User:George902
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This user is a participant in the Motivation and emotion unit, 2010. See also: Textbook |
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This page is an e-portfolio. Also see other participants' pages. |
E-Portfolio
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Week 1 - Introduction and History of Motivation
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I am currently completing a double degree in psychology and coaching science. I am in my third year and am now enrolled in the unit motivation and emotion. As part of this unit assessments I must keep an up to date e-portfolio where I will reflect on what I am learning about the unit and try to deepen my understanding of particular concepts by relating them to research and personal experience. I am new to using Wiki so I will be learning as I go, which is both exciting and a little overwhelming at times but I am looking forward to the experience and with the help of Jtneill and other motivation and emotion participants' hopefully it will be a rewarding one. Lectures and Readings[edit | edit source]
Assessments[edit | edit source]This week we were told what the assessment items for this course were going to be. They are:
This consists of our class having to choose a topic in relation to motivation or emotion and research it and then write a textbook chapter on in. This must be done on Wikiversity. This assessment item is worth 50% of our grade, which is a little scary. We will be marked on theory, research and written expression. I have begun thinking about what topics would possibly interest me to write about and so far I have got:
In this assessment item we must create a 5min video explaining the key concepts from our textbook chapter. We will be marked on the structure and content, communication and production quality. This assessment item is my least favourite as I am not the good with computers and this is something I have never ever attempted before. Hopefully I will be able to learn how to do this correctly and it will all work.
We must develop an online e-portfolio that shares our reflections about what we are learning and all the things we are going through. It must be consistent throughout the entire semester and this will be marked, it will also be marked on depth and understanding. This unit does not have a final exam which I have not yet decided whether I like or dislike. As it will be good not to have another exam crammed into the exam period but I don't mind exams and some of these assessments are looking quiet stressful at the moment. I guess I will just have to wait and see how it all turns out. |
Week 2 - Assessment Task Skills
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Learning Wiki and Lecture[edit | edit source]This week during lectures we learnt more about our assessment items in more detail. This made me feel a lot better about them and relaxed me, well only slightly. Another part of this lecture was going through and learning more about wikiversity. We were shown editing skills such as:
placing text in the centre of the page
  So now that I have learnt a few new editing tricks I am going to have a play around and see what I can do to help myself learn some more. It is quiet fun and rewarding learning these new skills and being able to put them together myself. Another thing we were shown in the lecture was a multimedia demonstration which was extremely helpful. So now I hope to continue learning more and more about this. Assessment Ideas[edit | edit source]This week I have begun looking into more detail about the ideas I had for my textbook chapter and so far I am really interested in motivation and goal setting both with sport and personality. Although researching these topics I have not really found a great deal of information so I will continue researching and make my decision by the end of next week. |
Week 3 - The Brain and Physiological Needs
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week I learnt about the motivated and emotional brain and the physiological needs that we all experience.
Tutorial 1[edit | edit source]This was my first tutorial for motivation and emotion and before coming to the tutorial I was quiet interested to see how it would run and what it would be like. We first sat in a circle and were told what we would be doing throughout the tutorial, and then we had some icebreaker games to help everyone get to know each other. During this I found out I had the smallest thumb size, I was the person that had been at University of Canberra for the shortest time (although I have now been here 2 yrs), and found that I was with the majority of people with who they voted for and how I had been feeling for the day (tired and stressed). After this we were able to form our own small groups that would help us with our assessment items in terms of feedback and help with ideas on which direction would work the best for what we wanted to accomplish. In these groups we were to first come up with our own definitions of motivation and then emotion. Then mash these ideas together to form a group definition of both terms. My own definitions were:
I found that it was quiet difficult to come up with a definition of emotion, although talking about it with my group helped as we all had different views. It was helpful to also go over all the definitions that everyone came up with that can be found atTutorial Definitions.  From here we went into discussing our interests in the subject. We phrased our interests as questions and my question was "How does personality affect motivation, in particular towards goal setting in sport and exercise?" This interests me because I am just extremely interested in personality and I always wonder why some people set goals for themselves and others do not. Also why do some people feel motivated to exercise while others cannot bring themselves to do it? Does this have something to do with their personality? There were other interesting questions put forward by other groups (can be found here Questions and one common one that came through was "why do people commit adultery?" This interested me as I am currently reading a book that was originally a blog of a girl's life as a call girl. It is called The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour, Bell de Jour Information, this is a link to information surrounding the book and this is a link to her Blog. This book is so interesting and it gives insight into why she chose this line of work and it really makes you think about motivating factors behind why some people do things you would never think there could be rational motivators for. To finish the tutorial off we discussed our textbook chapter and possible structures that could be used when writing the chapter. This was extremely helpful and gave me a lot to think about for the next tutorial where I have to come with a structured plan on how I would like my textbook chapter to flow. Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]So I have finally after a long and hard decision making process decided on what topic I will write about for my textbook chapter. It is going to be motivation and personality. At the moment I am still deciding which path I am going to go down with this topic, I am not sure whether I will relate motivation and personality to a few different scenarios or just focus on one aspect of it. Although as I was reading through the textbook chapter relating to this topic to gain some ideas I seen that it relates personality to emotion more than personality to motivation, so I am not sure if I should do something similar and discuss how personality effects motivation and emotional states. Any helpful input that people have on which way I should go with this idea would be helpful. So feel to comment and help me out. As for the e-journal it is coming along and the more I use wikiversity the more confident I feel about trying new things so I am hoping this progresses through the semester. |
Week 4 - Psychological and Social Needs
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week in our readings and the lecture we looked at the two other kinds of need that an individual experiences; psychological and social needs.
