Emotions Affect on Motivation - Term Paper Example

For example, the emotion of anger will not arise until and unless one believes that, the person at whom the anger is directed is guilty of some wrongdoing. Similarly, one cannot be envious of someone if he/she does not have any significant thing in his or her possession. “Perceptual theory, affective events theory, cannon-bard theory, two-factor theory, component process model, feeling theory” (Power, 1997), and others are a few examples of models and theories that explore the cognitive aspect of emotions.

However, these theories have faced criticism on the account that they end up excluding animals and infants lacking language since they do not have propositional attitudes but they still have emotions, as we know it (Power, 1997). It was in the year 1884 when philosopher William James highlighted the fact that emotions are a product of the happenings in the sensory and motors areas of neocortex. Later researchers went on to form cause and affect relationships with the chemical and neurological happenings in the brain in “hypothalamus, anterior thalamus, cingulate gyrus, and hippocampus and the entire limbic system” (Power, 1997). . Happiness, playfulness, joy, delight, and other such emotions are a result of chemical activities in “Dorsomedial diencephalon; Parafascicular area and Ventral periaqueductal gray” (Lewis, Haviland-Jones & Barrett, 2010).

Similarly, emotions of fear, anxiety, panic and terror can be attributed to the areas of brain named as “Central and lateral amygdala, Bed nucleus of stria terminalis, preoptic and ventromedial hypothalamus, and lateral and ventral periaqueductal gray” (Vincent, 1990). According to Charles Darwin, human emotions and evolved and adaptive and he did not only see emotions as a method of survival, which was a part of evolution of humans but at the same time, he strongly believed that emotions served the function of communication as well.

Evolutionary theory believes that different emotions have evolved at different times in human history. For the emotions such as fear, panic, alarm and others evolved amongst our oldest premammal ancestors. Consider the example of the live that the earliest men used to live where they would hide in caves since they had to protect themselves from the more dangerous animals. The emotion of fear was crucial to their survival and thus could be linked to the ancient parts of the brain (DeCatanzaro, 1998).

As the time passed and our ancestors started living in communities, societies, groups and herds, filial emotions such as love, care, affection, nurturing and other evolved amongst the early mammals. As these people started living in the society, it became crucial for human survival to keep them motivated with the help of emotions such as guilt, pride, envy, jealousy, satisfaction, pleasure and others. This is a lengthy process of adaption of