When we discuss emotions, it is useful to consider them relative to the concept of motivation. Motivation is a term used to describe the compelling forces that mobilize actions. Many theorists have used the term "drives" to describe motiva-tion (e.g., Freud, 1959; Hull, 1943; Woodworth, 1918). In this context, humans are thought to be driven to act to fulfill and satisfy need states. For example, we are driven to satisfy the drives associated with hunger and hydration. We expe-rience the need for food by way of hunger pangs, and the need for hydration through thirst. The idea of motivation relates to the desire to create positive states for ourselves, including adequate nutrition and hydration, and to avoid or escape negative states such as hunger and thirst. A simple behavioral model shows us seeking rewarding outcomes and striving to derive states of relief from unpleasant circumstances (Figure 6.1).
The feeling of thirst signifies an unpleasant state, and the satisfaction of that thirst via water consumption is associated with relief from the discomfort associ-ated with dehydration. Pleasure might be derived by eating foods consumed not simply to satisfy hunger, but for the enjoyment derived from the taste. Important in this model is the understanding that, when we are able to secure rewards by acting in particular ways, we are more likely to act similarly in comparable situa-tions. Likewise, when we are able to implement reactions in the face of unpleasant circumstances that reduce or eliminate the unpleasantness, we will again imple-ment similar strategies when again faced with a similar unpleasant situation. ...
Let me embellish the basic behavioral model. In any given situation there are essentially four possible outcomes. You can get something you like, get something you do not like, lose something you like, or lose something you did not like in the first place. This is a basic 2 x 2 matrix ...
There are things you like—things that provide pleasure, and there are things you do not like they create feelings of displeasure. Considering these two states of like and dislike, you can either get it or lose it. If we do something and get what we like, we are more likely to do whatever it was we did to get it that time again in the future when the possibility of getting it occurs again. If what we did leads to us losing something we like, we will not do that again in order to avoid losing what we like. Further, if we face something we do not like and do something to make it stop or go away, we will do something similar to whatever it was we did before, the next time we face something similar that we do not like. Finally, if we do something and it leads to an outcome we do not like, we will probably stop doing it—at least until we can find a safe way to do what we were doing, which implies that weassociated our doing it with a desirable outcome. ...
Thus, we do things that lead to desirable outcomes or to the removal of undesirable outcomes. ... if we eat ice cream and like it, but eating it is associated with other things such as a scolding parent or weight gain, we will not necessarily stop eating it: we will just try to figure out a way to eat it free of the negative consequences. For instance, we might only eat it when the parent is not looking or try to get the parent to eat it with us, and we might look for ice cream that is fat free and thus less associated with weight gain. In some cases, we might eat it and then engage in extreme behaviors in order to avoid the consequences of having eaten it, which is often the case in bulimia, where the bulimic individual eats then exercises excessively to burn the ingested calories, or engages in self-induced vomiting (i.e., purging) to prevent caloric absorption. In other situations, the individual might consume the food and feel badly about it, but rather than changing his or her behavior will conclude that he or she is hopeless and unable to exercise self-control. Such an option, how-ever, requires one to retreat from ideals of healthy eating and slim appearance, thereby requiring some degree of hopeless depression. The good news for this individual is that, in his or her state of hopelessness, there is no reason to avoid ice cream, and eating it provides some degree of joy that he or she is not going to get in another way. ...
We are moti-vated by an inherited desire to seek out those outcomes that are pleasurable and to avoid or escape those that are painful and/or displeasing. This is a pretty simple concept. However, it can get complicated. Sometimes we find things to be pleasurable that ultimately lead to more problems, like too much ice cream, and some-times we find things unpleasant that are actually quite good for us. ...
In these situations, the item that should be rewarding actually becomes a source of displeasure, so people avoid it. Or the thing that is ultimately harmful, but brings pleasure, is sought out and consumed. Some people are able to look at situations and objects that many people view as pleasurable, such as ice cream ... and judge them as harmful ... and thereby as something to avoid. Or activities that others find to be unpleasant become viewed as very positive and are sought, such as exercise. For these latter individuals, engagement in exercise, while painful, is also viewed as'an immediate (success) and optimal (better health) enhancement—this includes a strong plea-surable component that sufficiently compensates for the physical displeasure that might be part of the exercise. Anycine watching as a person lifts weights as a form of exercise will typically witness signs of extreme discomfort during the actual lift, which is then followed by a smile and perhaps a subtle boast (e.g., "yes!"), once the lift is completed. That the person often comes back to lift again suggests that the pleasure, however felt, trumped the displeasure. Apparently, despite the pain, the individual derives some pleasure from the activity. Whether eating ice cream or exercising, when some form of pleasure ensues, the individual is likely to engage in the activity again. For the individual who enjoys ice cream and hates exercise, there will need to be sacrifices to health. For the individual who avoids ice cream but pursues exercise, the sacrifice will be the pleasure of eating ice cream.