From looking at these different types of needs and thinking about how they relate to my own life it had made me realise just how much social needs especially achievement and psychological needs; relatedness and competence mean to me. I consider these things to be very important in my life and they always have been from when I was a child growing up. I always felt the need to develop relationships and hated being left alone; I also always felt the need to succeed in everything I tried. This relates to what was said in the lecture that the components of these needs can be thought of like personality traits, everybody as the needs at some level they just differ in how high or low the need is and the level of the need will usually remain stable throughout life. This week has been a big learning week that has interested me especially thinking about how personality could possibly affect these types of needs as well. I look forward to moving on from here. Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]All I can say for this week is that there has not been a lot of progress in terms of the textbook chapter. I have begun researching ideas for which direction I want to take with it but I am still very undecided. I think I will keep researching and then take all my ideas to the tutorial next week where I hope to gain some feedback from my group members and James. Let's hope next week is more productive with my major assessment piece. |
Week 5 - Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation and Goal Setting
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week in our lecture and through our readings we learnt about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and goal setting.
Reflection These two chapters gave me a lot to think about especially in relation to my own life as these are two topics I have always be interested in. Learning about intrinsic motivation helped me understand my own motivation as much better. I learnt that intrinsic motivation is a more useful motivator than extrinsic motivation because it increases depth or learning, creativity, more persistence and a greater well-being. I believe this to be extremely true as seen through my own life examples, such as assignments and in particular even this one of writing our e-portfolio. If we are intrinsically motivated to complete an assignment because we enjoy the topic or we just want to do it for ourselves and no external reward, I see that I will definitely work harder at the assignment, even though I don't really consider it to be hard work as I really enjoy it. I'm sure everyone when they experience this feeling they also notice they feel better about themselves, they are not as stressed about getting the work done (improved well-being) and also you will tend to actually get very good results from your efforts. I found this in my life as before I moved to Canberra to study psychology and coaching science, I began a degree in Wollongong. This degree was very different to what I am doing now it revolved around maths and physics and I did not enjoy and as much as I hate to admit this the main reason I continued with degree before deciding to change was because of the external rewards associated with that degree such as a well paid job at the end. I thought I was doing ok at this degree, yes I found it extremely difficult, I had no internal motivation, I had to make myself sit down to study and work on my assignments and I was continually stressed everyday (just ask my mum)! But I still thought I was ok because I did not know anything different and I did not understand there could be a different in my motivation. Then I changed degrees to the one I am currently doing and I love it, straight away I noticed a difference, I was never as stressed, I actually loved what I was learning, it was so interesting to me. Straight away I noticed an improvement in why well-being through reduced stress and anxiety, I had greater persistence with making myself understand the material and I also found a learnt more through deeper processing. This was seen as I loved to tell everyone what I was learning because I found it so interesting but by doing this and actually having to tell someone else about I noticed that I knew the material really well and at a deeper level as I was not just repeating it like it was rope learnt. As a result straight away I noticed an increase in my results from the other degree which was also then acted as another motivating tool to do well because I knew I could. So from my life I have definitely learnt being intrinsically motivated towards something is a very beneficial thing and it also showed me how extrinsic motivation will only work when the incentives are important to. I found this when I sat down and thought about the degree I was doing in Wollongong and how I could possibly be doing it for a long time, yes the money would be good but when I thought about it, it didn't really matter to me all that much. This shows the incentives for completing something must be relevant to the individual otherwise they will not work. Another part of this topic I found interesting and was able to relate to was the idea of amotivation. Amotivation is not motivation or lack of motivation. Now I'm sure as being uni students the majority have experienced this at some point during our lives. It's like when you have those days where you just can't bring yourself to get out of bed. You have no motivation to do anything that day, you just want to lie in bed or in front of the tv and just do nothing. So what do we do if we feel like this? Or our friend feels like this? Learning how to motivate someone and yourself, I thought was a very important part of this chapter, one because it helps understand your own motives and two it can be applied in some many ways. I especially find it useful to know has I am also studying coaching science, so this knowledge is beneficial to me when trying to teach an athlete something or trying to motivate them to train and train harder. Learning how to build interest also compliments this as I can also apply this to my coaching, I now know it is better to motivate them through the individual not through the situation as the motivation will last longer and be more intrinsic. I also believe when trying to motivate someone if you show your own passion and