helps to repair awkward social situations
Informs onlookers you care about their opinion towards you (Kelter & Buswell,
1997)
Embarrassment can transform a "potentially tense, aggressive situation into a
polite and friendly one. From your perspective, as the person who caused the mess
in the first place, you've just managed to avoid social ostracism, possibly even a
physical attack." (Kalat & Shiota, 2007, p229)
Embarrassment as social appeasement
Semin and Manstead (1982)
Ss shown videos of someone knocking over a supermarket display then showing or
not showing embarrassment.
Ss reported liking the embarrassed person more than the unconcerned person.
Miller (2001)
Ss more likely to forgive a person who broke a valuable item if they looked
embarrassed.
Semin and Papadopoulou (1990)
Children displaying embarrassment after rule-breaking are punished less severely
by parents.
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Keltner, Young and Buswell (1997); Levin and Arluke (1982)

People are more likely to help, and more likely to feel liking and affection towards
someone looking embarrassed.
Limitations to the appeasement effect (De Jong, Peters, De Cremer, & Vranken, 2002)
Embarrassment only appeases others if they believe your transgression was truly
an accident.
Clarifying the elicitors of embarrassment
Questions needing clarification
What does it mean to violate a social convention?
Is all social attention embarrassing?
Is it more embarrassing for some people than for others?

Sabini, Siepmann, Stein and Meyerowitz (2000)

Asked students to read descriptions of embarrassing interpersonal scenarios then
rate how embarrassed they'd feel.
3 categories
Mistake
Centre of attention
Sticky situation
All three rated as high
44. Different types? Yes:
If you reported high embaressment for one of the mistake scenarios you were
likely to report high for all. Within category, there were high correlations. But
there were no high correlations between categories. Within-S within-category
correlations high
No correlations between category
Individual differences due to different beliefs regarding reasons for rejection
from others?
Empathic embarrassment
A fourth category? Empathic embarrassment
Being embarrassed in sympathy for someone else who is, or we think should be,
embarrassed
Shearn, Spellman, Straley, Meirick and Stryker (1999)
Phase 1: S brought to lab, asked to sing 'The Star Spangled Banner' (US national
anthem) amongst other tasks
Phase 2: S returns a week later with a friend and unknown 3rd subject; watch video
of S singing; blushing measured
Friend blushes more than stranger. Why?
Presumably in sympathy > with the performer.
Perhaps embarrassed through association?
Follow-up study. Stranger sang previously as well. Showed as much blushing as
friend or performer. Why?
Perhaps sympathises with performer?
Perhaps is thinking "my video might be up next!"
 107

Variation in embarrassibility
Individual differences
Scales: E.g. Embarrassibility Scale (Modigliani, 1968); Susceptibility to
Embarrassment Scale (Kelly & Jones, 1997)
Embarrassibility correlates
Positively with level of neuroticism (Edelmann & McCusker, 1986; Maltby &
Day, 2000)
Positively with social anxiety, shyness, loneliness (Neto, 1996)
Negatively with extraversion and self-esteem (Maltby & Day, 2000)
Embarrassment rare in socially confident people.
Gender differences
Some say women more easily embarrassed (e.g. Neto, 1996), most show no
difference (e.g. Maltby & Day, 2000)
Age differences
Infants/young children don't experience embarrassment (or shame, pride, guilt)
Self-conscious emotion seen around age 2, along with other signs of self-
consciousness.
Embarrassment peaks in adolescence
Embarrassment declines during adulthood (Maltby & Day, 2000)
Shame and guilt
Shame vs guilt: Responses
Shame/guilt
Like embarrassment, we see lowered eyes, hunched posture.
Unlike embarrassment, no smile (no sheepish grin) - facial expression may appear
sad.
Both are closely related to each other
Keltner (1995)
College students correctly distinguish shame vs embarrassment facial expressions
more than half the time.
Keltner and Buswell (1996)
College students can't distinguish "ashamed" vs "guilty" expressions.
No differences yet identified between shame and guilt responses.
Shame vs guilt: Elicitors
Common elicitor
Are shame and guilt triggered by same situations? Generally yes
People feel them when they think they've done something morally wrong, or when
failed to live up to their own or other's expectations.
Scope of interpretation
Key difference between thoughts of situation but not nature of situation
Shame (global)
When youve done something morally wrong and you attribute it to you
interpret negative event as evidence that entire self is defective/inadequate
I am such a bad person
Guilt (local)
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Focus on the specific event; feel bad about your actions but not who you are as
a person
Negative emotion you feel when youve done something morally wrong, but
you consider it a one off
Niedenthal, Tangney, & Gavanski (1994): What would have created a different
outcome?
Shame: "If only I weren't so stupid"
Guilt: "If only I hadn't done such-and-such"
Shame and guilt are elicited by same situation, and trigger different responses,
they differ in object of emotion
Remember: in self conscious emotions, object being judged in belief. So in
shame, object of emotion is entire self. In guilt, object of relevance judgement
is specific behaviour of the situation
Object in shame is global interpretation of actions
Object in guilt is localized and specific
Shame vs guilt: Approaches to social interaction
4. O'Connor, Berry, and Weiss (1999): Shame-prone people experience:
More problems with interpersonal relationships;
Higher social anxiety
Less empathy
More anger towards others
Why greater anger if shame = feeling bad about oneself?
Tangney, Wagner, Hill-Barlow, Marschall, and Gramzow (1996)
Shame-prone people
Attribute negative outcomes to their global, stable inadequacies
Feel they have no control over their outcomes
Feel other's disapproval strongly
Therefore: Feel disapproval is unfair; more angered by perception of other's
disapproval
Guilt-prone people
Take more responsibility for actions
Feel more control over whether they will repeat actions leading to negative
outcomes
Therefore, defensive anger is unnecessary
So, are they different?
No? Evidence
Similar expressive responses
Similar subjective feelings
Similar elicitors
From functional perspective, not much difference
Yes? Evidence
Involve different appraisals/interpretations of eliciting situation
Shame-prone: Low sense of control over one's own outcomes
Guilt-prone: High sense of control over outcomes, believe they can make ammense
and avoid behaviours in future
Whether they are different depends on how you define emotion, but by most criteria for
differentiating emotion says they are same emotions
Pride
Definition of pride
The one positive self-conscious emotion
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Tracy and Robins (2004)

The emotion felt when someone takes credit for causing a positive outcome that
supports a positive aspect of his or her self-concept.
That is, feel pride when:
Something good happens
Person feels they caused (and can take the credit for) the good event
The event confirms the person's positive self-image
Thus has to relate to something important to us
Only when these three conditions are met, when you experience pride. Ie, if you
win a competitive comp and win, you feel pride. If it is an easy comp, youll
experience happiness but not prode
Expressions of pride
Distinguishable from other positive emotions?
Pride expression opposite to that of shame/guilt. "I want you to see me clearly right
now":
Posture: Head tilted back slightly; Sit/stand up tall; Arms on hips or above head
Face: Slight smile, but usually small
These displays identifiable as pride by subjects in US and Italy (Tracy & Robins,
2004)
In opposition to embarrassment, pride looks like behaviour of high-status/powerful
animals/people.
The role of comparative psychology
Animals in psychological research
Easier to study
Fewer ethical concerns
Direct interest in the species
Comparative
Simpler models
Challenging implicit assumptions
Self-conscious emotions: Unique to humans?
What are the cognitive capabilities required for the self-conscious/social/secondary
emotions?
How are they demonstrated?
Do other animals have them?
Difficulties in studying animal cognition
Over-interpreting cognitive capabilities
Under-interpreting cognitive capabilities
Difficulties in interpreting animal cognitive capabilities
Over-interpreting cognitive capabilities
Explaining our own behaviour
Humans draw upon knowledge of self, own cognitive capacities, own decision-
making capabilities when trying to understand:
Causes of our own behaviour
Causes of others behaviour
Often also causes of animal behaviour
Anthropomorphism: Calling upon human qualities when trying to explain animal
behaviour. We attribute higher cognitive abilities
Clever Hans
Orlov Trotter horse
Early 1900's, owner Wilhelm von Osten claimed to have taught Hans
 110

