Steven J.C. Gaulin Donald H. McBurney “Evolutionary psychology”
Chapter 6: Motivation and emotion
Traditional psychology is focused on the feelings and needs that guide behavior reflected by motivation
and emotion, evolutionists are also interested in “why?” questions about those feelings and needs.
Evolution has built us to find things that contribute to our fitness pleasurable. (Dawkins, 1989). We are
thought by our ancestors to avoid or remove the source of pain, the feeling that causes strong
emotional tone and also signals actual or potential damage to our body. We often accomplish tasks
subconsciously, but is only because it took a lot of time for our ancestors to get accustomed to these
situations.
Motivation generally thought of as the study of the directional and energizing aspects of behavior. Our
motivation is most of the time (and preferably) caused by internal changes, for example the need of
food and etc.
Emotion is defined by its affective tone – by pleasantness or unpleasantness. There are no neutral
emotions. There are many situations where we have mixed emotions, as when your joy is interrupted by
disappointment. But emotion by definition involves affect.
Emotion and Motivation are inevitably related. Emotion is our affective response to information that
our goals are either being advanced or harmed. Motivation and emotion are the keys of survival. Robert
Plutchik pointed out three steps that are taken before the actual action. First is stimulus, the actual
seeing or hearing the object. It causes us to interpret the situation, whether it is friendly or harmful for
us and this is our second step – Cognition. The cognition causes our emotion (fear, joy, etc.). These are
three steps that we take before the actual acting – behavior. This simplified sequence contributes to our
survival and improves our chances of reproduction. We define emotion as the affective component of
motivation.
There are, of course, motives that do not involve emotions, mostly unconscious actions. The best
example would be breathing, we don’t normally recognize our breathing, but the interruption in this
unconscious action would cause strong emotions. Emotions occur in to motivate us to solve any threat,
in this case our inability to breath.
The definition “instinct” troubled the scientists for the last century. It was believed that the concept of
instinct explains motivation. Instinct ignores any scientific examination of behavior, and true motivation
is left behind, thinking that one has explained something by giving it a name is called nominal fallacy.
Instinct confuses the importance of past experiences in our behavior. It is impossible to decide, or count
how many instincts people have. In an instinct was a type of adaptation that evolved to solve problems
in the EEA, there would be as many instincts as there were problems in EEA that instincts could solve.
Psychologists avoid using the term of instinct, they approach to this issue explaining it as evolved
mechanism or adaptation.
Psychology emphasizes the role of motivation and emotion in social context, because social life posed
many problems that faced our ancestors in the EEA and still face us today.
The most important part in examination of motives and emotions is to realize which one’s are biological
and which one’s are learned. Almost all motivations are biological and it support the model of EEA
(evolved mechanism through evolution). Emotions and motivation can be put into two categories,
biological and social. Some behaviors are biological and some are learned, but all motives are
mechanisms that existed in the EEA, and thus are equally biological.
Motives differ in the surrounding situations. In the case of danger, other motives and needs are
minimized leaving the motive of “safety” the leading.
Basic emotions. For many years many researchers believed in basic emotion model which was given by
SSSM. It was agreed that biologically we’re born with only three basic emotions: fear, rage and love; and
all the other emotions we’re believed to be learned. New researches showed that SSSM model was
incorrect. Paul Ekman and his colleagues found that across cultures, people react with the same face
expressions to the same stimulus. (* Ekman has found evidence for five basic emotions: anger, disgust,
fear, happiness, and sadness; but there are many more).
Ekman provided nine criteria that have to be met to consider the emotion basic. First one is distinct
facial expression, a visual measure which occurs in certain situation. Second criteria is presence in other
primates. This explains the universality of emotion, which basically means that it must be common not
only in one social group. Third point is a distinct physiology, this occurs only for measurement issues.
Fourth criteria is distinct causes, which explains that emotions and motivation are not random, they are
triggered by some kind causes or effects. Point number five is that facial expression can not be
separated from physiological response. The sixth criteria is that the basic emotion takes a quick onset,
which explains the quick reaction to the stimulus. Seventh point – brief duration. Emotions don’t last too
long, as a quick reaction it disappears quickly as well. Ekman’s eighth idea explains that emotions
appear automatically, without awareness. And the last point is that is an unbidden response.
One basic emotions are easier to detect than the others. In particular anger emotion is easier to detect
than happy expression. As researchers found out we’re much more focused on situations where we are
forced to think critically, for example: when we see a happy face, we usually don’t do anything, or we’re
simply not forced to act in situation, because it usually doesn’t affect our chances of survival, in other
case when we face anger there is much more danger for us and we try to avoid it or solve the situation
as fast as possible, that’s why we much more easily detect “anger”.
Why can’t we be happy all the time? The answer that evolutionary psychologists suggest is: That it was
not constructed like that by evolution. The simple example would be: happiness means fitness, and only
increasingly fit individual can reproduce better, so we adapt to our happiness quickly and that’s the
reason why we’re always in pursuit of it. (*happiness is a response to immediate change in our fitness)
The social emotions. Social emotions are not biological, in other words they’re learned, evolved via
experiences in our life’s. The cooperation with other people increases our chances of survival and
reproduction. Some social emotions evolved to solve the problem of commitment. These emotions
promote faithfulness; these emotions also serve as a sign of commitment. They are critically important
from a reproductive perspective. Honest signals (peacock tail, deep voice of female toad, lavish displays
of love by humans) provide reliable evidence of mate quality. In a cooperative relationship we can see
that anger and guilt are related. For example loving couple (cooperative relationship, in this case same
emotion is love), when one of them begins to feel angry, the second person experiences guilt. The role
of anger toward the cheater is called moralistic aggression.
Shame and pride. These two very important emotions have a huge impact on our place in society.
Shame and pride are separated from basic emotion, because they do not always have a certain facial
expression. Shame and guilt are often related by psychologists, though Barret draws a line between
these two emotions. The emotion of guilt is focused on a particular bad thing that we have done,
however shame leads to a global evaluation of ourselves as bad, it may even cause us to withdraw from
society. Shame and guilt are often experienced together, but shame may be felt even in the situations
where we haven’t done anything wrong. Pride is the opposite of shame, it builds up and strengthens our
place in the social hierarchy. The cooperation between our pride and shame leads us to the concept of
self-esteem. Self esteem can be understood as our own evaluation of our worth. Self esteem is our tool
that we use to overcome our insecurities around the groups of people. The higher the self-esteem – the
better our chances of reproduction.
Testosterone level. The hormone testosterone influences dominant and aggressive behavior in men.
Winning a contest increases testosterone, and loosing lowers it.
Evolution designs adaptations which are usually set by the solving a conflict. Conflict is considered a
undesirable by definition, though conflict means crossing interests or emotions. Conflicts are solved
depending on the nature of disagreement. Sometimes we use violence to solve the problem.
Homicide. Homicide is one of the forms of violent conflict resolution. Homicide was probably common
in the EEA. On average, most of the people killing other people are men, but also the number of people
being killed are men. Conflicts arise over verbal insults, robberies, domestic quarrels, jealousy, money
and many other things. The reason is dominance, more power, more money etc. Increases the chances
of mating and reproduction.