enthusiasm for something then they can take a little of this and put it towards their own motivation. I have seen this when doing group study on a topic that I may be very interested in but my partner is not so if I show my interest then they seem to take this on and start to enjoy it themselves. Learning about goal setting definitely sparked my interest as it is something I seem to do every day. I now understand how goal setting and planning work as motivators, by creating the discrepancy between where you are now and where you want to be. This gives us energy to change this discrepancy and directs towards where we want to go. So how do we reduce this discrepancy? By changing the plan we have or the behaviour we can reduce the discrepancy. I have definitely done this before, I set goals for my self such as get 500 words written today and sometimes things come up and I don't reach that goal and so i begin to feel anxiety and stress come on so instead of working more sometimes I will change the plan, say I only really needed to get 300 words done today. So now I have achieved my goal and lost my feeling of discrepancy. This shows me how highly motivating discrepancy can be especially to me as I am someone that will stress quite a bit and experience anxiety so I am highly motivated to reduce this feeling and I tend to work hard to achieve this. As I said goal setting is something I do often and I always have. I believe that it works, as the goal setting theory says if an individual sets higher and more specific goals they will generally achieve more. I have generally always set myself fairly high goals throughout different areas of my life such as sport, academic work and with family and friends. I have found through setting these high goals I have generally always achieved what I wanted to and I think this is a very important thing that most people should apply to their own lives. It also helps in the coaching side of things as I learnt last semester in the unit motor control. By setting your athletes higher goals and specific goals they generally will work harder to achieve them and if they do this boosts their confidence and performance. Although there are some downfalls to high goal setting as I have experienced myself. By setting high goals you can increase stress and possibly for failure. This is what I have experienced before, the higher the goal the more pressure, therefore the more stress I experience. Also there have been times when I have set myself up for a high goal and not quiet achieved it, this led to a feeling of failure even though really I did not miss the goal by much and I still did extremely well by most people's standards but it just was not good enough for me. I found this to be a very negative experience but it taught me a lot in relation to goal setting, I think yes we should all strive for the highest we THINK we can achieve but at the same time if we don't quiet reach the goal, we need to put in into perspective and still see the positives within what we have achieved. Finally feedback is another aspect I feel is important, to know we are on the right track to achieving our goals helps our confidence and allows us to progress further. In this unit in particular the feedback as been extremely helpful, I know what I need to improve to achieve my goal and what I am already doing well with. Also setting short term goals to eventually reach a bigger, longer term goal is an important idea. It is very similar to the idea of shaping in learning theories. We set ourselves smaller goals so we do not become overwhelmed and quit before we have really begun. Shaping uses a similar principle such that by slightly increasing efforts we can eventually shape ourselves to reach our end goal. Overall these topics have been very interesting and have taught me a lot. They made me think a lot about my own life and experiences and how the concepts of motivation have already to applied to my life and how I can now apply some more. Tutorial 2[edit | edit source]This week in my second tutorial we discussed needs. Fist we had an Introduction to Needs. We talked about what needs are and how they are organised. In particular we discussed Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This pyramid of needs puts different types of needs in strata that start from the bottom which is the most important need to us to the top. Although in the tutorial we were asked to think critically about this pyramid and we came up with a few criticisms:
 After this we talked about the motivated and emotional brain. We had to complete an activity where we had to label the different brain structures that are associated motivation and emotion. After this we discussed the motivational and emotional states that these brain structures create paying close attention to which structure does what such as make us approach or avoidant orientated (see table). Approach Orientated States and Structures
Avoidance Orientated States and Structures
We also discussed neurotransmitters and hormones and the relation they have to motivation. After this physiological needs were discussed briefly before moving on to the psychological needs. Whist talking about this we took The General Orientation Scale, this survey has a link between motivation and personality which is exactly what my textbook chapter is about so I found it very useful and interesting and it gave me something more to consider when writing my chapter. There were three rating scales and if high in it indicated a certain motivational type, one for autonomy which indicated an internal motivation/personality type, two was control which indicated extrinsic motivation/personality type and finally impersonal which indicated that you were not controlled or motivated by anyone or anything (not extrinsic or intrinsic). The General Causality Orientations Scale (GCOS) The last type of need to be discussed was the social needs with everyone going through a revision of information from the lecture. Finally we ended with a discussion about our textbook chapter where we got into our groups and talked about our ideas with each other. I found this activity very helpful and give me a starting point and a direction for my assignment. Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]This week I have tried to make some progress with ideas surrounding my text book chapter. I tried to come up with a basic idea of a plan for how my textbook chapter would flow and what type of information I would like to include in it. It helped going to the tutorial and being able to bounce some ideas off my group members and getting feedback from both James and them. My first idea for a plan was to have an introduction of the topic on personality and motivation, which includes focus questions to give the reader of what my textbook chapter would cover. Then I thought of having some information about personality and a few different theories surrounding this, I would maybe in this include a link to an online personality test that I took my self last year in the personality and individual differences unit, so I could give the reader an idea of their own personality and how they would relate to the motivational aspects I would discuss. Then I would like to go on to discuss how different personality types or traits affect motivation in general. Finally I thought I could an application section where I would discuss how different personality types or traits affect specific examples like either exercising, dieting, goal setting or study habits. I would finish with a summary of the chapter and maybe include some revision questions about the chapter. This was my first very basic plan, I still had many more things I needed to sort out like whether I should relate a specific section or personalities effect on emotion as this is what the textbook covers. From talking in the tutorial I decided to include focus questions to begin with to make sure that I would not go to broad on the topic and just stick to specific areas that I wanted to. An idea came up that I could also take a history perspective of personality and see how the idea of personality throughout history as changed and how that has changed the idea of people's motivation. Finally I could think of personality in terms of people being extrinsically or intrinsically motivated. As in the tutorial we did a survey which related to peoples motivations and how this is affected by their personality. So far these are the basic ideas I have, I now have to develop this further through more research. At this point I am feeling a lot more confident about my e-portfolio; I feel I am getting the hang out of it and that I am heading in the right direction. It is definitely not as scary as it was to me a few weeks ago and now I hope I can continue learning and improving through the weeks left. |
Week 6 - Personal Control beliefs and the Self and its Strivings
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week in our lecture and readings I learnt about personal control beliefs and the self and its strivings. This is what I have learnt so far:
Reflections I found the content this week a little more difficult to reflect on as some of it was hard to get my head around the concepts especially some relating to the self and strivings. From the personal control beliefs I found it very true that we all want to have control over our environment. No one likes things to be unexpected and take us off guard in case we are not equipped to handle that type of situation. This definitely applies to me as I HATE surprises, I like things to stable, in my control and I'm not even a big fan of change. So when I feel I do not have control over what I am doing I can get very stressed and upset. This can also be applied to group work we have to complete at university, depending on the group you are put in. When working with others you cannot have complete control over the situation as you can't control them or what they do (or don't do). This can cause negative feelings and provide a motivating source for our behaviour, as we are motivated to gain as much control as we can, so in a group task we may take on the majority of the responsibility or do all the work just in case the other person does not do theirs. We all want to be in control! Self-efficacy is an important concept in understanding the level of control we have in different situations. Our self-efficacy is how much we believe we can achieve an outcome, and it can affect our behaviours by determining what types of tasks we take on and how much effort we will put into those tasks. Having a high self-efficacy means we will generally take on greater task and persist longer at them because we have the belief in ourselves that we have control over the situation and we can achieve what we want to. Learning how to gain self-efficacy is a useful tool as I believe self-efficacy is important for us succeed in what we want to. Also learning this will help me apply it to my coaching and teaching methods so I can help my athletes to be the best they can be. So the gain a higher self-efficacy we can improve it through past experiences, by watching others, by persuading them they can achieve what they want to achieve and by helping them understand their physiological states. Learned helplessness is an interesting concept that I had never really overly thought about before. The idea that people can learn to be helpless in nearly every situation is quiet astonishing. But when you think about it I'm sure we have all experienced some people like this. They always think everything happens to them so they don't really ever both trying with anything anymore because they do not see the point. They have no motivation to achieve, they would rather just accept that they cannot do it and they will never get anywhere. With my own experience with someone in this situation I found them to be so negative all the time, everything is bad and they find it hard to be positive at all. They told me they tried at things and it just didn't work for them so they don't see what they can do now. The hardest thing I found about being around someone like this is you being to feel negative and find it hard to be positive, it is also extremely hard to motivate them. I believe it is very important to help someone to not feel helpless all the time and I think the best way to do this is by teaching them that they aren't through their own experiences. When learning about the self and its strivings, the first thing I noticed was how similar all of these concepts are to social psychology, as I am also studying that unit at the moment. This helped with my understanding of the ideas presented in