Arithmetic calculations (subtraction, addition, multiplication, division and

fractions)
Calculation of time and days
Understanding, reading and spelling German
Standard operant conditioning techniques
Hans responded by stamping
Correct responses rewarded with food
The Hans Commission
Simple training or higher level 'rational' calculations?
Hans Commission, 1904
Circus owner, retired army captain, retired school teacher, veterinary surgeon,
university academic, director of a zoological park, others.
Conclusion: No trickery involved; training procedures akin to those used with
children
Enter the psychologist...
Psychologist Oskar Pfungst studied Hans scientifically in 1907
Correct responses only under certain conditions:

Hans' responses cued

Unconscious displays of tension in questioner's posture and facial expression
As approaching correct answer: increase in tension
When correct answer reached: tension released
Simple operant conditioning - no higher level comprehension
Involuntary
Pfungst unable to prevent involuntarily cueing Hans himself!
90% of people produce such behavioural cues in response to human tapping
out answer
Pfungst Consequences for research
Importance of separating experimenter and subject to prevent cueing
E.g. 'double-blind placebo' drug trials
So: Distance experimenter from subject in animal studies?
Problems with distancing from animals
Social nature of many animal behaviours distance from animals
E.g., argued by Irene Pepperberg (studying African Grey Parrot 'Alex') and
Gardner and Gardner (studying chimpanzee 'Washoe') argue that many animal
behaviours are social and wont be displayed without development of social
relationship.
Distanced investigation will fail to demonstrate full capabilities in many
species
45. Anthropomorphism
E.g. great apes researchers Diane Fossey (gorillas), Jane Goodall
(chimpanzees) and Birut Galdikas (orangutangs) criticised for over-
estimating ape cognitive capabilities
enhanced by socio-emotional connections. For example, just as a proud mum
over emphasises her clever child after walking, this can happen with animals
 111

Under-interpreting cognitive capabilities

Can also under-interpret cognitive capabilities in
Animals
Children
(any non-linguistic subject)
Difficulty
Demonstration of many cognitive capabilities depends upon other capabilities such
as language, developed motor system, etc.
Non-verbal behavioural demonstrations of high-level cognitive processing difficult
to devise
This issue frequently arises in developmental psychology
Examples
Piaget criticised for underestimating child cognitive capabilities at different
developmental stages
Many tasks required children to have range of other capabilities to demonstrate
certain developmental aspects
Same occurs in some animal studies
Cognitive requirements for self-conscious emotions
Introduction
Unlike basic emotions, self-conscious emotions require
Self concept
Allows the formation of beliefs about the self
Beliefs about the self act as objects of self-conscious emotions.
Theory-of-mind (Premack & Woodruff, 1978)
Recognition that others have thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, etc.
Allows consideration of situations from the perspective of another
In other animals?
Cognitive complexity means self-conscious emotions 'appear' evolutionarily
advanced
Seen in other animals?
Self-concept
Sense of self
Requires knowledge of your independence as a physical entity
Primarily demonstrated through tests of self-recognition
Mirror self-recognition
Fail
Many birds/animals; children before age 18-24
Object in mirror seen as other individual
Pass
Children from age 18-24
Object recognised as self
Common paradigm
Sticky dot/dot of ink placed on child's forehead
Children past this milestone direct attention to the anomaly on their face
Animals?
VIDEO: Self-concept
Chimpanzees pass dot test. To be self-aware means you can engage in mental time
travel
Theory of Mind
Extension of sense of self that requires understanding that others have internal mental
 112

worlds, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, etc.

Takes longer to develop in humans: Seen around age 3-4
Cognitive requirements
Self
Cognitive manipulation of information about beliefs, intentions, thoughts, etc.
Requires understanding distinction between
Abstract vs concrete
Subjective vs objective
Mental vs physical
Particularly, the recognition that:
humans have thoughts and beliefs, that are
self knowledge that we have conscious thoughts, feeling and beliefs
part of an internal, subjective world separate from the physical world separate from
physical world, and that
thoughts/beliefs about the physical world can be incorrect
Demonstrating theory of mind
Conceptual knowledge
Whether child has mature understanding of concrete/physical vs abstract/mental
distinctions can be used to indicate whether they have achieved theory of mind
Example
Infants reify subjective experiences (believe mental experiences are physical)
Past age 3-4, realisation that contents of mind are private and non-physical
Reification is about believing that non-physical things are actual physical
entities ie young children think others can see their dreams. They reify their
mental experiences. Eventually they realise their mental experiences are
private.
Obtaining theory of mind opens up a range of social capabilities including
Perspective-taking: The ability to take the perspective of another person ie
describing what someone would and wouldnt be able to see from a certain angle
Deception: Intentional action to deceive others, gain ability to lie
Theory of mind enables self-conscious emotions
Theory of mind in animals is difficult to determine as?
46. Can't describe their understanding of the world to us
47. Ongoing debate in literature
VIDEO: Theory-of-mind in children
Differentiating subjective from objective experiences.
Self-conscious emotions in animals
Introduction
Self-conscious emotions in animals
Blushing is uniquely human
Pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, etc.
Lack of dedicated expressive response in most > primary detection through self-
report in humans
Dedicated expressive response of blushing for embarrassment, but
Embarrassment likely to be specific to humans
Edelmann (2001):
"It is difficult to imagine embarrassment except in a few, very social mammals.
Even if dogs and perhaps a few other species are capable of embarrassment, no
one has ever reported seeing a nonhuman animal blush. As far as we can tell,
blushing may have arisen specifically during human evolution.
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Other signs? ...

Maybe signs suggesting some animals have cognitive capabiltiies underlying self
conscious emotions
Sympathy and empathy
Two ways that other's emotional displays affect our own emotions...

Emotional ('mood') contagion

Automatic process of 'catching' other's emotions
Presumed triggered by non-verbal communication
Does not require higher level cognitive capabilities
Sympathy and empathy
Sympathy: Cognitive awareness of other's emotional state
Empathy: Cognitive awareness of other's emotional state PLUS consonant
emotional feeling
DO require higher level cognitive capabilities
Empathy has own emotional content
Compassion and cruelty
Understanding another's emotions allows for motivated behaviour to alter their emotions
Sympathy/empathy > compassionate behaviours
(Serve purposes of social cohesion, group protection?)
Cruelty > deliberate creation of suffering/unhappiness in others
If animals have theory of mind, and understand the consequences of their actions
on other's emotional states, can we ever describe aggressive behaviours in animals
as 'cruelty'?
VIDEO: The Demonic Ape
Frodo Claire, Frodooooo!
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Week 12: Cognition in stimulus relevance connections

Role of cognition in motivation
Various roles cognition plays can be divided into sense relevance connection roles and
relevance response connection
Cognition in sense-relevance connection
Cognitive skills give us new objects for motivational appraisal ie beliefs about
the world and about our own and other people's feelings
Abstract concepts (theories, ideas, political movements, etc.)
Meta-beliefs
Self-knowledge (via self-concept)
Others beliefs and intentions (via theory of mind)
Causal reasoning (via attributions)
Cognition in relevance-response connection
Expectancies
Decisions

Introduction to Attribution Theory

Attribution theory
Explores the nature of causal reasoning: The way we form beliefs about the causes
of our own and other people's
Cognition in stimulus appraisal
Applicable to all stimuli, but research focus on appraisal of mental concepts of
Behavioural intentionality (why did X perform the behaviour they did?)
Subjective experiences (what is X feeling and why are they feeling it?)
Can talk about both in respect to the self or other people

Attribution research
Popular area of investigation
Forsterling (2001): Average of 400 articles per yr since 1980
Multiple theories
3 most influential (Heider; Kelley; Weiner)
Some focus on evaluations of others
Heider
Kelley
Some focus on evaluations of self
Weiner
Some attempts at synthesising the different approaches
Martinko and Thomson (1998): Synthesis of Kelley and Weiner
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3 assumptions of attribution theories

