Historical Theories of Emotions - Essay Example

Emotions emanate from psychological processes that occur within a person’s body, this has a great effect on the performance of different tasks, duties, and how they behave. The paper examines the different historical theories about emotion and its significance to people’s motivation.

Emotions are a key factor in peoples’ daily performance as it is quite evident in peoples’ daily actions. Understanding the concept of emotion and motivation is very important because it makes people unique. Arousal is the activation of energy before a given task is undertaken (Arnold, 2013). Schechter Singer and Yerkes- Dodson Law theories relate since they bring out the same concept as to how peoples’ performance is because of emotional arousal and motivation. The latter is quite specific on how arousal influences motivation and performance. The law states that low arousal results in maximum output in case of difficult tasks and high arousal results in maximum performance of easy tasks. Arousal can increase a person’s concentration on a given task and gives a person more energy to do the same (Arnold, 2013).

Schechter-singer's theory focuses on how emotion and arousal influence motivation and productivity. The theory depicts that a person first learns that events cause physiological arousal before emotions (McInerney, 2011). For instance, when a person walks alone at night and then the person gets to hear footsteps behind them, the heart will start racing in fear of danger. The footsteps from behind arouse the emotion of fear. The sense of danger depicts human behavior while the need to get out of danger manifests the motivation.