Motivation And Emotion Worksheet Summary

University of Phoenix Material

Motivation and Emotion Worksheet

Discuss the following as a team and provide a brief summary of the each discussion. The word count for individual answers may vary but your responses should total 500- to 800-words for the entire worksheet.

1. Describe three approaches to motivation. Explain how each approach affects motivation.

Three different approaches to motivation are drive reduction, incentive, and arousal. According to Hockenbury & Hockenbury (2014), “In general, drive theories asserted that behavior is motivated by the desire to reduce internal tension caused by unmet biological needs, such as hunger or thirst” (p. 320). Basically, it comes down to the idea that all of the needs that have not been
met can push or drive a person to act in a certain way that will eventually lead to the drop in the drive. The incentive theory to motivation is a big one that many people take part in without even knowing it. Incentive theories are the thought that behaviors are motivated by goals or rewards. For example, many parents will use this motivation approach on their children when they are in school to help them get better grades and help them work towards a reward. Lastly, the arousal is another approach to motivation. The arousal theory revolves around the motivation of keeping a level to a person’s arousal that is ideal. It should not be too low or too high. This has much to do with tension when it comes to the motivation aspect. When a person is too bored, they can look for more stimulating experiences to increase a person’s arousal. On the other hand if a person’s arousal level is too high, a person will look for a less stimulating area.

2. Theorists vary on why we experience emotions. Discuss at least two different theories related to emotional experiences.

The James-Lange suggests that any emotional response is a direct result of an external source, or an external stimulus. This theory basically states that something must happen physically for emotion to surface. Emotions depend on the actual physical reaction at hand. A good example would be someone who is afraid of talking in front of large crowds. The hands begin to sweat, and the heart starts to pump faster. So, based on the physical reactions, your body will know that you are frightened resulting in emotion. The common sense theory is another one that caught my eye. The baseline behind this theory is "cause and effect". Cause refers to the stimulus, and effect refers to the emotional reaction that is a result of the stimulus. An example: If the American team had won the Olympic hockey game, the game being the stimulus, then their emotional response would have been celebrating, laughing, and overall happiness. However, the team lost the game that resulted in a negative emotion, sadness.

3. Choose one positive and one negative emotion related to being a student. Provide one example for each of how these emotions may affect your performance in class.

I chose to use two of the most basic emotions that most researchers agree upon, fear and happiness.
Emotions cannot get much more basic than that. As a student, the emotion of fear can be a huge negative impact. This fear can easily turn into a fight or flight situation. It can be fear of a class (like math), fear of failure, or even the fear of just becoming a college student. Fear can be detrimental to our performance in class. If we let the emotions take over and we can quickly lose motivation. We feel first and think later (Hockenbury & Hockenbury. 2014). Fear of failure can quickly take over our emotional state and overwhelm our minds. As this takes over we are no longer productive in our schoolwork and in turn fail because of our emotion –
fear.
Happiness, however, would positively aid our performance as students. As a basic emotion that we have all felt, we know how much more productive we can be when happy. As a student, earning a good grade in a course not only brings happiness but motivation to continue to be successful. The idea of starting my career goal makes me feel happy. I must first earn my degree and that all starts by becoming a student. David G. Myers believes that happiness is the key to many things in life (Hockenbury & Hockenbury. 2014). I for one could not agree more.
People can have mixed emotions about things, you may be feeling some fear/anxiety about becoming a student but you can also be excited and happy about what it will bring in the future.

4. Summarize two theories of intelligence. What are the benefits and drawbacks to intelligence testing?

Charles Spearman 's theory of General Intelligence suggested the fact that individual scores could vary on tests of different mental abilities, but that they would score the same on different tests pertaining to the same ability.
He believed that a factor called the g factor was responsible for a person’s overall performance on test of mental ability. Psychologist who follow this approach believe that intelligence can be described as a single measure of general cognitive ability and therefore they could accurately sum up a person’s intelligence by a single number such as an IQ score.
Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic theory of intelligence is broken up into three categories. Practical intelligence involves the ability to adapt to your environment and other cultures, commonly known as “street smarts”. Creative intelligence involves being able to deal with novel situations by drawing on existing skills and knowledge. The person is able to use past experiences to problem solve current situations. Analytic intelligence refers to the mental processes that occur when trying to problem solve, such as picking a problem solving strategy. While conventional intelligence tests are able to measure mental abilities, they do not evaluate the strategies that a person uses to solve a problem; this would be referring to a person’s analytic
intelligence.
The benefits to intelligence testing are being able to find academically gifted children and how intelligent they are on some levels. It can also help identify learning disabilities. While these are advantages, there are some disadvantages. As psychologist Louis L. Thurstone had stated, measuring with an IQ score was an overall average score of independent abilities and that this is consequently less important than a person’s specific pattern of mental abilities. (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2014)
Intelligence test do not test for creativity, aptitude and social skills, and in Robert Sternberg’s theory, all of these things can equal intelligence. When using an IQ as testing, it is a number; it does not show a person’s strengths or weaknesses. Two people can score the same and have very different strengths and weaknesses.

REFERENCES

Hockenbury D. H. & Hockenbury S. E. (2014) Discovering Psychology (6th ed.). New York, NY:
Worth Publishers.