6 min read•june 18, 2024
Mary Valdez
John Mohl
Dalia Savy
Haseung Jun
Mary Valdez
John Mohl
Dalia Savy
Haseung Jun
This unit is about motivation. It identifies and applies to understand behavior of humans and animals🧑🤝🧑🐻. It talks about the strengths and weaknesses between theories and the most basic primary needs: physiological, social, and sexual.
Motivation is something that directs a behavior. For example, if you want to get a good grade on the AP Psych exam in May, you are motivated to study 💯 You're probably very familiar with motivation, but it goes deeper than you think and basically exists in every action you do.
Before going through the theories, let's discuss some vocab terms:
Many different theories about motivation developed over time. Let's discuss them!
This theory has to do with that stated that those that are best adapted to their environments are most likely to mate and survive. Therefore, the motivation in this theory is to survive and we, as well as animals, adapt behaviors that help us live 💕
Example | Strength of Theory 👍 | Weakness of Theory 👎 |
All babies display innate reflexes like rooting and sucking | It helps explain similarities due to our ancestral past. | It helps explain animal behaviors better than human behaviors. |
This theory focuses on how our inner pushes and external pulls interact to drive our behaviors.
By doing this behavior, we should reach , which is a steady internal state.
Example | Strength of Theory👍 | Weakness of Theory👎 |
When you need food, you become hungry, and then you cook yourself something to make the feeling of hunger go away. | It explains our motivation to reduce arousal by meeting basic needs, hunger, or thirst. | It doesn't explain why some motivated behaviors increase arousal. |
The focuses on finding the right level of stimulation. An organism tries to find behaviors that actually increase arousal because everything else bores them.
Example | Strength of Theory👍 | Weakness of Theory👎 |
Being bored and getting yourself into trouble just because you needed to find something to do. Another example is "Curiosity kills the cat" and you just wanna try something new that excites you! | It explains that motivated behavior may increase or decrease arousal. | It doesn't explain our motivation to address our more complex social needs. |
The suggests moderate arousal can lead to optimal performance. With this being said, you've probably experienced the law in real life.
If you were ever way too relaxed 😴 when taking an exam or way too stressed 😟, I bet you noticed a decrease in your exam performance. However, if you are moderately aroused so much that you are aware and alert, you will obtain a higher score.
Tip—The Yerkes-Dodson Law is very different from the optimal arousal theory. It focuses more on the relationship between performance and arousal.
Maslow came up with a theory based on needs. The first level of needs focuses on fulfilling basic, physiological needs. Once they are met, the focus shifts to more cognitive and abstract needs.
From the bottom to the top, the pyramid reads:
Strength of this Theory | Weakness of this Theory |
It incorporates the idea that we have levels of various needs. | The order of needs may change depending on the circumstance of the person. |
Ever felt that huge urge to eat those Oreo late at night? Well that's a motivation of hunger, which happens simply because we need food. Or is it that simple?? Hunger motivations actually involved biological, psychological, and social factors.
Our brain plays the biggest role in hunger. The controls body chemistry. So when it's time for you to eat, the activates, causing you to eat. Then you are getting pretty full from 5 bags of Oreos on your own. That's when the kicks in, causing you to stop eating. If either part is damaged, you'll either never eat because you never feel hungry or you'll never stop eating because you don't feel satisfied. Both situations are kinda horrifying 😖.
So how does the hypothalamus decide when we need to feel hungry and full? Well the states that the hypothalamus wants to maintain a certain body weight. So when your weight drops, it'll tell you to eat more and lower the metabolic rate, which is how quickly your body uses your energy.
But it's not solely the hypothalamus that gets to decide everything. there's also something called the , which states that there are certain foods that make you more hungry. If you have bad memory of eating hot dogs and throwing up, you might not feel too hungry around hot dogs as you would to Oreos. Culture and background can also play a similar effect.
Like hunger, sexual motivations have biological and psychological properties.
The physical sexual response cycle is as follows:
Basically, this means you want to succeed. You want to challenge yourself and reach your goals. This is called achievement motivation. This is different from optimum arousal because it's not about only being motivated to seek, it's more about meeting a high achievement goal.
🎥 Watch: AP Psychology—Motivations
🏆 Trivia—Motivations