Chapter 1: Introduction of Motivation
Human wants are unlimited. All of us try to satisfy our wants and desires once they appear through carrying out some particular actions. In the process of carrying out appropriate actions to satisfy our wants, we do experience some forces that driving and directing us to perform particular behavior, which is our motivation. Our motives may not only come from internal wants, but also the environmental events happening around us. For the internal motives, it includes our needs,
cognitions and emotions. Needs are the basic desires that we have to satisfy them in order to maintain our lives and personal well being, such as hunger and thirst. Cognitions include our values, beliefs and the ways how we think, they are mental thoughts or events, such as the beliefs a person hold about his/her self capacity and the goals he/she set in mind. For emotions, they enhance our motives in responding or carrying out certain kinds of behavior, such as when we feel fear of something, this fearful emotion stimulate our bodily reaction, leading our respiratory rate increases, as well as increasing heart rates, and this finally prepared us to take action to fight or escape. For the external events, they refer to the environmental situations
surrounding us, such us our home, working places, classrooms. For example, when a child know he/she will receive a candy from his/her mother after finishing homework, the candy provides incentives for the child to do the homework. So, environmental rewards/punishments do affect our motives in participating in certain kind of behavior.
Besides, motivation does vary in its intensity and direct our attention at a
particular time, depending on the preceding situation and the urgency to satisfy our wants. For example, Peter have several wants, they are playing football, buying pen and eating. If the previous situation is that Peter did not eat his breakfast and lunch, eating is the strongest want for him and his brain will tend to gain the attention on food, action will be taken to eat as the first priority.
We usually express our motivation through three ways, they are behavior, physiology and self report, in which both of them can reflect the existence and intensity of our motives. For behavior, there are seven aspects to indicate being motivated, which are the effort, latency, persistence, choice, probability of response, facial expressions and bodily gestures. Usually, the higher the effort, the shorter the latency and the longer in persistence imply higher motivation in particular event. For physiology, changing in heart rates, respiratory rates, blood pressure and muscle’s tension indicates the biological change under motivation and emotion. For self-report, it refers to ask and get answer, however, this is not very reliable if conflicts occur between client‘s answer and his/her bodily expressions. Therefore, self-report mainly being used to support behavioral and physiological approach.
To better understand about motivation, some theorists in the past have established a framework for motivation. To summarize it, there are three main sequences in the framework, which are the antecedent conditions, the motive status and the sense of wanting to. A person motive status, including needs, cognitions and emotions, are affected by the previous conditions and event, in which how urgency or the intensity to satisfy that want will drive the person to have a sense of wanting to, and those motives are expressed through behavior (action take), physiology (bodily change) and self report (reported feelings). And finally the motives direct us to perform certain behavior in satisfying that want.
