Remembering, feeling, and thinking - Essay Example

The interrelationship among the psychological concepts of motivation, emotion and behavior is important to understand. Human behaviors are always directed towards certain motives and those motives are further propelled by emotion. Human emotion stands in between motivation and the behavior. Emotion, first of all, stems from motivation. A desire to do or achieve something comes from emotion and the success or failure of the same also results in the arousal of emotions – joy or happiness if one is successful and sadness or distress if one fails.

The emotions thus aroused make the person show appropriate behaviors that project those emotions. For example, a sad person stops eating and a happy person may start dancing and singing! Sometimes emotion also effects motivation. Often times our goals and ambitions stem from the kind of emotional state one is in. A joyful person might be motivated to spend time in recreational activities while a frustrated person might choose to seclude himself inside closed doors. Let us look at the behavior of John, a high school student who wants to pursue a degree in engineering.

His ambition to become an engineer is a motivation and his desperate search for a suitable institution that can provide a degree in engineering is the behavior propelled by his motivation for achievement. This motivation, on the other hand does not appear without emotion. John feels extremely happy when he repairs certain machines like his neighbor’s computer or his old radio and when he makes certain buildings out of plastics or cartoons. He is always driven towards outdoor activities and is obsessed with other clerical jobs and other activities that require dexterous capabilities and mathematical intelligence.

Thus such behaviors are always motivated and those motivations are always liked to emotions. II. Theories of Emotion There are four major theories proposed to explain emotions. The first one is The James-Lange Theory. According to this theory an event causes a physiological arousal and it is only when you interpret the physical response, you experience the resulting emotion (Maddie, 2011). For example a girl walking in dark hears certain sounds of an animal, and her heartbeat rises. She interprets this reaction to be fear.

The Cannon-Bard theory claims that “we feel emotions and experience physiological reactions such as sweating, trembling and muscle tension simultaneously” (Kendra, 2011). For example I see a snake; I feel afraid and begin to tremble. The Schacter-Singer Theory says that two factors are essential for the experience of emotions, high physiological arousal and an emotional interpretation of that arousal. According to the theory, an event causes physiological arousal first. You must then identify a reason for this arousal and then you are able to experience and label the emotion (Schachter-Singer Theory, 2011).

The Lazarus theory builds on the Schechter-Singer theory and proposes that when an event occurs, a cognitive appraisal is made and based on the results of that appraisal, an emotion and physiological response follow. The most valid theory for me is the Cannon-Bard theory because it acknowledges the fact that the experience of emotion and physiological reaction occurs simultaneously. Moreover it does not assert the need for ‘interpretation’ of emotion, for, emotion is instinctual and a person engrossed in the emotion hardly has a change to ‘interpret’ the same, yet, he feels the emotion.

The least valid theory for me is the James-Langue theory. It is not necessary that the physiological arousal must occur first and it is also not necessary to ‘interpret’ the physical reaction for a person to know what emotion he is feeling. Emotions often occur in a subtle form where we notice our physical reaction such as rejoice way after we have felt the emotion. III. Thinking, Intelligence and Creativity Thinking is the process of making use of mind or the brain to observe, interpret and make sense of the world around us.