this part of the course as I was able to take examples from both units and deepen my own understanding of the material. The first idea surrounding the self is our self-concept and the motivational links towards our self-concept are very similar to our goal setting motivation. As in both ideas there is a discrepancy present that provides our motivation towards something. In relation to our self-concept we are motivated by a discrepancy between our actual self and a possible self. We see what we can be and we are motivated to achieve that. Another motivating tool surrounding our self is, we are motivated to show consistency regarding our own self-concept. This applies to me as part of my self-concept is I believe I am quite a sociable person, so I am motivated to participate in situations that proves this true. I believe I like social gatherings, I can generally start a conversation with someone I do not know and I can generally make friends easily so I do things that prove these are true. Cognitive dissonance is another related idea to our self-concept. This is when we have a belief in something but then we perform an action that goes against this belief and this causes negative affect feelings. This is an important idea discussed in social psychology as it helps to understand why we do what we do and why others do what they do. This theory provides us with ways we can reduce the negative feelings associated with cognitive dissonance such as; removing the belief, reducing the importance of the belief, introducing s constant belief and increasing the importance of this constant belief. These ways of reducing cognitive dissonance are all ways of motivating us. How identity is how we relate to society, my identity is made up of me being a student, a sister, a daughter and a friend. To just name a few. Our identity motivates us to confirm these beliefs in ourselves and to restore any beliefs that may have been lost. Agency is how we see ourselves as action and development within. This idea took me a while to understand but what I got from it was we are motivated by our psychological needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) to develop our agency within us. This is how we develop ourselves and move forward towards what we want to be. Self regulation is the final part of our self and its strivings and this involves us evaluating how well we are going at achieving our goals, this is done through feedback that we self monitor. These topics regarding the self, its strivings and ideas about our control allow for deep thinking about our own selves and how we relate to all of these topics. I think this has been the most reflective chapter as it's all about you and what makes you. Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]This week I have only been looking at more research and trying to gather as much as I can to help me decide exactly which way I would like to go with my textbook chapter. So now just a lot more researching to do to come up with a definite plan and then to start my draft....
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Week 7
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Tutorial 3[edit | edit source]This tutorial was about the self and goals, we were introduced to a more applied side of motivation. It was a very interesting and eye opening tutorial that was very enjoyable. The first thing that was discussed was student motivation, in particular what motivates students to go to university. Through our general discussion in the class we came up with:
One motivation that we did not come up with but could quiet possibly be a motivator was altruism, going to be able to help people or society or the planet. After this discussion we completed the University Student Survey and the University Students Outcome Survey. My results showed that my main motivations are career development and social opportunities and I was above the student average for social motivation. Links to student motivation survey and student averages:
The results showed that we have many different motivational factors that influence what we do. Clary and Slayder came up with the Functionalist Perspective which is: Satisfaction = the match between our motivation and outcome After discussing student motivation we moved on to Learned Optimism (Personal Control and Goal Setting). Discussing learned optimism was different to what we discussed in the lecture which was on learned helplessness. We completed a Learned Optimism Test, which showed that my results we very different to what I would have thought they would have been. My overall optimism was rated very pessimistic with a score of -4, which was shocking as I really don't believe that I am that pessimistic, I am quite a happy person with a pretty good outlook on life, although I do stress about things. Some of the class also had results that they did not think indicated their true optimism. We came up with some reasons as to why this could be the case which were the test could be a little outdated and more culturally specific towards an American culture. To take the Learned Optimism test and see how it rates yourself see here - Learned Optimism test (Seligman, 1991) We finished the tutorial by discussing the self in particular life effectiveness, we took a Life Effectiveness Questionnaire that assessed how well we can handle the demands of life. It is related to our own self concept and my scores we fairly high on all eight constructs, although we did not mark our questionnaire. We discussed this concept in relation to people's changes in life effectiveness during outdoor education programs. It showed that when people first begin the program their life effectiveness drops but then rises throughout the program and then when taken once more a few weeks after the program it has slightly dropped. This shows how our life effectiveness can change in relation to certain things and what we are doing. At the end of the tutorial we talked about advanced searching to get the best possible resources for our textbook chapter which was very helpful and will hopefully benefit myself through the research journey. Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]This week has been a slow week in terms of the textbook chapter, hopefully next week during the break it will be more production and progress further.