Jones, Kanouse, Kelley, Nisbett, Valins & Weiner (1972)
Assumption 1. We attempt to determine causes of our own, and other's behaviour
Why...
Adaptive? Shermer (1997)
Causal reasoning is evolutionarily adaptive - helps us understand and thus
control our environment
Need for control? Pittman and Pittman (1980)
Attributions stem from a need to control the environment
Interpreting behavioural intentions of others directs our responses
Assumption 2. Assignment of causes is rule-based, not random
Assumption 3. Attributed causes affect behavioural motivation
Attributions are appraised by motivational mechanisms (e.g. emotions), potentially
motivating behaviour
Different attributions > different emotional appraisals > different behaviours
Crucial idea is that different attributions (explanations) will lead to different
emotional appraisals which will lead to different behaviors
CBT is most successful form of therapy
Attribution theories: Evaluations of others
Heider's Nave Psychology
Heider (1944, 1958): Initiated attribution theory
Nave psychology
48. Petri and Govern (2004), p318: "how the average [untrained] person (who is
presumably naive about how behaviors are objectively determined) decides what
are the causes of a behavior".
People attribute behaviour of other's to either two possibilities
Dispositions (actor's personality characteristics)
Abilities
Motivation (intention)
Motivation (effort)
Situation (aspects of the environment the behaviour occurred in)
Difficulty
Luck
Behaviour is always a result of the interaction between the person and the
situation they find themselves in
Kelley's Covariation Theory
Kelley (1967, 1971, 1972, 1973)
Attributions = attempts to specify the causal relationship between events
Attributional process
Rational, 'nave scientist' approach - Wanted to understand process by which we
form an attribution
Saw attribution process as process of elimination
Generating a series of hypotheses concerning event cause
Eliminate unlikely options using evidence and logic
Kelley's 3 dimensions of causal attribution - Three cognitive tools we can use when
trying to explain something
1. Covariation and Distinctiveness
Compare current to past instances of events when making attributions
Example
Last exam: Friend studied hard, got a good grade
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This exam: Friend didnt study, got a poor grade

What differs (covaries) between the two: Study effort
2. Consensus
Examine other people's behaviour/reactions to the situation
E.g. How did other people do in an exam.
Other people consistently did well or poorly > situational attributions
(easy/hard test)
Some people did well, others did poorly > dispositional attribution
(differences in effort/ability are important)
3. Consistency
Frequency of the behaviour
E.g. Your friend always does well in exams > dispositional (effort or ability)
If everyone did really well or poorly, more likely to form a situational attribution
Of there is variation, we are more likely to use dispositional attributions
Attribution theories: Evaluation of self
Weiner's Attributional Analysis of Achievement Behaviour
Factors involved in our interpretation of the outcome of achievement-related events
(Achievement related outcomes - successors and failures)
4 elements to which we can attribute our successors or failures
Ability, effort, task difficulty, luck which can be categorized across two
dimensions
2 Dimensions
Internal vs external
Stable vs unstable

Dimensions
Internal (dispositional)
Ability
Largely result from past experiences
Past success > belief in ability in that area
Past failure > belief in inability in that area
Also influenced by observation of success/failure of others
Succeeding where others fail > belief in our own ability
Effort
Effort judged by time spent, muscular effort, etc.
External (situational)
Task difficulty
Inferred through % of people who usually succeed
Most people succeed > easy
Most people fail > difficult
Luck
Success or failure ascribed to luck when we cannot identify a relationship
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between the outcome and our behaviour or environmental consistency

Stable
Remain relatively consistent across instances of the situation
Ability
Task difficulty
Unstable
Vary across instances of the situation
Unpredictable and unstable
Effort
Luck
Revisions
Frieze (1976)
Found evidence for Weiner's 4 categories
Also found a role of mood, effects of other persons, incentive to do well,
suggesting attribution is more complex than Weiner thought.
Abramson, Seligman and Teasdale (1978)
Interested in explaining learned helplessness
Added a 3rd dimension: global-specific dimension
Global: Attributions that generalise across different situations beyond current-
I'm not good at anything.
Specific: Attributions that characterise a narrow range of factors and focus on
here and now- I failed because it was a hard exam
Weiner's attribution process and emotions
Different emotions associated with different attributions for own behaviour
Idea that success > pride and failure > shame is oversimplified
Recall 3 requirements for pride: good outcome, self-caused, in line with personal
goals
Shame/guilt similarly require attribution of responsibility (self-caused)
Self-conscious emotions require internal attributions
Thus attribution style plays an important role in determining appraisals
Self conscious emotions only arise when you attribute something to yourself
Primary difference between shame and guilt is that shame is a reflection of
yourself

Martinko and Thomson (1998)

Different approaches
Kelley: Focus on attributions of other's behaviour
Weiner: Focus on attributions of self's behaviour
Martinko and Thomson (1998)
Synthesis, drawing on similarities between the two approaches
Both theories postulate 3 dimensions
There is common ground hinting all of them
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Introduction
Attributions are interpretations of cause of behaviour - not necessarily accurate
c2 main xauses of inaccuracy
Rarely have all the info needed to ensure accurate interpretations.
Attributional biases tendencies to use certain attributional styles:
Other-as-object biases: Biases in trying to understand other people's
behaviours
Self-as-object biases: Biases when trying to understand our own behaviour
Other-as-Object biases
False consensus effect
Assumption that other people think the same way that we do
Projecting your values and beliefs onto others
Confused why someone likes something you dislike
Well known and long studied (e.g. Katz & Allport, 1931)
Ross, Greene, and House (1977)
Asked college students about willingness to carry large advertising sign around
campus, then predict other student's responses to same request.
Both those who said yes and no estimated 2/3rd of students would respond in the
same way
False consensus effect: Causes
Causes: Motivational or cognitive?
Wolfson (2000)
1st yr uni. students asked if they'd used cannabis (marijuana) or
amphetamines, and to estimate percentage of all students who use each drug.
Users' estimates higher than non-users
Motivation? Motivated to reinforce self-competence and gain social support by
claiming our behaviour is the norm especially when they are undesirable
behaviours
Cognition? Selective exposure to those similar to us may lead to a skewed
assumption of population norms. That is. We associate with people we are similar
too leading us to have selective exposure and a skewed bias
False consensus effect: Causes and consequences
Causes: Personality?
Attributions affected by our personality
Dodge and Coie (1987)
Highly aggressive and unaggressive boys shown videos of events of
ambiguously-caused events. Subjects asked to explain causes of actions
Those with aggressive personality types explained child's actions as deliberate
and intentional even when facial expressions displayed otherwise
Behavioural consequences
Changes in public health messages
Example: Adverts to reduce binge drinking in college students
Appropriate but ineffective: "Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't
make it right"
Perkins, Meilman, Leichliter, Cashin, and Presley (1999): Incidence of binge
 119

