Saskia Ensel (2023)
Samenvatting Literatuur:
Motivatie en de zelfsturende
mens.
Schooljaar 2023-2024. Universiteit Utrecht.
Inhoud
Understanding Motivation and Emotion by Johnmarshall Reeve (7 th edition)................................1
Chapter 1: Introduction...................................................................................................1
Chapter 2: Motivation and emotions in historical perspective................................................4
Chapter 3: The motivated and emotional brain...................................................................6
Chapter 4: Physiological Needs.......................................................................................11
Chapter 5: Extrinsic motivation and internalization............................................................15
Chapter 6: Psychological needs.......................................................................................18
Chapter 8: Goal setting and goal striving.........................................................................21
Chapter 9: Mindsets......................................................................................................24
Chapter 10: Personal control beliefs................................................................................26
Chapter 11: The Self and Its Strivings.............................................................................30
Chapter 12: Nature of emotion: six perennial questions.....................................................34
Parenting and the Facilitation of Autonomy and Well-being in Development (Ryan & Deci, 2017). 38
Parent Praise to Toddlers Predicts Fourth Grade Academic Achievement via Children’s Incremental
Mindsets (Gunderson et al, 2018).......................................................................................41
Understanding Motivation and Emotion by Johnmarshall Reeve (7th edition)
Chapter 1: Introduction
What is motivation? Why is it important?
Motivation = a condition inside us that desires a change – a change in the self or a change in the
environment.
Two perennial questions
The study of motivation revolves around providing the best possible answers to two fundamental
questions: What causes behavior? and Why does behavior vary in its intensity?
Subject matter
The study of motivation concerns those internal processes that give behavior its:
Energy behavior has strength
Direction behavior has purpose
Persistence behavior has endurance
Internal motives
Internal motive = an internal process that energizes,
directs, and sustains behavior. Needs, cognitions, and
emotions are three specific types of motives:
Needs conditions within the individual that are
essential and necessary for the maintenance of life
and for the nurturance of growth and well-being.
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Cognitions mental events. Cognitive sources of motivation involve the person’s ways of
thinking.
Emotions the complex but coordinated feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive reactions to
the significant events in our live. Given a significant life event, emotions rapidly and rather
automatically generate and synchronize four interrelated aspects of experience into a unified
whole:
o Feelings: subjective, verbal descriptions of emotional experience.
o Arousal: bodily mobilization to cope with situational demands.
o Purpose: motivational urge to accomplish something specific at that moment
o Expression: nonverbal communication of our emotional experience to others.
External events and social contexts
External events are environmental, social and cultural offerings that affect a person’s internal
motives.
Motivation versus influence
Influence is the social process in which one requests that the other changes his or her behavior
or thought. Motivation, however, is a private, internal process.
Expressions of motivation
Behavior
Seven aspects of behavior express the presence, intensity and quality of motivation.
Effort exertion put forth during a task. Percentage of total capacity used.
Persistence time between when a behavior first starts until it ends.
Latency duration of time a person waits to get started upon first being given an opportunity
to do so.
Choice when presented with two or more courses of action, preferring one course of action
over the other.
Probability of response number of occasions that the person enacts a particular goal-
directed response given the total number of opportunities to do so.
Facial expressions facial movements, such as wrinkling the nose, raising the upper lip and
lowering the brow.
Bodily gestures bodily gestures, such as leaning forward, changing posture, and
intentionally moving the legs, arms and hands.
Engagement
Engagement refers to how actively involved a person is in a task:
Behavioral engagement refers to how effortfully involved a person is during the activity in
terms of effort and persistence.
Emotional engagement refers to the presence of positive emotions during task
involvement, such as interest and to the absence of negative emotions.
Cognitive engagement
refers to how strategically the
person attempts to process
information and to learn in
terms of employing
sophisticated rather than
superficial learning strategies.
Agentic engagement
refers to the extent of the
person’s proactive and
constructive contribution into
the flow of the activity in
terms of asking questions,
expression preferences and
letting others know what one
wants and needs.
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Psychophysiology
Psychophysiology = the process by which psychological states produce downstream change in
ones physiology:
Hormonal activity chemicals in saliva or blood, such as cortisol or catecholamines.
Cardiovascular activity contractions and relaxation of the heart.
Ocular activity eye behavior.
Electrodermal activity electrical changes on the surface of the skin.
Skeletal activity activity of the musculature
Brain Activations
Brain activations underlie every motivational and emotional state. When thirsty, the hypothalamus
is active. When we feel disgust, the insular cortex is active. Researchers can use equipment and
machinery to detect, monitor and measure brain-based neural activity.
Self-report
A fifth way to collect data are self-reports can be useful and informative, but they always need to
be backed up and verified by the person’s behavior, engagement, psychophysiology and brain
activity.
Framework to understand motivation and emotion
The unifying themes
The scientific study of motivation and emotion includes a wide range of assumptions, hypotheses,
theories, findings, and domains of application. there are 10 unifying themes:
1. Motivation and emotion benefit adaption and functioning
Motivation and emotion change in response to changes in the environment, and this capacity
to change allows people to function as complex adaptive systems.
2. Motivation and emotion direct attention
Environmental events and the motivations and emotions they generate have a way of gaining,
and even demanding, our attention so that we attend to one aspect of the environment rather
than to another. Motives prepare us for action by directing attention to select some behaviors
and courses of action over others.
3. Motivation and emotion are “intervening variables”
Motivational and emotional processes arise in response to environmental events and, once
aroused, cause behavior and outcomes. Motivation and emotion are therefore variables that
intervene between these causes (antecedents) and effects (outcomes) to explain why that
underlies these cause-effect relations.