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Week 9 - Nature of Emotion
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week in our lectures and readings we started the emotion part of the unit. We looked at an introduction to emotion focusing on five main questions. What I learnt from this week:
Reflection What is emotion? The first thing I learnt about emotion is it is so difficult to define. There are four different dimensions that make up emotion; feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose and social-expression. Understanding how these different components come to together to make up emotion helps me to understand what it is more. Emotions can act as both motivators and a way of understanding how we are coping in different situations emotionally. This can be applied to the majority of our lives, when we feel angry we are motivated to do something about it and feeling anxiety lets us know we are not handling the situation well. This happens a lot to me around exam periods as I stress and anxiety builds, this lets me know I am not coping and it motivates me to take action so I can better cope with the environment. There are two main theories surrounding what causes emotion, a biological perspective and a cognitive perspective. Although there is a theory known as the two system theory that combines the two perspectives to give a cause of emotion. I believe this is true as there are some situations we experience that occur very quickly and we don't have time to process what is going on before an emotion occurs an example of this could be surprise. Although there are other situations where something occurs and we have time to process what is going on and then express an emotion, an example of this could be get an exam mark back, we then have to process what it means for us and will then experience either relief and joy or anger and sadness. Learning about how many emotions we have helped me understand a lot more about emotion. I had no idea there were basic emotions and then associated emotions with each of the basic ones. I thought they were all just different emotions and not facets of other bigger emotions. One important thing I learnt is that all emotions are important. There are definitely days where I wish why do I have to feel like this? I don't want to feel like this, I have experienced such feelings when relationships break down. I find it comforting to know that all the emotions sever a functional purpose. There are two main purposes; for coping and for social functioning. Coping helps to direct our attention to what we need to be aware of and social functions allows us to communicate and interact with other emotionally, as well as being able to facilitate, create, maintain and dissolve relationships. This is so true without being able to express our emotions where would we be? I found it interesting to learn that mood and emotion are two different things. Mood is our everyday long lived feelings while emotions are short lived and generally are produced from significant life events. So on the days where I was just having one of those down days I always thought this was just an emotion I was feeling but really I was experiencing mood. We can't feel a highly intense emotion for long periods of time because our body just couldn't handle it physiologically. Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]This week was another slow week with my textbook chapter. I have been concentrating on trying to get my e-portfolio up to date but as for the textbook chapter I have done some research into personality and its affect on motivation and have found some good articles. I just hope I can keep working on this and understand exactly where I want to go with my chapter as I am still unsure about which direct I would like to take. So hopefully more to update you with soon,
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Week 10 - Aspects of Motivation
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week I learnt about the different aspects of emotion. There are three main aspects they are; biological, coginitive and social-cultural.
Reflection There are three different aspects of emotion. The biological perspective first introduces the James-Lang theory of emotion and believes that first we experience a situation, and then bodily processes react and this causes the emotion. I can definitely agree with this theory to some degree as I just recently experienced a similar process. I was playing sport and got hit in the thumb by a ball (situation), straight away my body reacted by increasing my heart rate, my breathing and signalling pain. After this occurred I experienced emotion such as anger and distress. Although the contemporary perspective believes that this physiological arousal accompanies and regulates emotion but does not cause it so maybe this is true? The facial feedback hypothesis is another theory of emotion. It states that emotion is cause due to changes in facial muscles, temperature and glandular activity. I think this is true to an extent, there are some days where I experience sadness due to a significant event but then I have to go to work or uni and smile and act like everything is ok. After a while of doing this I actually begin to feel ok so I think the emotion expressed on your face can affect how you feel. A cognitive perspective of emotion is based on appraisals, which is where we determine if an event as personal significance to us or not. If we don't think the event is significance to us then no emotion will be produced. This makes sense because it something happens and it is not related to us in any way why would we experience an emotional reaction. Emotional knowledge is an important concept and has been linked to intelligence. When thinking about my own emotional knowledge I think that my is fairly good, I usually will pick up on cues and understand some ones emotions and how they are feeling. Although I believe this could be situational well at last for me, I pick up most emotional cues and respond well in social situations involving emotions although there have been times where I have totally missed specific cues when I thought I should have picked up on them. So this makes me wonder why can I pick up on them sometimes and not others. I guess I will continue to search for the answer and wonder about this question. The final perspective is a social - cultural one. Social interactions are where we experience the majority of our emotions as we are around others. During this interaction we also have a tendency to mimic another's emotions they are expressing at the time. I find this happens to me all the time. If you go to visit a friend you find if they are in a happy and upbeat mood you will leave feeling the same way. Being able to manage emotions is an important thing for me, as I work as a sales assistant and I find I have to keep a lot of my emotions to myself especially when I am feeling frustrated due to a rude customer. Tutorial 4[edit | edit source]I unfortunately missed this tutorial due to my own emotional experiences occurring at the time. From reading what happened online and talking to others who attended the tutorial I found out they sorted many emotions into groups during a q-sort activity. They also discussed positive and negative affect schedules. The links to information on this tutorial are located here: Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]This week was spent working more on my textbook chapter and I am still changing my ideas of where I want to go with it. There is so many pathways to take but I was given advise saying choose some focus questions to help narrow down the information I wish to focus on. So by next week I hope to have some focus questions and more direction with what I wish to do.
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Week 11 - Personality and Motivation
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week in our readings and the lecture I looked at how personality can affect both emotion and motivation.