drinking is lower than often thought - Colleges focusing now on emphasising

that binge drinking is the exception, not the norm
False consensus effect can be used to advantage: If you believe a behaviour
you perform is the norm even if it's not right, you're likely to continue, If you
believe you're the odd one out, people more likely to stop
Fundamental Attribution Error -correspondence bias
Tendency to attribute other's behaviour to dispositional (stable, internal) characteristics
and downplay the influence of situation.
Jones and Harris (1967)
Method
Asked students to read essays about Fidel Castro supposedly written by fellow
students
Essays + or - towards Castro
Two groups: Told essay writers could either choose or not choose position to
take towards Castro
Results
Ss in BOTH choice and no-choice groups made dispositional attributions
(though to a lesser degree in no-choice group)
Both groups still assumed people were pro Castro even if they were forced to
write pro Castro or given choice
Self-as-Object biases
Actor-observer bias - Flip side of fundamental attribution error
Tend to attribute own behaviour to situation and others to disposition
Example: What do you think of the actor in these situations.
Another driver cuts in front of you - If you are cut off, you use dispositional
YOU cut in front of another driver - If you cut off, you use situational
Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, and Marecek (1973)
Male college students asked to write essays about
Why they chose their current girlfriend and current major
Why their best friend chose their girlfriend and major
Self explanations = situation (positive qualities of girlfriend and major)
Other explanations = dispositions (friend's likes and dislikes)
Actor-observer bias: Causes
49. Jones & Nisbett (1972): Actors and observers perceive information from different
perspectives/points of view
Availability of information
Actor is aware of their background and previous experience
Observer judges actor's actions on the basis of limited information
Attentional differences between actor and observer
Actor focusses on envt. in order to interact with envt. successfully. Will not
focus on own responses because cannot directly observe them.
Observer focusses on actor as the cause of the actor's behaviour.
Storms (1973)
Phase 1
4 subjects; 2 asked to have a short, instructed conversation (actors); other 2 to
observe.
Phase 2
Videos taken in Phase 1 from actor's and observer's perspectives.
Actors watched themselves from observer's perspective (3rd person perspective).
Observer's watched actors from actor's perspective (1st person perspective)
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Results
Phase 1 had standard actor observer bias
Distributional (qualities of person), situational (environment)
Phase 2: opposite effect found, Actors talked about their own dispositional
qualities whereas observers used situational
Thus physical perspective you have when trying to explain behaviour is key to
determining whether you will use situational or dispositional explanations
Self-serving bias
Tendency to take credit for success, avoid responsibility for failure
Attribute own behaviour as
Success: internal (low consensus), stable (high consistency), global (low
distinctiveness)
Failure: Opposite: Specific rather than global
Example: Johnson, Feigenbaum, & Weiby (1964)
Ss asked to teach maths to confederates posing as students
If student did well > high teaching ability
If student did poorly > poor ability of student
Self-serving bias is
Long-known (Heider, 1958; Johnson, Feigenbaum, & Weiby, 1964; Miller &
Ross, 1975)
Robust (Campbell & Sedikides, 1999; Zuckerman, 1979)
Seen in Western and non-Western cultures (e.g., Jain & Mal, 1984; Nathawat &
Singh, 1997)
Self-serving bias: Causes
Motivational factors
Motivated to maintain positive self-image as well as to assess our abilities
accurately (Duval & Silvia, 2002; Sedikides & Strube, 1997; Silvia & Duval,
2001)
Cognitive factors: Errors of information processing?
1. We usually engage in behaviours we except to succeed at
2. Anticipated events tend to produce internal attributions (Miller & Ross, 1975)
Therefore: Internal attribution for success is logical
But
Most evidence suggests its motivational
The bias continues even when cognitive factors are controlled (e.g., Miller, 1976;
Sedikides, Campbell, Reeder, & Elliot, 1998)
So: self-serving bias primarily motivational
Summary of attributional errors
Other-as-object biases
False consensus effect Assumption that other people think the same way that we
do
Fundamental attribution error Attribute other's behaviour to disposition
Self-as-object biases
Actor-observer bias Attribute self's actions to situation
Self-serving bias Tendency to take credit for success, avoid responsibility for
failure
Introduction to cognitive consistency theories
Hedonistic judgements of cognition itself, particularly logical consistency between
beliefs/behaviours.
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Consistency theories
A number proposed since 1950's
All assume
Logical Inconsistency between thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours is
unpleasant
People motivated to decrease such inconsistencies/reduce this tension
Balance theory
Heiders (1946) Balance Yheory
Relationships between people/objects can be positive or negative
Liking relationships: John likes Amy (+), or John doesnt like Amy (-)
Belonging relationships: Amy belongs to the local book club (+), Amy doesn't
belong to the local book club (-)
Analysed in triadic situations
The relationships we have tend to be balanced meaning that Liking and belonging
are types of relationships and can be positive or negative
Balanced determined by multiplying signs together of different relationships.
(balanced = +, unbalanced = -)
Thus, balanced is when they result in a positive
Ie john and Aimee like each other, john likes house and Aimee likes house, 3
positives make a positive. Thus, triad is balanced or

John likes Aimee, aimee doesn't like house, john doesn't either = positive

Resolving imbalance
Unbalanced situations motivate us to the change the situation in order to rebalance the
situation

John motivated to restore balance

Two positives times a negative leads to negative and therefore John will be motivated to
restore balance by changing one of the relationships
Dislike Amy?
Convince Amy to like house?
Dislike house?
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Problems with balance theory

Petri and Govern (2004): Balance theory...
Privides good foundations for cognitive dissonance theories
Doesn't describe how we resolve imbalances
Doesn't consider degree of relationship between out of balance items
Doesn't describe how much imbalance required for motivation to re-balance
General lack of specificity
Too general
Not detailed enough
Cognitive dissonance theory
Festinger (1975)
Motivated to maintain consistency between our beliefs/attitudes/opinions and
behaviour
Possible relationships between our cognitions and the world include
Consonant (consistent with each other)
Irrelevant (different things)
Dissonant (logically inconsistent)
Example: You smoke (belief about behaviour) but know smoking is bad for
you (belief about consequences of actions)
Dissonant cognitions > negative motivational state > 'drive' to resolve the dissonance
Options for resolving dissonance
1. Change behaviour
Smoking example: Quit smoking
2. Change the belief/attitude
Smoking example: "Smoking isn't all that bad; after-all, cigarettes are not illegal"
Cohen (1962)
Behaviour > change in attitudes
Participants asked to write essays arguing for a position they opposed
improvement in opinion towards the previously opposed position
3. Add consonant cognitions
Additional cognitions which reduce the dissonance without changing the
conflicting elements
De/re-valuing of the situation
Smoking example: "I smoke, and smoking is bad, but"
"Smoking also relaxes me"
"By the time I get cancer, scientists will have a cure for it"
"I can quit any time"
Choosing a resolution strategy
Easiest strategy is chosen
50. Smoking example
Change cognition?
Very difficult to deny you smoke or that smoking causes health problems
Change behaviour?
Difficult to give up smoking
Add consonant cognitions!
Most common resolution of dissonance in smoking
Demonstrations of cognitive dissonance
Tested through induced compliance (Festinger, 1957)
Will experience dissonance when you can't justify your behaviour
Unjustifiable contraction between public behaviour and private attitudes > dissonance >
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alteration of attitudes
No/low dissonance
Contradiction: Dislike a dictator but publicly claim allegiance to them
Low dissonance because sufficient self-justification for the contradiction (fear of
punishment)
High dissonance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)
3 subject groups performed repetitive, boring task
Suggestion was that 1$ group had insufficient justification for convincing others
that experiment was interesting which was contrasting to what they had believed,
so the inconsistency lead to a change in their attitudes causing them to believe that
the experiment must have been more interesting than thought
20$ group had clear justification for discrepancy between their experience and
what they had to d
Contrary to learning theory, dissonance theory predicts small rewards/punishments
are MORE influential in changing motivation than large rewards/publishments.

Post-decisional dissonance and selective exposure to information

Example: buying a new car
Two cars you like, but can only afford one
Eventual choice creates dissonance
Re-valuing of original options
Increase perceived value of chosen car
Decrease perceived value of rejected car
Selective exposure
Focus/sensitive to information supporting your choice
Avoid information suggesting choice was wrong
Example: Brehm (1956)
Women asked to rate two products before and after being told they could choose one to
keep
Products of clearly different value
Choice easy as alternatives varied significantly in value
Pre- and post-choice ratings very similar
Products of very similar value
Choice more difficult to make
Rating for chosen object increased over pre-choice rating
Rating for non-chosen object decreased
Choosing between two similar products created dissonance > change in cognitions
(attitude) to reduce dissonance
Festinger, Riecken & Schacter (1956): When Prophecy Fails
Field study of religious cult
Cult group believed city would be destroyed by flood on 21st December
Small group of followers met at leader's house on the night, awaiting the disaster
World didn't end > dissonance
How to resolve?
Question belief? - We use easiest solution available to reduce dissonance
Festinger et al. predicted presence of surrounding social support and
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consonant behaviours meant questioning truth of belief unlikely

Bring in other cognitions to explain discrepancy!

Leader 'received' message at 4:45am - group's devotion had saved them!
increase in strength of belief and recruitment behaviours
Practical uses of dissonance theory
Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, and Fried (1994)
Subjects asked to write and video record speech on importance of condom use for high
school students
5. Two groups
Group 1: Control
Group 2: Subjects completed questionnaire on their past failures to use condoms
(creating dissonance)
Subjects given opportunity to purchase condoms
Group 2 subjects purchased more condoms than group 1 subjects
Challenges to dissonance theory
Criticisms
Dissonance theory...
is vague (McGuire, 1966) and lacks precision (Aronson, 1968).
doesn't adequately explain which dissonance-reducing technique will be employed
Alternatives
Self-perception theory (Bem, 1967)
We observe (and then judge) own behaviour similarly to the way others observe our
behaviour
Recall Festinger & Carlsmith (1957). Outside observer would predict
$1 subjects: behaviour not justified by reward (behaviour attributed to
dispositional- enjoyment)
$20 subjects: behaviour justified by reward (behaviour attributed to reward)
Observer (with no dissonance) reaches same conclusion as subject, so dissonance not
necessary to explain result
Self-judgements made on basis of publicly available information. That is attribution
theory!
Aversive motivation from inconsistent behaviours and attitudes unnecessary to explain
findings.
Conclusions
Evidence for and against a motivational effect of dissonance
(Some results still difficult to account for without a motivational component)
Revisions to cognitive dissonance theory proposed
Aronson (1992)
Cooper and Fazio (1984)
Stone and Cooper (2001)
Is consistency all important?
Individual differences in desire for belief-consistency
Cialdini, Trost and Newsome (1995): Preference For Consistency scale
High scorers like consistency, experience frequent dissonance and are
motivated to reduce it
Low scorers appear to prefer unpredictability; not motivated to reduce
dissonance
Cultural differences in desire for belief-consistency
Heine and Lehman (1997); Kashima, Siegel, Tanaka, and Kashima (1992)
 125