4. Motives vary over time and contribute into the ongoing stream of behavior
The strongest motive typically has the greatest influence on our behavior, but each
subordinate motive can become dominant as circumstances change and as time passes and
can therefore influence and contribute to the ongoing stream of behavior.
5. Types of motivation exist
Type of motivation and emotion is important because some types yield a higher quality of
experience, more favorable performances, and psychologically healthier outcomes than do
other types.
6. We are not always consciously aware of the motivational basis of our behavior
Motives vary in how accessible they are to consciousness and to verbal report. Some motives
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originate in language structures and the cortical brain and are thus readily available to our
conscious awareness. Other motives, however, have their origins in awareness.
7. Motivation study reveals what people want
All of us harbor physiological needs such as hunger, thirst, sex and pain. All of us inherit
biological dispositions such as temperament and neural circuits in the brain for reward and
pleasure. Theories of motivation also reveal those motivations and emotions that are learned
through experience and are socially engineered through cultural forces.
8. To flourish, motivation needs supportive conditions
A person’s motivation cannot be separated from the social context in which it is imbedded.
These environments can be nurturing and supportive, or they can be neglectful, frustrating
and undermining.
9. When trying to motivate others, what is easy to do is rarely what works
10. There is nothing so practical as a good theory.
Chapter 2: Motivation and emotions in historical perspective
Philosophical origins of motivational concepts
The intellectual roots of contemporary motivations and emotions study owe their origin to the
ancient Greek – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle:
Plato proposed that motivation flowed from a tripartite, hierarchically arranged soul. At the
most primitive level, the appetitive aspect contributed bodily appetites and desires. At the
social level, the competitive aspect contributed socially referenced standards as honor and
shame. At the highest level, the calculating aspect contributed decision-making capacities.
Aristotle endorsed Plato’s hierarchically organized, 3-part psyche (appetitive, competitive and
calculation), although he preferred different terminology (nutritive, sensitive and rational).
Hundreds of years later, the Greek’s tripartite psyche was reduced the dualism. It made a
distinction between what was irrational, impulsive and biological vs. what was rational,
intelligent and spiritual (the body vs. the mind).
Descartes added to this mind-body dualism by distinguishing between the passive and active
aspects of motivation. The body was a mechanical and motivationally passive agent, whereas
the will was an immaterial and motivationally active agent.
Grand theories
Will
Descartes’s hope was that once he understood the will, then an understanding of motivation would
inevitably unfold.
Instinct
Darwin’s biological determinism had two major effects on scientific thinking:
1. It provided biology with its most important idea (evolution). In doing so, biological
determinism turned the mood of scientists away from mentalistic motivational concepts and
toward mechanistic and genetic ones.
2. Darwin’s biological determinism ended the man-animal dualism that pervaded early
motivation study. For Darwin, much of animal behavior seemed to be unlearned, automated,
mechanistic and inherited. Darwin proposed the instinct.
James borrowed heavily from the intellectual climate of Darwin and his contemporaries to endow
human being with a generous number of physical and mental instincts. All that was needed to
translate an instinct into an impulse for action was the presence of an appropriate stimulus.
McDougall regarded instinct as irrational, impulsive and automatic motivational forces that
oriented the person toward one particular goal. It was the instinct that “determines its possessor
to perceive, and pay attention to, objects of a certain class, to experience an emotional excitement
of a particular quality upon perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in a particular
manner.”
Drive
The motivational concept that arose to replace instinct was drive.
Freud’s drive theory:
Freud believed that all behavior was motivated and that the purpose of behavior was to serve the
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satisfaction of biologically based bodily needs
Hull’s drive theory:
For Hull drive was a pooled energy source composed of all current bodily deficits/disturbances. For
Hull motivation had a purely physiological basis and bodily need was the ultimate source of
motivation. High vs. low motivation could be predicted and even experimentally manipulated
before it occurred.
Hull’s research led him to argue that if a response was followed quickly by a reduction in
drive, learning occurred and habit was reinforced.
E= Hx D
E strength of behavior. H habit strength. D drive. Hull later extended his behavior system
beyond H x D to include a third cause of behavior: incentive motivation (external motivation),
abbreviated as K (E = H x D x K).
Decline of drive theory:
Drive theory rested on three fundamental assumptions
1. Drive emerged from bodily needs
2. Drive energized behavior
3. Drive reduction was reinforcing and produced learning
Post-drive theory years:
Two motivational principles from the 1960s: incentive & arousal:
Incentive an external event that energizes and directs approach or avoidance behavior.
Incentive motivational theories asserted that people were motivated by the incentive value if
various objects in their environment that pulled them towards these objects. These theories
adopted the concept of hedonism.
Arousal
1. Arousal represents a variety of processes that govern alertness, wakefulness, and
activation.
2. A person’s arousal level is mostly a function of
how stimulating the environment is.
3. A moderate level of arousal coincides with the
experience of pleasure and optimal performance.
4. People engage in strategic behavior to increase or
decrease their level of arousal.
5. When under aroused, people seek opportunities to
increase their arousal.
6. When over aroused, people seek opportunities to
decrease their arousal.
Rise of mini-theories
Mini-theories seek to understand or investigate one
particular: Motivational phenomenon, circumstance that affects motivation and/or theoretical
questions
Three historical trends emerged to explain why motivation study left behind its grand theories to
embrace the new traditions of mini-theories:
1. Active nature of the person
People were inherently active, always motivated. Today’s ideas about motivation and emotion
accept the premise of the active organism and they deal less with deficit motivations and more
with growth motivations.
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