Reflection Reflecting back on this chapter I feel like personality can affect so much and only a little part has been touched on here. I understand the idea between extraversion and happiness but does it take it too far? I know a lot of people who would consider themselves introverts and they are extremely happy. They don't feel the need to engage all the time and they do not need to always look for rewarding situations. They are actually happiest when they just get to be themselves and interact with people whenever they feel the need. So this makes me think critically about this idea and whether we could generalise it everybody. The inverted U hypothesis surrounding arousal is also an extremely important in sporting situations, as athletes want to achieve optimal performance so they need to know exactly how aroused they must be to achieve this. Finally to idea of control as a personality quality is quiet common as I have discovered while researching my textbook chapter. Similar ideas are locus of control which is how much perceived control we think we have on our outcomes. Also self-efficacy can be related to how much control we think we have and how much we would like to have. To learn more on these topics see my textbook chapter where it goes into much more depth relating personality and motivation. Motivation and Personality Textbook Chapter Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]This week was extremely helpful for my textbook chapter. Learning about my topic in class helped me to focus on what I wanted to discuss in my textbook chapter and what direction I wanted to take with it. I have decided to concentrate on the trait perspective of personality such as the big 5, locus of control and sensation seeking and relate all these theories to different motivation aspects such as goal setting and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. More to come next week.....
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Week 12 - Unconscious Motivation
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week in our lecture and through our readings we learnt about our unconscious motivation.
Reflection Reflecting back on this chapter gives you many things to think about. The unconscious is such a hard thing to understand and yes it is very interesting to think about what actually happens in our unconscious. The psychodynamic perspective brings up some important points about the unconscious, Freud's drive theory is understandable but does take certain aspects a little too far in my opinion so the development of a psychological wish was very appropriate. I believe that yes some things we do are due to our drives and instincts but things like sexual behaviour and aggression is more a wish we would like to express rather than having to express it. The most interesting part of the unconscious was the subliminal motivation has I think this can occur to an extent. We all take in sensory information that we are not aware of and you realise that when you process the same thing consciously and go where have I seen that before or why do I know that? You can't work why it is familiar but you know it is, I think this could possibly be where subliminal stimuli has been processed without your conscious knowledge. Whether we act on this information or not I'm just not sure but it is an interesting theory. The two main parts of psychodynamics is repression and suppression. I think these two processes do occur, its like the times when you have a thought and as soon as you realise you are thinking it you go "no I shouldn't be thinking that, stop it." You try to suppress the thought but once you have thought about it, it becomes hard and you in a way you cannot stop thinking about it. Thinking about repression made me wonder when we try to repress unconsciously the things we are not meant to think about and then we have slips of the tongue and things similar to this, is that our repression mechanism failing? I seem to think from what I have read that it could be, which is interesting because slips are generally fairly controversial. Finally the ego psychology side of things raises some interesting points. I can see how our ego develops, as we grow older we learn more and me learn what is acceptable within society and how to express what we wish to appropriately. You can see this, as children we would say whatever we thought and many of these things would be considered inappropriate but has we grow up and develop we don't do things like that anymore has we have learnt what is appropriate and our ego has developed. Ego defence mechanisms are important and I think we all use them. My own example would be, I stress a lot and when it is because I haven't done what I knew I should have such as studying instead of going out to a party. I begin to feel anxiety and worry and instead of letting myself feel like this I usually will take it out on someone else usually a partner or family member. So I show displacement because if took it out on myself (where the true anxiety came from) it could be harmful to my well-being so I do it to someone else who can cope with this. Tutorial 5[edit | edit source]This week in tutorials we looked further into personality and motivation and emotion. First we were given a quiz on last week's lecture and reading on personality and emotion. This covered all aspects such as happiness and personality, arousal and control. On the quiz I got 18/20 which I was very pleased with as I am writing about this topic for my textbook chapter so I thought that I should do well. Also I am extremely interested in this topic and find it easy to learn about and take the information in. One of the questions I got wrong was difficult and there were a few people in the class that brought up issues surrounding it. The answer was that most people are happy and this is true almost irrespective of life circumstances, we all thought happiness was quiet reliant on the circumstances you are experiencing at the time but apparently Reeve explains this by saying that people generally happy no matter what circumstance they are, for example if they are rich or poor people are still generally happy. After completing this quiz we discussed Zuckerman sensation seeking scale and took it to see what our own scores on the four subscales would be. My scores were all very low, I got 3 for thrill and adventure seeking, 4 for experience seeking, 3 for disinhibition and 1 for boredom susceptibility. These scores were fairly similar to the class score and we determined that our class size was not large enough to see the normal distribution of scores that we would expect to see. My scores confirmed what I already believed about myself, that I am not very sensation seeking at all. The final part of the tutorial was where we briefly discussed our textbook chapters and how we were going and got to ask one on one personal questions to make sure we were on the right track to finishing. This was very helpful and made me feel better about my chapter. Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]This week was a huge week for my textbook chapter as it is due on Monday! I finally got a plan together and know exactly what I want to do with my chapter. I have planned on introducing my topic then go on to talk about the motivational concepts that relate personality to motivation such as; intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, goal setting theory, expectancy-value theory, self determination theory, social needs and self-efficacy. After introducing all of these concepts I will discuss how different personality theories such as the five factor model, locus of control, Eysenck's theory of personality and sensation seeking relate to the motivational concepts I have introduced already. I will include some type of quizzes and links to the personality tests you can do online. To see my textbook chapter developing click on this link Motivation and Personality Textbook Chapter This week we were also shown how to record our multimedia presentation using the website screenr. Seeing this made me feel a lot better about this part of the assessment so this is the next thing to try after I finish the textbook chapter.