Collectivist cultures (Japan, Korea) less concerned with maintaining

consistency than individualistic cultures (USA, Australia)
If dissonance is caused by inconsistencies, then it is based more on cognitive
style and culture rather than being hard wired
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Week 13: Cognition in relevance-response connections

Introduction to cognition in relevance-response associations
Role of cognition in motivation
Attributions (stimulus-relevance connection)
Expectancies (relevance-response connection)
Decisions (whether relevance-response connection is triggered or not)

Expectancy
Beck (1978)
Attribution = belief that Y (outcome) WAS CAUSED BY X (e.g. behaviour) -
With attributions, the thing that is known is the effect or the outcome and the role
of cognition is to help construct an understanding of the cause
Expectancy = belief that X (e.g. behaviour) WILL CAUSE Y (outcome) -With
expectancies, you know the cause/behaviour. What you're trying to cognitively
construct is the effect or outcome of that behaviour. Ie if I behave in this way, what
will happen.
Primary difference is in the time of cognition relative to the event. Expectations
takes future oriented approach where as attributions take past approach

Many different areas of research into relevance-response cognitions

Game-theory approaches
Learning perspectives (extension of operant conditioning concepts)
Expectancy-value approaches
Attributional approaches
Expectancy-value and Social Loafing
Expectancy-value theory
Tolman (1932); Lewin (1938)
Motivated behaviour results from combination of needs for an emotion thats being
activated and the values of goals in the environment
Probability of behaviour depends on
Value of goal (i.e. motivational mechanisms)
Expectancy of obtaining the goal (learnt and/or constructed)
A highly valued goal may not generate behaviour if there is a low expectancy of
achieving the goal
Explored in a number of contexts
Social learning
Achievement motivation
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Social loafing...
Social loafing
Social loafing (the 'Ringelmann Effect')
Humans work together in social and professional groups
Benefits
Many hands make light work
Specialisation/expertise
Drawbacks
Responsibility for achieving outcome spread across the group
Belief that other's effort will lead to achievement of the goal
Expectancy-value theory says...
Behaviour determined by predicted relationship of individual effort to goal
achievement
So, if a goal is likely to occur irrespective of effort, effort will decrease.
Max Ringelmann (French agricultural engineer)
Late 1800s
Quantifying work efficiency of humans and draft animals
Asked humans to pull on a rope as if playing "tug-of-war"
Measured amount of force under two conditions:
Individual: Average force = 83.5kg
In groups of 7: Average force per individual = 65kg
The greater the group size, the lower the force per individual
Ingham, Levenger, Graves, and Peckham (1974)
Replicated Ringelmann's method and results
Confirmed the effect is due to decreased motivation caused by perceived number
of people in the group- influenced by perception of group size, not actual group
size
Idea is that belief of importance of effort in achieving something will determine
amount of effort invested. If you think you don't need much you won't put much in
Term 'social loafing' coined by Latane, Williams, and Harkins (1979)
Karau and Williams (1993)
Social loafing occurs across all genders, cultures and ages
Seen in a variety of cognitive, physical and evaluative tasks, including
Brainstorming
Maze navigation
Job evaluation
Advertisement evaluation
Swimming
How do past failures affect future effort?
Reactance versus Helplessness
Introduction
51. Expectancy can be based on
Learning: Previous experience of outcomes of actions
Cognition: Attributions for success/failure
if we succeeded or failed in something in the past, we will form attributions about
why and this cognitive construction will influence our beliefs later
Two possible responses to failure
Keep-going: Reactance (increased effort)
Give up: Learned helplessness (decreased effort)
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Learned helplessness - What determines whether we will use reactance or learned

helplessness
Seligman and Meier (1967) dog experiments
Phase 1:
Dogs placed in harnesses, divided into 3 groups (triadic design)
Group 1 (control): No shocks
Group 2: Dogs shocked, but could stop shock by pressing lever
Group 3: Wired in parallel with Group 2 dogs. Not given ability to turn
off the shocks (shocks appeared to stop at random as controlled by Group
2 dog)
Group 3 dogs learned to be helplessness; exhibited symptoms similar to
chronic depression
Phase 2:
Shuttlebox: Two sides, floor electrified on one side - dog can move freely
between the two over a low partition
Group 1 and 2 dogs quickly learnt to cross the partition
Group 3 dogs were slower to learn, or made no effort at all to escape the
shocks
Previous phase taught them their actions have no effect on shock-avoidance
Learned helplessness
Learned helplessness
"A psychological state involving a disturbance of motivation, cognitive processes,
and emotionality as a result of previously experienced uncontrollability on the part
of the organism." (Petri & Govern, 2004, p178)
Operant conditioning leading to a demotivation of behaviour
Also demonstrated in cats, fish, monkeys, rats, humans (Seligman, 1975)
Four key elements that define learned helplessness
Passivity (motivational deficit) - dogs would sit there and not try escape
Retardation of learning (associative retardation) dogs slow to learn
Somatic effects - various bodily effects ie helpless animals are less aggressive in
aversive/competitive situations
Reduction of helplessness with time/ some extinction over time
Learned helplessness and depression
Model for human depression?
Primary quality of both is that individual believes their actions have no effect on
the world
Original model
Helplessness and depression result from perceived disconnection between actions
and outcomes
But: Original model couldn't account for
1. Depressed patient's low self-esteem and self-blame for lack of control
2. Why some depressions are short-lived and others longer
3. Why the observed helplessness is sometimes specific and sometimes general
Reformulated model (Abramson, Seligman & Teasedale, 1978)
Uses attribution theory to overcome these limitations
1. Low self-esteem and self-blame (internal-external)
A patient may attribute lack of control to internal (dispositional) or external (situational)
factors
Situation (e.g. flood)
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Universal helplessness ("no-one would have control over") > Lack of personal
responsibility
Will not affect self-esteem or personal sense of control
Likely to make external attribution
Disposition (e.g. level of intelligence)
Personal helplessness ("others do fine, it is just me that doesn't") > Personal
responsibility
Belief that we lack the ability of others that allows them to control their situations
> attribution of personal helplessness > lowered self-esteem
Only experience low self esteem when it's dispositional
Motivational deficits in both, but low self-esteem only when dispositional attributions
made for lack of control
Depressed patients tend to attribute lack of control to the self > low self-esteem and self-
blame
2. Length of depression (stable-unstable)
Lack of control may be attributed to
Stable factors (e.g. intelligence) longer-lived helplessness
Unstable factors (e.g. luck) more transient helplessness
Depressed patients tend to make stable attributions for their helplessness, leading to
chronic helplessness
3. Specific versus general (global-specific)
Attributions of causal ineffectiveness can be global or specific
Specific: E.g. Test failure "I don't do well at tests" > helplessness in those specific
situations
Global: E.g. test failure "I'm incompetent at all academic work" > widespread lack
of behavioural motivation
6. Depressed individuals tend to make global attributions
Summary
By Martinko and Thomson' (1998) synthesised model of attributions, depressed
individuals attribute failure to:
Stable (high consistency) factors
Internal (low consensus) factors
Global (low distinctiveness) factors
Considerable debate and controversy around the attributional model of learned
helplessness
Reactance or helplessness?
Wortman and Brehm (1975)
Initial reaction to loss of control = Reactance
Ongoing lack of control = Learned helplessness
Mikulincer (1988)
Two subject groups
Group 1: Exposed to one unsolvable problem
Group 2: Exposed to four unsolvable problems
Both then measured
If subjects had an internal attributional style
Group 1 > reactance > better performance on a subsequent task compared to
individuals with external attributional style
Group 2 > stronger feelings of incompetence > decreased performance on
subsequent task
Initial reaction to failure is likely to be reactance and therefore we try to out in
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more effort. We only experience learned helplessness after continual failure

Pros and cons to having an internal attributional style
Difficult to know whether its good to have internal or external attribution
styles
Reactance and helplessness in developmental context
Achievement motivation
Carol Dweck
Developmental approach
Causal attributions regarding success or failure influence
Future expectancies of success
Emotions experienced in response to success/failure
There are individual differences in children's sense of control over their environment
Two types two types of children:
Mastery orientation: Set challenging goals for themselves in order to increase
competence; persevere in the face of failure
Helpless orientation: Avoid challenging goals; give up easily, prefer simple tasks
Attributions for failure (Diener & Dweck, 1978)