The challenge to everyone is to identify true sources of enhancement and avoid false enhancers and to find the enhancements in many activities that are in the immediate sense somewhat unpleasant. I rarely see an exhausted runner smiling or showing outward signs of pleasure. but after completion of the run, they very regularly display such signs of joy, but only after the pain of exhaus-tion has subsided. Similarly, I have seen many individuals express considerable signs of pleasure when consuming large quantities of ice cream, but later signs of distress when they have overindulged, or even later when they face the scales.
The important point is that we want to feel good and do not want to face the negative consequences of our bad choices. Indeed, we really do want to eat our cake and essentially not have it too.
The importance of motivation is that it underscores the role of urgency in our quest to feel good. We all want things to go well; the more deprived of positive outcomes we feel, or the more threatened we perceive ourselves to be, the greater is our urgency to act to alter the circumstance we face. Urgency emerges as we con-sider the degree of deprivation should we not procure the desired outcome, or as the intensity of the displeasure increases and our need for relief becomes more intense.
Whether or not an outcome is viewed as positively or negatively reinforcing often depends on the vantage point that one takes in explaining that outcome. For instance, we may look at what someone gained as the result of their behavior and find that it was attention, thus a positive reinforcer. However, they may also have gained some relief from their state of boredom or loneliness, in which case the reinforcement was negative (i.e., relief from unpleasant emotions). In order to sort out whether we are looking at positive or negative reinforcement, we should look at what motivated the response. If there was no aversiveness motivating a behav-ior, yet the behavior wa.s'reinforced, meaning the person received something desirable, clearly this is positive reinforcement. Likewise, if there is a desire for something positive and the person got it, the reinforcer is again positive. HoweVer, if the person was looking to end an aversive state and does, the reinforcer is nega-tive. Unfortunately this will not always be clear, and both positive and negdtive reinforcement can occur at the same time in the same situation, or can explain the same conditioning event. For instance, if the person desired something and felt deprived because he or she did not have it, and perhaps others did, and then did something to get it, it is positively reinforcing (desired object was obtained), while at the same time negatively reinforcing because the aversiveness was ended.
The role of negative reinforcement is probably underappreciated. At issue here is the notion of instead. This is not something that you will read much about, but the idea is worth mentioning. In many cases of psychopathology, the pathologic condition is what the person focuses on instead of something that he or she should contend with but does not really want to deal with. This can occur, incidentally, at an unconscious level (i.e., at a level of consciousness in which the individual is not immediately aware of the process read about the adaptive unconscious in a later section). For instance, the student who does not want to do school work can get bummed out instead and spend his or her time thinking about how much he or she hates school work and how "stupid" it all is. While this is not done specifically to avoid homework, it may be better than doing school work, which is unpleasant for any of a number of reasons it is hard, it is boring, it cuts into other activities, and so forth. The relief from the school work gained via the "bummed-outness" is very much negatively reinforcing (could also get lots of nice, supportive attention that could reinforce the despair; which would be positive reinforcement). As long as the student is hummed-out, school work is avoided. As soon as the "bummed-outness" remits, the burden of homework, which by now has increased, is again unavoidable—providing reason to be "bummed-out." This may reflect a level of depression; not necessarily a clinical depression, but a period of depressed retreat. The person may truly want to do his or her homework, but they are hopeless about their inability to enjoy homework. In many cases, the retreat from homework can develop into a more serious depression. Why the individual becomes depressed probably has to do with several other factors related to his or her reinforcement history, one of them being the fact that this student believes that he should do his homework and at some level wants to. These two factors contribute to an aversive state that compels actions that will, hopefully, produce relief. Depression is par-ticularly well suited for this, because with depression one feels victimized by the condition (i.e., another way of saying "not responsible for"), which is not an opportunity to one who gets relief from the distress of school via excessive video-game playing (which would more likely be associated with guilt rather than victimiza-tion), as an example. To be sure, this does not explain all cases of depression, but it does highlight the learning processes and circular contingencies involved.
As another example, I know of a woman who hated the task of being a mother. She liked the idea of being romanced. On the average she read roughly 10 romance novels a week. She clairbed to be addicted. By reading romance novels and "having to find out if Nathan and Roxanne made up" (i.e., a hypothetical romance plot), she was too busy to be bothered by many of the mundane and less stimulating activities of being a mother. Reading romance novels is what she did "instead." While the pleasure she derived from reading the novels was posi-tively reinforcing, it was also a powerful negative reinforcer via the opportunity to avoid the burdens of spending time entertaining her child. The fact is that a lot of our motives are not clearly understood and are often pretty self-serving. The mother I describe did not "intentionally/consciously" read romance novels to avoid the responsibilities of being an involved mother, but she did recognize the payoff when it was suggested to her. Negative affect plays a very important role in our lives because learning principles have such an impact on affective conditions (e.g., conditioned emotional responses [CERs] and the nature of "positive" rein-forcement and "negative" reinforcement). The fact is that positive and negative are defined affectively.