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Week 13 - Growth and Positive Psychology
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week in our lecture and readings I learnt about growth and positive psychology:
Reflection The first thing I notice from this week is how difficult it seems to be able to reach actualisation. There are so many different things you have to do before you can get there but at the same time there are a lot of helpful hints that try to point you in the right direction. I find it both interesting and slightly comforting to think that we all have an actualising tendency, that we all striving towards something to fulfil our lives. It gives us a sense of purpose and I think it makes life interesting by trying to be the best you can possibly be. The concept of congruence is one that comes up a lot when learning about motivation and emotion. So I believe in some way we must always be trying to be a peace with ourselves with no lasting conflicts. Causality orientations is what we are guided by either internal or external. Thinking about my own influences I find it hard to think that I would have to fit into one or the other. I believe we could possibly be guided by different things in different situations. For example for a social psychology perspective we could possibly be guided by external influences when we are in situations that are shown to society but then when we are on our own we may be influenced more by our internal guides. I also have this belief when relating to growth and validation seeking. Why do we have to be one or the other? Through my experiences throughout life I definitely feel that there are different things that influence my motivations, emotions and as a consequence my behaviours. The debate about whether evil is something inside human beings or is triggered through different environments and situations is such a hard question to take sides on. You could think about this all day and come up for many arguments for both sides but at this time I think we all do not have evil inside of us, I think it may occur by how we handle situations we are given. Finally positive psychology is an interesting topic that I think makes people feel empowered through the strengths they are shown to have, which is an important thing in today's society. Due to this I think we should continue to look into this area as it could possibly be a way of helping a lot of people. Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]My textbook chapter is done! A lot of hard work went into the assessment and although it was stressful at the time it feels very rewarding finishing it. Especially as the book will be published. This week was all about getting the multimedia recording done. I made my slides and wrote my script then began recording. After a few frustrating and I must admit funny stuff ups I eventually have one recorded and this can be viewed from my textbook chapter.
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Week 14 - Summary and Conclusion
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Lecture and Readings[edit | edit source]This week in our lecture and readings we conducted the unit.
Reflection So the semester is over and you can see from my fairly extensive weekly e-portfolio I have learnt so much. It has been a very interesting journey that I have enjoyed and will take a lot from. Tutorial 6[edit | edit source]This week was our final tutorial for the unit. We began with discussing some problems surrounding growth psychology. The first one was whether we think humans are evil or whether the environment influences them to be. We lined up in a row depending on how we felt about the issue. My thoughts on this question were, I don't believe humans have evil inside them but I do think there can be certain influences on a person that turn something inside them evil. We then discussed raising children and how learning should be fostered. In this part we discussed how google help their employees develop their own projects and this works as a successful motivating tool. After these discussions we moved on to thinking about and comparing Maslow's characteristics of a self-actualised person and Rodgers' idea of a fully functioning individual. Maslow has 16 characteristics while Rodgers' has 9. From what I gathered it is a very difficult journey to become self-actualised and fully functioning and guess this is why Maslow says there is only approximately 1% of people who fully do. I had to leave the tutorial half way through due to another circumstance at the time. But reading through the rest of the notes from the tutorial I see they discussed sense of meaning and coherence and completed a scale relating to this. There was also a practical activity where we could choose an exercise from the list and discuss it in our e-portfoilo's. So the one I have chosen to discuss is three good things in life. It is says, write down three things that go well during your day and identify the cause of each. So my three things and causes from yesterday are;
To see the tutorial notes on this tutorial see here Tutorial 6 Assessment Progress[edit | edit source]So now my textbook chapter and multimedia presentation is completed, the only thing left is the e-portfolio. I have been working hard on this all week and I have really put a lot of time and effort into this assignment so I am just hoping it all pays off and I receive some good marks. Fingers crossed!!! So after this all the assessments have been completed for this unit. Looking back on our assessment items, they did seem like such a big task at the beginning of the semester but now coming to the end they I felt very rewarded in completing them. I have learnt a lot of new skills especially using recording equipment and wikiveristy. I began as someone who had no idea about any of these things and have finished feeling extremely confident in what I am capable of. So I think overall this has been a very worthwhile and successful experience.
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References
[edit | edit source]All the information this e-portfolio is based on are from two keys references:
Neil, J. T. Lecture Presenations for Motivation and Emotion Unit. Semester Two (2010).
Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion(5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