Attributions for success (Diener & Dweck, 1980)

Different goals (Dweck & Leggett, 1988)

Mastery orientation Helplessness orientation
Goals Internal goals External goals
Increasing sense of Performance goals
competence (gaining favourable
Compare to their past judgements)
performance Compare their
performance to objective
external standards
Important difference
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between goals that drive

their actions
Result of failure Reactance Helplessness
Failure at learning goals Failure in pursuit of
Promote strategies to turn performance goals
failure to success

Helpless and mastery-oriented individuals differ in the goals they seek

Source of different goals?
The different goals may result from different implicit theories about intelligence
Some people believe intellectual abilities are fixed
adopt performance goals to prove ability
perceive effort as indicating lack of ability ("if I have to work hard I must not be
very smart")
Some people believe intelligence is malleable
adopt learning goals to further develop that intelligence
view effort as one strategy for demonstrating competence
Summary
Abilities can be changed which leads to learning goals in order to increase sense of
competence. Make internal and unstable attributions for causes of failure. That is, you
are responsible for your failure but you can do things to change that which promotes
putting in more effort and trigger reactance response.
See ability as unstable
Helpless: ability as fixed, leads you to have performance goals (comparing to others),
have external attributional style (not your fault so nothing you can do) or internal but
stable attributional style (it's your abilities but they are fixed so you can't change them).
This will cause perception of lack of control causing feelings of helplessness

Changing the situation

Dweck (1975)
Retraining helpless children's failure attributions improves their performance.
Dweck (2002)
Praising children for intelligence > performance goals
Praising children for effort > learning goals, and thus increases task persistence
SO: To improve effort, encourage
Unstable attributions (necessary for belief that outcome can change)
Internal attributions (necessary for belief in personal influence over situation)
Summing up attribution and expectancy
Your predictions regarding the efficacy of your actions determine the effort you put in
Attributional/expectancy style is a very important aspect of human personality
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HUGE area of research

Many different models and approaches from many different schools of thought in
psychology
A need for integration
Decisions
Recap: Role of cognition in motivation
Attributions (stimulus-relevance connection)
Expectancies (relevance-behaviour connection)
Decisions (whether relevance-behaviour connection is triggered or not)
We need a decision system to decide which motivational system to express

The dual role of decisions

Two kinds of 'decision'
Prior cognitive decisions: Active cognitive predictions of our likely actions in a
future scenario a decision about what we should do
Actual real time behavioural decisions: the actual decision we make. Based on
what we are actually feeling
Example
How would you behave in a crisis situation?
Crisis situations trigger intense emotions which may override behavioural
decisions
Emotional or rational decisions?

Do emotions help or hinder the quality of our decisions?

Kalat and Shiota (2007): 3 types of rational decision
Logical reasoning
Value-based reasoning
Moral reasoning
Emotion versus cognition: Logical reasoning
Emotions and Logic
Large complex logical calculations?
Swets, Dawes, and Monahan (2000)
Computers better at predicting outcomes than humans
Choosing college applicants with greatest chance of later academic
success
Choosing best medical treatment for patients
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'Gut reaction' poorer than considering all influential variables

Simple logical calculations?

Logical reasoning appears infallible: Given A = B and B = C, A must = C
Humans fairly good on basic logical tasks...
Effect of emotions on logical reasoning (Blanchette & Richards, 2004)
Quiz 1: E.g. if one is in a library, then one sees books

Questions 1 and 2 above

Understand that library > books
Most Ss' respond correctly
Questions 3 and 4 above
Understand that books NOT > library
Average correct responses: q3 = 69%, q4 = 79%
May perform worse on the second than first quiz
Quiz 2: E.g. If someone is in a tragic situation, then she cries.

Questions 3 and 4 above

Understand that crying NOT > tragedy logic is the same
Average correct responses: q3 = 51%, q4 = 70%
Idea is that presence of emotion gets in the way of processing logic
Emotion versus cognition: Value-based reasoning
Somatic Marker Hypothesis (Damasio, 1996)
Decisions based on prediction of emotional outcomes - Motivational mechanisms define
goals, that is what is important to us and why
Prediction: Strength of predicted emotion will alter decision?
Sinaceur, Heath and Cole (2005)
How much would you decrease your consumption of beef if there was a small
chance it had been contaminated with:
Mad Cow Disease
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (cause of mad cow disease)
Information the same, but decision altered by emotional salience of the options
Accuracy of value-based decisions
Problem: Greater concern with perceived emotional consequence of outcome than
likelihood/probability of outcome
Gigerenzer (2004)
Increase in US road traffic after September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks
Increase in road fatalities in proceeding 3 months greater than total number killed
in the attacks
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We focus more on emotions, because I'm a plane it feels more dangerous

regardless of probability.
52. Lerner and Keltner (2000)
Personality-based
Fear-prone people over-estimate risk of death from floods, brain cancer, etc.
compared to anger-prone people.
Gambling
In humans, size of potential pay-off more important than actual probability of receiving
pay-off
Example
1. Would you risk $1 on a 50% chance of winning $2?
2. Would you risk $1 on a 1% chance of winning $100?
3. Would you risk $1 on a 0.0001% (one in a million) chance of winning one
million dollars?
Most are more likely to choose higher value outcome even though they are all identical
statistically but the greater the appeal of an outcome, the more likely they are to take the
risk.
Rachlin, Siegel, and Cross (1994)
50% US college students prepared to bet $10 on one-in-a-million chance of
winning one million
Terrible bet!
Human decisions based on emotional consequences of outcomes, NOT likelihood of
outcomes
Effect of current emotions (priming)

Lerner, Small and Loewenstein (2004): Emotional priming

Emotional induction (neutral or disgusting film)
Asked Ss'
Dollar value of a set of highlighter pens
Would they like to receive the pens
Emotions people experienced would alter judgements of value of objects
Idea is that disgust is an emotion of rejection, and thus they are more likely to
devalue something
They used priming effects.

Emotion versus cognition: Moral reasoning

The Framing Effect
Tversky and Kahneman (1981)
Scenario 1: 72% choose A over B
Scenario 2: 78% choose D over C
Yet
A and C are equivalent outcomes
B and D are equivalent
Why?
Scenario 1: Framed to emphasise a positive outcome (saving 200 people)
Scenario 2: Framed to emphasise negative outcome (killing 400 people)
Moral reasoning: relies on the ability of emotions in decision-making process
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People's moral decisions can be effected by the way a question is worded

VIDEO: Emotions in Decision-Making

Presented with Game scenario:
Gain perception: One group presented with a nice surprise: receives 20 for them to
take
Loss perception: Next group presented with nice surprise: 50, but only 20 to take.
They have to gamble for the thirty
Both the same.
However, those who felt they were losing out were more likely to gamble:
Prospect theory: perception of loss or gain drives human decision making in many
ways. We are not always rational of our decisions
In every case, amygdala (emotional centre) lights up
People can control their emotional responses in their frontal lobe,
Priming: responding to something more so after being primed than you originally
would have
Cold and hot beverage experiment
Free will versus determinism
Where does this leave 'the will'?
Throughout the unit, motivation and behavioural decisions described as 'stimulus'-driven
Previous module showed emotions frequently affect cognitive processing and decisions
If so, what role does 'the will' play in behaviour? Is there such a thing?
Free-will versus determinism debates
Philosophy
Long-standing philosophical debate
Behaviour is determined (by genes/environment/external agents, etc.) versus
humans have free-will and can freely choose their own behaviour
Free will contradicts fundamental beliefs of science
Causal relationships are deterministic and rule driven
A science assumes causation in a rule or law driven fashion
Science implies determinism
Only one historical thought of psychology that embraces free will: humanism

Psychology
Major historical division between humanism and other schools of thought in
psychology
Agency in psychology
Humanist approaches
Volitional control central to Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, etc.
Maslows Needs Hierarchy
Deprivation motivation (D-Motivation)
1st 4 levels of needs (biological, safety, attachment, esteem)
Triggered by deficiency or deprivation of needs - something out-of-
place/missing
Self-actualisation (B-Motivation) being needs
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Driven by positive qualities (truth, honesty, beauty, goodness, etc.) rather than
deprivation
Self-actualised individual is free to control what happens to them - not driven
by needs
Various theories regarding the concept of control
Competence (White, 1959)
Personal causation (deCharms, 1968)
Human agency (Bandura, 2001, 2002)
Self-determination (Deci & Ryan,1980, 1985, 2000)

