On Emotion and Motivation

Motivation and emotion are very closely intertwined. We usually consider hunger, thirst and sex to be needs or drives; typical emotions are anger, grief joy, surprise, and embarrassment. But what about pain? A painful stimulus produces both an emotional response and a drive to escape the pain. In the same way fear is an emotion but also a motivator-for example, in the Miller (1948) experiment   described earlier the rats that received electric shocks in the white cage presumably became afraid when they were put into that cage again and were motivated to escape. So an unpleasant emotion can serve as a motivator-the organism is motivated to terminate that feeling.

Drives and needs can produce emotions, too. Consider the example of the person swimming underwater who comes up under a raft. The need for air will produce not only a struggle to reach the edge of the raft, but also intense fear. Extreme hunger or thirst is also likely to result in emotional   responses such as grief anger or fear. Another source of strong emotional responses is the frustration of the sexual or parental drive.

As these examples indicate there is sometimes no clear-cut separation between motivation and emotion. Generally, though, we can think of motivation   as arising from some internal source such as deprivation of a biological   requirement (food for instance) and of producing some sort of goal-directed behavior (such as searching for food). On the other hand, we can think of emotion as being an internal state usually produced by an external stinnulus (or stimuli) and not necessarily leading to any particular behavior. In fact, a given emotion can result in many different sorts of behavior, even within the same individual. When a specific emotion isaccompanied by specific behaviors either as a result of predisposition or   of learning then motivation and emotion form a coherent unit. In other cases, though, they act as independent action tendencies and states of being.

Emotion is an extremely difficult subject to study. It is especially hard to study under controlled laboratory conditions because it is not always possible to produce a genuine emotion in the laboratory or even to know   for sure when we have succeeded in producing it. Some behavioral and physiological indications can tell us when a person is fearful or angry, but it is often difficult to tell-except by the person's verbal reports-whether   he or she is happy, sad, amused, embarrassed, disgusted, envious, puzzled, worried, relieved, or in love. Thus those more subtle emotions have been the subject of relatively little research.

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