Similarities Between Motivation And Emotion

963 Words2 Pages

Motivation and emotion are usually viewed as two psychological features that seemingly share cause-and-effect relationship. We often see motivation as something that stimulates a person to act and behave to achieve a desired goal, while emotion is the feelings that emerge from the motive or drive itself, from the actions caused by the motive and from the achievement or failure of the desired goal. However. Motivation has been defined in different ways over the years, but a common component of the different definitions is that motivation is a force that energizes, activates and directs behaviour. In 2006, Franken defined motivation as the “arousal, direction and persistence of a person’s behaviour”. Motivation has been defined in various ways …show more content…

Second, emotions often go together with motives. And third, it is typical for basic emotions to possess motivational properties of their own. For example, happiness motivates a person to achieve better performance. A similarity between emotion and motivation is that they are both linked to energy or intensity instead of information or direction. Yet another similarity is that both rely on the relationship between an individual and it’s environment. Emotions have the biggest control over our motivation in life. Understanding how people feel in situations may inform you of what strongly motivates them to do certain actions. Every person has a different experience even when viewing the same events. Events are an external stimulus that can affect a person’s emotional state. The act of laughing or crying, may be the reaction to stimulus. Stimulus can come from internal factors as well as external factors such as a person thinking something funny or thinking something sad. People who smile are happier however it is not known if the smile is in reaction or if the smile produces feelings of happiness. Understanding emotional theories and their operation within our subconscious, is a useful device for managing our own lives as well as understanding others. Each person is unique, so every emotion to each situation is unique as well. Schachter-Singer theory is troubled with how arousal and emotion affect performance and human motivation. In this theory a person learns that events cause physiological arousal first then emotion. Although motivations biggest influence is emotion, another influence is having a goal. For example, you have a aunt who would like to get fit. Your aunt sets the goal of watching what they eat, and trying to exercise more. The motivation here for your aunt would be the goals that they had previously set. But some people could also argue that the goals are also linked to emotions because the goals were made from some desire , and desire is an emotion.

Open Document