Competence (Robert White, 1959)

Competence motivation
Capacity to interact effectively with one's environment
Effectance motivation
A drive to strive for competence
Occurs after basic drives satisfied
(Similar to Maslow's drive for self-actualisation)
Gaining mastery over environment important during childhood
Motivates exploratory behaviour until child can control that environment
Children exercise their control, which creates sense of efficacy which is just as
fulfilling as hunger
Human agency (Bandura)
The "capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life" (Bandura,
2001, p1).
4 key features

what we want in life

Self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan)
Approach to human motivation focussing on
Self-development
Self-regulation
Self-motivation
Argues that feelings of personal control and agency over ones life depend on
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satisfaction of these three needs which can be developed and encouraged through
right social relationships, right challenges and right feedback (positive over
negative)
Self-motivation/sense of personal agency associated with
Greater interest, excitement and confidence in life
High sense of vitality, self-esteem, general well being, good mental health
Three needs whose satisfaction promotes self-motivation
Summary
Summary of the humanist position
Established the importance of a feeling of competence/control over outcomes in
our lives
Humanistic people focus on need we have to control our environment, and the role
efficacy plays in our behaviour which has drawn attention to influences of our
attitudes
53. Does control = free-will?
Does 'feeling/believing that we are in control mean we have free-will?
Motivation still in charge?
Motivational mechanisms (drives, sensations, emotions, etc) are the things that
determine the relevance and our beliefs about the world have for us, as such it is
they that initiate and direct our behaviour
VIDEO: Free-will vs determinism
Conscious decision is second to unconscious brain activity.
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WEEK 14: Summing Up - Approaches to research , and effecting behavioural change

Summary and directions for motivation research
The final week!
Summing up motivation
Different perspectives approach
Most important: Understanding motivation is about understanding the factors that
determine why a particular piece of information about the world triggers a
particular pattern of responses
Ultimate connection between sensory info coming in and the particular responses
that are triggered. Resent the relevance of that information about the environment
has for the organism
Nature of relevance: is this good or bad for me?
Complex responses: connection between sense and response are mediated by
relevance centres to as motivational mechanisms. These function to cate generic
complex and flexible patterns of responses to enable an organism to meet a need.
Understanding motivation requires Understanding motivation requires
understanding the entire process between sense and response
Understanding the way beliefs and knowledge gain relevance to the organism
through their association with particular motivational mechanisms

What has been left out?

Development of motivation
Individual differences (i.e. personality)
Social factors in motivation
Observational learning (modelling)
Coaction/audience effects
Conformity/obedience
Bystander intervention
Motivation in learning theory context
Other aspects of emotional cognition
Emotional intelligence
Emotional regulation
Other 'needs', particularly described in humanism (e.g. Maslow's Need Hierarchy)
Nomothetic: species wide common mechanism/ways in which way things work
Motivation theory/research: The task ahead
Unifying core concepts
Many different theories developed around the same basic concepts (e.g.
attribution/expectancy)
Overlap and poor definition in terminology
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Each approach has its own terminology

Integration of related research
Social psych - cognitive psych personality (all relate to motivation in complex
inter-connecting ways)
Defining core functional mechanisms
How many discrete motivational mechanisms are there?
How best to categorise/group them?
Relationship between motivation and other fields of psychology needs to be
clarified
Identify full range of specific discrete motivational mechanism and group them together
categorically
Reflexes
Instincts
Sensory sensations
Drive
Arousal
Primary secondary emotions
Sexual
How do we distinguish natural kind mechanisms from linguistic constructions
How many discrete motivational mechanisms are there?
Motivation theory/research: Common approaches
3 approaches requiring integration
Lexical
Typically founded in everyday language and identify core themes. Ie early
instinct approaches said every behaviour was an instinct
Often the first stage
Analysis of everyday use of words categorisation and prototyping
E.g. trait approaches in personality

Functional
Description of functional systems
Identifying discrete functional systems - the discrete ways we are built to
receive certain info from our environments, process and respond
Neural
Explanation at a neural level
The task
Relating labels to functional processes and functional processes to neuroscience
Example: Love
Love and the 'Attachment Drive'
Introduction to love
What is love?
Love as an emotion?
Love referred to as emotion in every day life - Folk psychologically, Yes
Psychologists, No: Complex emotional experience, not simple basic emotion
Love as an attitude? (e.g. Rubin, 1970)
Combination of beliefs, feelings, behaviours, directed towards person, object
or category
Ruben: labeled love as attitude and strong learnt component of love
Not thought to be primary or secondary emotion
Cognitive in its nature
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Love as a script? (e.g. Skolnick, 1978)

54. Culturally learnt set of expectations about events, thoughts, feelings and
behaviours
55. Set of assumptions about what happens when someone is 'in love
How many types of love?
Lexical approach
The term 'love' used in many contexts
Different types of love?
Love as a single category?
Fehr and Russell (1991)
Participants listed the 'best examples' of love

What do prototypical forms of love have in common?

Close interpersonal relationships
Involves commitment to someone
Willingness to give even under difficult circumstances - selflessness
Knowing people for who they really are (accepting fault as well as strengths)
If so, function of love = building/maintaining close relationships
Function of live is about building and maintaining relationships. We benefit from
relationships so we have emotions that cause us to want them
Functional approach: Bowlby's 3 systems of love
Bowlby's (1979): 3 universal 'behavioural programs' underlying social bonding/intimate
human relationships
Attachment system
Caregiving system
Sex system
The programs are 'instincts' not emotions, but emotion plays a central role in each
About providing stereotyped behavioural programs to maintain relationships
Bowlby's 3 systems of love: Attachment system
A child's love towards their parent
Behavioural program facilitating child > parent bond
Hedonically Motivates child to stay near parents/caregivers
First system to emerge (develops as soon as child gains mobility)
Close proximity to parent > pleasure; separation or loss of parent > distress
Bowlby's 3 systems of love: Attachment system
Lexical labelling?
None in English language
Japanese word 'amae' comes close (Doi, 1973)
Feeling of pleasure from dependence upon another
Passive acceptance of another's nurturance and concern
Relying on someone without need to reciprocate (e.g. someone looks after you
when sick)
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Opiate system (endorphins) important for both

Pleasure of proximity in attachment
Pain on separation in attachment (psychological separation akin to physical pain)
Bowlby's 3 systems of love: Caregiving system
Compassionate love: parent > child love
Behavioural program facilitating parent > child bond
Motivates parent to nurture and protect offspring (especially when young and
helpless)
Two associated states
Sympathy/empathy
Concern, attention and empathic sadness for someone who is suffering
(Eisenberg et al., 1989)
A response to other's distress
Compassion
Desire to promote another's well-being (Shiota et al., 2004)
Also triggered by helplessness, cuteness, etc., not just signs of distress
Both motivate other-focussed, nurturant behaviour
Bowlby's 3 systems of love: Sex system
Sexual desire
Behavioural program facilitating sexual interest in prospective reproductive partners
Neurobiology of love
Oxytocin
Pituitary hormone involved in attachment, caregiving and sex
7. Oxytocin in attachment
Baby rats injected with oxytocin blocker don't develop preference for mother's
smell (Nelson & Panksepp, 1996)
Oxytocin in caregiving
Stimulates uterus to contract during childbirth
Stimulates mammary glands to produce/release milk
Facilities 'maternal' behaviours and bonding (mother-child skin-to-skin touch
releases oxytocin in mother)
Oxytocin in sex
Vasopressin (closely related to oxytocin) released in male and female brains during
sex and close proximity
Oxytocin/vasopressin released on close proximity to partner in many species
Species forming pair-bonds (Pair bonds mean species that mate for life) show
greater oxytocin (and vasopressin) release during sex than species lacking pair-
bonds (Carter, 1998; Young, 2002)
All suggest: Sex > attachment in some species...
Neurobiology of love
Oxytocin in sex and pair-bonding, example:
Prairie voles and meadow voles. Closely related species, but..
Suggest oxytocin underlies attachment and nurturing elements associated with sex
and pair bonding not sexual behaviours themselves
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Neurobiology of love
Why does adult love depend upon mother-infant relationship hormone?
Perhaps attachment + sexual types of love "tapped into" the pre-existing caregiving
system (Diamond, 2004)
Diamond believes care giving system is most fundamental basic system
Single system underlying 'attachment' and 'caring
Summing Up
Difficult to answer following questions
How many types of love? discrete natural kinds
Lexical approach says many?
Bowlby says three?
Neurochemical suggests one driven by oxitocin?
What is love?
Emotion: doesnt really meet classification criteria for emotion
Instinct suggested by Bowlby may miss out on cognitive complexity that
underlies love
Drive
So
Multiple approaches to investigating the nature of motivational systems
A full explanation requires bringing together work across these different
approaches
Changing Behaviour
Motivation from a functional-process perspective

Motivational mechanisms?
We have a range of motivational systems and thus ways things can be relevant,
are fixed. We can't learn new motivations, we can only form new associations
with existing motivations
Altering behaviour by changing motivational mechanisms - Focus on these if we want to
change someone's behaviour
Drugs (pain relievers, caffeine, anti-depressants/anti-anxiety medications, etc.)
- Core role of drug therapy is attempt to decrease or increase activation of
motivational mechanisms
Epigenetics: way environment can alter genes
- Stress may trigger obesity
- Prenatal nutritional intake
Neuro-surgery/electrical implants
- Removing parts of brain
- Electrical imparts Focus on these if we want to change someone's behaviour
 143

Environmental triggers?