Before moving on, we should consider the notion of intentionality relative to the idea of usefiiine.ss. To say that symptoms are useful/purposeful/adaptive implies intentionality (i.e., that they are intentionally produced as a means of bringing about a desired outcome). To say that a symptom works, that it is useful, suggests that it leads to a desirable outcome—to a desirable state of affairs (reward or relief). It is important to keep in mind that most of what we have learned we were not even aware that we were learning when we were in the process of learn-ing it. Often, when learning is occurring, we are attending to other factors and not specifically to what we are learning. This is why parents stop us at times and ask us what we learned in a situation; they do not want the awareness to be missed. Despite our lack of awareness, our brains do register the important association between what occurred (the "Event"), what was felt (the "Feeling"), and what was done (the "Action"); thus we are inclined to do similar things in similar circum-stances if they have worked in the past. We learn things and act on what we have learned, yet we often are not aware that learning has occurred or that we are acting on something we have learned—thus our emotional reactions appearing as symp-toms of a condition may be purposeful/useful, but not necessarily intentional. ...
While each purpose of emotional expression is critical, it is useful to consider first the role of emotion as an existential feedback mechanism. Emotions serve the important purpose of helping humans to monitor the quality and state of exis-tence, thereby motivating one to modify a current circumstance, avoid potential problems, and obtain desired outcomes. We determine that a situation is good or bad not just as a function of our cognitive appraisal, but as a function of how we feel about it. If we feel good, we want more; if we feel bad, we are compelled to change the situation—this is the basis of the evolutionary imperatives (Millon), or the striving for a "felt plus" (Adler). Adler stated that "The emotions and their physical expression tell us how the mind is acting and reacting in a situation which it interprets as favorable or unfavorable" (1958, p. 41, taken from Beames, 1992).
Furthermore, the intensity with which we act to affect any situation is a func-tion of the intensity of, or urgency created by, the emotion. For example, if one feels a little anxious or nervous, that individual will remain vigilant of the situ-ation but may proceed anyway. For instance, entering an unlit building might generate feelings of anxiety or even fear, but if threats are not perceived to be great or the emotional energy not significant, the person can proceed, typically in search for a light switch. However, if that person feels a great deal of anxiety, to the point of terror, he or she is more likely to remove him- or herself from the situ-ation as quickly as possible. Of course this depends in large part on how the situ-ation is perceived and interprettd, but the critical, behavioral mobilizing factor is the emotion felt. Further, emotions provide feedback regarding the effectiveness of our behavioral actions. If our actions lead to changes in the event, which are associated with positive feelings, the actor is reinforced and will add the behavior to his or her repertoire of effective responses. If the action is followed by an aver-sive outcome—as determined by one's feelings associated with the outcome—that information will be remembered as an action to avoid.
Some emotions appear particularly well suited as sources of immediate feed-back. While emotions such as anger, contempt, and perhaps happiness require a greater combination of events to occur before they are felt, some are more imme-diate to the circumstance. For example, the feeling of hurt may occur immediately in the face of criticism or rejection. Surprise, an emotional reaction that prepares us for unexpected and salient events, is immediate, as is disgust, which turns us away from unpleasant things. Sorrow follows immediate loss, and embarrass-ment provides immediate emotional feedback concerning our violation of some social rule or expectation. Similarly, guilt may provide immediate feedback con-cerning the violation of some intimate expectation. Importantly, while one might cognitively recognize a rule violation, as in the case of embarrassment or guilt, unless and until the emotion is felt, it is unlikely that one would do anything about that violation, and the recognition would most probably be minimal and fleeting. For instance, sometimes we do not feel guilty until it is clear that we breached a relationship agreement, or we do not feel embarrassed until it has been pointed out that we violated a social rule (e.g., do not go out in public with your fly open on your trousers). Likewise, our guilt might be intensified once we realize we have hurt another, and we might not feel embarrassed if we know our social breach was not observed by others.
In sum, emotions are the critical source of our evaluation about immediate events and quality of life. One may think that life is good or had, but it is neither until it is felt to be one or the other. To emphasize this point, consider the individ-ual seeking psychiatric treatment for a mood disorder such as unipolar or bipolar depression. This individual might he surprised by the depression in light of her objective appraisal of life. She perceives herself as attractive and intelligent. She has wonderful, well-behaved children, a successful marriage to a spouse who appears to adore her, and she is financially well off. Yet as we look deeper into her situation, we may find that, despite the objective appraisal of good things in life more deeply, her lifestyle goals related to her own personal achievements are not being satisfied, and it is the level of awareness that creates her feeling of nonfulfillment. Alternatively, we might consider a drug user who, because of her drug problem, has a life that is, by all objective measures, in a horrendous state of chaos. She has children she cannot care for, her health has been compromised, she does not have a stable or intimate relationship, she is in financial ruin, and as the result of her educational limitations has no real promise of gainful employment. However, while high. life is good and she has no troubles; she laughs, smiles, and enjoys the company of her fellow drug users. These two examples underscore the importance of affect as the critical factor in determining how we view the quality of our lives.
