Test: Motivation and Emotion- 1 - Humanities/Arts MCQ

A reward is something an animal will work to obtain or achieve, whereas a punishment is something it will work to escape or avoid. In order to exclude simple reflex-like behaviour, we use the term ‘work’ to refer to a voluntary behaviour, also called an operant response.

A particular problem regarding the measurement of emotion comes from the existence of a strong folk psychology of emotion. Because we are used to observing emotion and thinking about it in everyday life, over time, cultures and subcultures have developed their own language for communicating about emotion. There are important differences between a measurement-based science and an everyday folk psychology. In practice, it is possible both to measure emotion and to make firm science-based statements about it. However, emotion as understood in everyday terms and as portrayed in fiction offers insights that should not be ignored.

Sham feeding has demonstrated that taste and smell bring immediate rewards for food-motivated behaviour, but do not provide fullness; thus actual eating is necessary to produce feeling of fullness (satiety) and regulate the ceasing of food intake. Taste and smell motivate, not stop, food-seeking. Gastric distension is caused by actual eating. Satiety inhibits further food-seeking behaviour.

We all hold implicit psychological theories, constructed from everyday, commonsense observations and thoughts. For example, we might well believe that it is important to express emotion, because if it is bottled up it will eventually break out in ways that could cause discomfort or even be injurious to health. The study of such ‘lay’ theories and how they map onto theories of academic or professional psychologists has become important in its own right.

Since the early twentieth century, we have known that damage to the base of the brain can influence food intake and body weight. One critical region is the ventromedial hypothalamus. Bilateral lesions of this area (i.e. two-sided, damaging both the left and right) in animals leads to hyperphagia (overeating) and obesity (see Rolls, 1999). By contrast, Anand and Brobeck (1951) discovered that bilateral lesions (that is, damage) of the lateral hypothalamus can lead to a reduction in feeding and body weight.

Think of how you feel and what you do if you put money into a vending machine, press the button or pull the drawer, and nothing happens. Amsel (1958, 1962) trained rats to run down an alley to food in a goal box and, from there, along a second alley to a second goal box. When the first goal box was left empty, the rats ran faster along the second alley. This increase in vigour is known as the frustration effect. It is reasonable to regard an increase in behavioural vigour following the frustration of experiencing non-reward, where reward was previously experienced, as an indirect measure of emotion.
The procedures that demonstrate conditioned emotional responding involve a mixture of classical and instrumental conditioning. Picture a rat in a Skinner box pressing a bar for food reinforcement. Sometimes a light comes on and is followed by an unavoidable electric shock. The rat soon learns to associate light and shock. When the light is on, it will decrease its rate of bar-pressing. After the shock, it will increase it again. This effect is sometimes known as conditioned anxiety and sometimes as conditioned suppression.
Much of everyday life appears to be characterized by this type of mixture of instrumental and classical conditioning. Unconditioned stimuli are frequently emotional and influence other behaviour. Millenson (1967) used these ideas to suggest a three-part behavioural model of emotion, in which all emotions are seen as deriving from various intensities and combinations of anxiety, elation and anger. As we have seen, a neutral stimulus that leads to a negative unconditioned stimulus leads in turn to anxiety. Moreover, a neutral stimulus that leads to an unconditioned positive stimulus (say, free food to a hungry rat) leads to elation, and a neutral stimulus that leads to the removal of an unconditioned positive stimulus results in anger.

In a primate’s secondary cortical taste area (the orbitofrontal cortex), the responses of taste neurons to a food with which the monkey is fed to satiety decrease to zero (Rolls, Sienkiewicz & Yaxley, 1989, 1990). In other words, there is modulation or regulation of taste responses in this taste-processing region of the brain. This modulation is also sensory-specific. So if the monkey had recently eaten a large number of bananas, then there would be a decreased response of neurons in this region of the orbitofrontal cortex to the taste of banana, but a lesser decrease in response to the taste of an orange or melon.
This decreased responding in the orbitofrontal cortex neurons would be associated with a reduced likelihood for the monkey to eat any more bananas (and, to a lesser degree, any more orange or melon) until the satiety had reduced. As satiety develops, neuronal activity in the secondary taste cortex appears to make food less acceptable and less pleasant – the monkey stops wanting to eat bananas. In addition, electrical stimulation in this area produces reward, which also decreases in value as satiety increases (Mora et al., 1979).

By now it should be clear that emotions have biological and evolutionary bases and involve both the CNS and the ANS. Although subcortical brain mechanisms are implicated in emotion (from the brain stem to the hypothalamus, thalamus and amygdala), cortical structures play an executive role. Animals with their cortex removed but with intact hypothalamus and thalamus show violent (sham) rage. Sham rage is so called because a weak stimulus can cause a release of autonomic responses (such as sweating and increasing blood pressure) that are normally only elicited by strong stimuli, and the anger is not directed at any one particular entity. Electrical stimulation of the hypothalamus can also produce such rage.

All of these explanations highlight environmental factors that influence people’s eating and exercise behaviour and thus may be linked to obesity.

Attention, certainty and situational control are three of the six dimensions listed as types of appraisal associated with emotional experiences. Reward is not a dimension of cognitive appraisal.

When our bodies lose too much water, or we eat foods rich in salt, we feel thirsty, apparently because of cellular dehydration, leading to cell shrinkage. Cellular dehydration is sensed centrally in the brain, rather than peripherally in the body. The part of the brain that senses cellular dehydration appears to be near or in a region extending from the preoptic area through the hypothalamus.

The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that emotional experiences are intensified by the feedback we receive from our facial expressions, so we should feel happier when we smile. The other answers do not describe the facial feedback hypothesis.

The desire to drink and actual drinking behaviour are also conditioned by environmental factors such as availability of wide variety and eating situations.

The five fundamental emotions include anxiety/fear, happiness, anger, disgust and sadness. The other answers do not include these five types. Answer c refers to the five self-conscious emotions.

It is possible that the following factors have shaped human sexual behaviour in evolution:

• women might choose a partner likely to provide reliability, stability, provision of a home, and help with bringing up her children;
• women might also be attracted to men who are perhaps successful and powerful, increasing the likelihood of producing genetically fit children, especially sons who can themselves potentially have many children;
• men might engage in (and be selected for) behaviours such as guarding the partner from the attentions of other men, to increase the likelihood that the children in which he invests are his; and
• men might be attracted to other women for their childbearing potential, especially younger women.