Altering behaviour by changing the environment

Place yourself in situations to increase/decrease likelihood of exposure to stimuli
triggering desired/undesired motivations - Ie studying at library to avoid being in
distracting environment/motivational difficulties
Motivations at one time may enable us to alter kinds of stimuli we are exposed to
in future thus preventing or encouraging the activation of those motivational
systems we'd like to drive our behaviour Ie throwing our chocolate bars when
you're full
Difficulty is we are just trying to avoid this system which requires constant
vigilance and is not affective
Sense-relevance and relevance-response connections?

3 factors that determine stimulus-relevance/relevance-response association

Innate/hard wired: Stimulus-appraisal/response determined by natural selection
over generations (cannot do much about these)
Learnt: Stimulus-appraisal/response determined by temporal contiguity and prior
consequences of actions
Cognition: Cognitive construction of beliefs about the world/behavioural
outcomes'
Overcoming these factors means we need something that can permanently change
those drives which means we don't have to be vigilant or take drug etc
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Can we use Learning to alter behaviour

Classical conditioning - Enables association of two stimuli
Stimulus-relevance connection
Association of previously un-associated stimuli
One stimulus predicts occurrence of other
Previously neutral stimulus gains motivational significance because its presence or
absence predicts something that is motivationally relevant ie bell signals food
If we accept functional process approach to understanding, we would argue classical
conditioning won't have any direct motivational impact unless it is working off existing
connection between sense and relevance and where does that initial sense relevance
come from. Why does meat trigger salivation? Probably hard wired

Watson and Rayner (1920): Little Albert

Greatest use of classical conditioning is through attempts to remove negative
associations such as fears and drugs

Removing classically conditioned connections

Extinction
Continually present previously neutral stimulus on its own, without the
motivationally relevant stimulus
Flooding therapy: continually show them neutral stimulus without aversive one
Counter-conditioning
Associate the object/situation with another stimulus with competing motivational
relevance/that is incompatible with fear
Systematic desensitization
Gradual extinction + counter-conditioning
E.g. Wolpe (1958, 1973)
Clint lists anxiety-producing situations in increasing order of intensity
Client learns to relax on command
Client exposed to situations on the list, starting with least anxiety provoking
Triggered to relax (counter-conditioned association)
Maintain contact with situation./object until anxiety abates (extinction)
Operant conditioning
Relevance-response connection - Learning motivational consequences of actions
Association of behaviour with motivationally relevant stimulus - Behaviour encouraged
 145

or weakened by stimulus that already has motivational relevance

Interactions between classical and operant

Distinguish between
Primary reinforcers (pre-existing genetically-set relevance association)
Secondary/conditioned reinforcers
E.g. Money
E.g. other tokens
Tokens with animas: Cowles (1937) and Wolfe (1936)
Works in humans and animals
Chimpanzees originally taught to trade poker chips for grapes
Will learn new responses for poker chips as quickly as to grapes
Learn new responses even with delay of up to 1 hour between token presentation
and exchange for grape
Would beg/steal poker chips from each other
Tokens with humans: Fox, Hopkins, and Anger (1987) token economy
Long-term study on effect of token economy on accident/injury rates in 2 open-pit
mines
Trading stamps redeemable for various items at redemption stores
Given to employees as rewards for safe behaviour and withheld when
accidents/injuries occurred
At start, both mines had 3-8 times higher lost-work due to injury days than national
average
During last 10 years of token economy, the number of accidents and work days
lost to injury fell very significantly.
Employees rewarded for safe behaviour
Number of accidents fell significantly
Cognition
Cognitive Behavioural Theory
Cognition in changing behaviour
Classical and operant conditioning requires
Temporal contiguity (classical): Exposed to stimuli and motivational emotional
consequences to learn association
Prior consequences of actions (operant) - you have to actually perform response
and see outcomes of that behaviour to learn association
Cognition allows formation of beliefs without direct experience
Cognition determined the formation of complex beliefs about the world and these
beliefs may become associated with motivational systems.
In other words, cognition determines the object whose relevance is then judged
through connection to some motivational system and the expectations we have for
future outcomes
cognition allows us to alter beliefs without actual exposure
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Reminder: Cognition about BELIEFS, not motivation directly

How to change behaviour through cognition?
Example: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
See: Greenberger and Padesky (1995), Mind over Mood

Introduction to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Attributions > good or bad outcomes. Example:
You meet Alex at a party. He seems distracted and keeps looking over your
shoulder.

CBT is founded on attribution theory: the way you interpret the cause of ones behaviour
Attributional styles can be self confirming and self reinforcing ie if you withdraw, he
will start to think your boring and leave, confirming what you believe about yourself.
CBT is interested in changing these faulty thinking styles
Doesn't always focus on positive. Encourages realistic and broader thinking - Be aware
of all possible, positive, negative and neutral possibilities
Some people have a tendency towards attributions with negative interpretations
So what should I think
Positively? No
Critically? Yes (CBT encourages realistic thinking from multiple perspectives)
The process of CBT: Thought Record steps 1-3
1. Identify and rate moods in terms of intensity
Problem: Confusion between thoughts and moods
Rule of thumb
Mood = often can be labelled with 1 word
Thoughts = typically requires multiple words
If you can label something with a single word, it's probably a mood, but a few
words involves a thought
2. Identify automatic thoughts
Problem: Thoughts are automatic and difficult to identify
Tools
Sudden mood change indicates presence of thought
Look for words, images/mental pictures, or activation of memories
3. Identify hot thoughts
Thoughts associated with the strongest changes in mood
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The process of CBT: Thought Record steps 4-5

4. Challenge hot thoughts
Evidence for? (usually easy)
Evidence against? (harder)
We tend to dwell on information that supports our thoughts so it's hard to dwell
on info that may disconfirm it
5. Alternative/balanced thoughts
Once internalised, this improves attitudes, moods, avoids rumination,
Regular use of thought records leads to
Greater awareness of changes in mood and triggering thoughts
Automatic tendency to challenge thoughts (where is the evidence)
Automatically develop balanced/alternative explanations
Assumptions and core beliefs

CBT assumes that automatic thoughts often reflect broader and deeper assumptions
which themselves reflect core beliefs that we have about ourselves and others
Assumptions are if then or should statements
It's these core beliefs that drive individual differences in attributional style
How to identify core beliefs? (Core beliefs are absolute statements that cant be further
generalized)
Look for recurring themes in automatic thoughts ie Natasha doesnt like me
Downward arrow technique: identify automatic thoughts by asking
if this were true, what would be so bad about that?
what does this mean/say about me?
ie People don't like me, I have no friends this says I'm unlikable (core belief)
How to change them
Once identified core belief, challenge and change them through presenting
alternative views
Use thought challenging to provide critical assessment of underlying
assumptions and core beliefs and generate alternative and balanced thoughts
which overtime become more automatic
Hence why CBT is effective in long term
The End!
Things to keep in mind
Understanding motivation requires understanding full functional connection between
environment and nervous system
These are not complete causal accounts of behaviour
I hit him coz he insulted me: Motivation not described
I didn't go coz I felt sad: Trigger not described
Dont over/under-interpret psychological capabilities
Complex behaviours sometimes caused by simple processes
Simple behaviours sometimes rely on complex processes