We recall that emotion is a complex set of interactions among subjective and objective factors, mediated by neural hormonal systems, which can lead to a chain of events and happenings. Wenow look further to understand the experience of emotion, expressed in physiological, cognitive and psychoanalytic terms. We also observe the link between emotion and motivation.
Many theories exist, seeking to explain things such as what makes us feel happy and sad, the sequence of events when we experience feelings, how does cognition relate to subjective experience of emotion and the relationship between emotion with behaviour. While they generally agree that emotions have subjective feelings, cognitive appraisals, physiological arousals, bodily movement expressions and motivational tendencies, they differ in thoughts on such areas relating to the relative importance of these components and the order in which these components appear in the sequence of events that includes an emotional response. Broadly, these theories and their differences are categorised as Physiological, Cognitive and Psychoanalytic.
The physiological theories believe that the experience of emotion is primarily a product of the brain and nervous system. Main proponents are the James-Land theory which promotes that a physiological reaction to an emotional stimulus causes a person to feel the emotion. An example isa person screams loudly (reaction) upon stepping on a snake (stimulus) and then feels frightenedafter that (emotion). Another is the Cannon-Bard theory. This theory believes that it is internal or external stimuli that lead to sensory impulses that are sent to the cortex of the brain. It means one is able to react to a stimulus only after experiencing the relation emotion. Example is, a personsuddenly sees a bear (stimulus) immediately shows fear (emotion) first and then ran away (reaction). The third is the psychobiological approach theory which states that there are four basic emotions (fear, rage, panic and expectancy) and each is associated with a command system found in the brain. These four interact to produce other emotions such as lust, care and play.
Modern day theorists build on the physiological theories to come up with the cognitive or thought theories on the experience of emotions. Four main thoughts were presented, which are cognitive labelling, misattribution, transfer of excitation and cognitive appraisal theories. In cognitive labelling theory, it is the role of cognitive labelling that is in determining what emotions are experienced. For misattribution thoughts, they believe it is people often misattribute an emotion to an incorrect cause, whereas in the transfer of excitation thought, they look at how excitation from one source can be transferred to another. Then for the cognitive appraisal theories, they believe that thought processes are primarily responsible for triggering both emotional responses and behaviours with these emotional responses and behaviours designed to cope with emotional situations. For instance, in the Schachter theory, it was thought a situation (face with a bear) triggers bodily reaction (heart pounding heavily) combined with cognitive labelling (brain thinking) that results in an emotion experience (fear). However, this thought met with numerous criticisms. The misattribution theory believes that it could be possible to misattribute an arousal from an emotional source, such as fear, to a non-emotional source, such as drug, which could result in a wrong experience of emotion. In the transfer of excitation theory, it was thought that an arousal from one source may influence an otherwise, unrelated cognition and reactions. This was demonstrated in the ride an exercise bike study whereby riding a bicycle, whether casually or heavily, should not have an impact on a person's emotion when they were later insulted, but, it did show an influence as those who cycled heavily experienced a higher level of emotional anger (transferred from the insult situation to the emotional experience). For cognitive appraisal theory, there is the primary and secondary stage whereby a situation is appraised first and then action impulses generated which finally resulted in a reaction such as a bodily action.
Finally, the psychoanalytic school hypothesised that emotional experiences are unconscious processes. They relate to emotions, motives and past memories that one was unaware of but which could still influence behaviour. This is evident when as a child we exhibit a lot unconscious emotional experience. Also worry and anger can be caused by a conflict inside of which we are unconscious of, such as we could suddenly feel worried and angry for no reason.
Moving on, we look at the relationship between emotion and motivation. We recall that emotion is positive or negative, never neutral while motivation is generally thought of as the study of the directional and energizing aspects of behaviour. Emotion is considered far wider than motivation. It is also thought of as inseparable from motivation and is also seen as a motivation to act in a certain way and be emotional. Even so, emotion is not a motivator in all situations. On the same level, not all motivators originate from emotion. In another form, motivation is what makes a person do one thing rather another. A simplistic example is, a person is motivated to work hard rather than be lazy, because of the amount of money that could be earned by doing so. Thus, motivation concepts would consist of the motivating factor, the drive which is the internal condition urging it and the incentive for which is an external goal that pulls or pushes the behaviour. Thus, drives may be due to an upset in constancy and the need to maintain it, such as if the body tissues lack salt, attempts will be made to increase it and vice versa. On the other side, incentive is any factor that provides a motive for a particular course of action, or counts as a reason for preferring one choice over another. It could be financial (monetary gains), moral (society or family recognition) or coercive (neglect by group or peers). In mankind, the humanistic needs theory is often studied. It divides motives into several levels from basic survival needs rising to higher self-fulfilment needs. As an example, a person needs food when hungry and is motivated just to fulfil this basic need, whereas a highly achieved person needs people to recognise him/her and will be motivated to do things that will achieve this aim. In short, emotion emphasizes arousal, while motivation emphasizes action.Both impacts behaviours.
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