The past ten years have seen an explosion of useful research surrounding human motivation and emotion; new insights allow researchers to answer the perennial questions, including "What do people want?" and "Why do they want what they want?" By delving into the roots of motivation, the emotional processes at work, and the impacts on learning, performance, and well-being, this book provides a toolbox of practical interventions and approaches for use in a wide variety of settings. In the midst of the field's "golden age," there has never been a better time to merge new understanding and practical application to improve people’s lives. Useful in schools, the workplace, clinical settings, health care, sports, industry, business, and even interpersonal relationships, these concepts are profoundly powerful; incorporated into the state-of-the-art intervention programs detailed here, they can enhance people's motivation, emotion, and outlook while answering the core questions of any human interaction.

This work focuses on human needs and illustrates how to apply motivational principles. A strong humanistic orientation with balanced coverage of behavioral, cognitive and physiological approaches is presented in the text.

Originally published in 1989, this title provided a wide-ranging and up-to-date review of a traditional area of psychology. It will be of great interest to all those who wish to discover what governs human behaviour and feeling – in other words, what makes people tick. Phil Evans explores the influences that determine a range of behaviour, from those with clear biological links such as eating, sleeping and sexual activity, to those specifically human concerns such as the need to achieve success or approval. He also analyses the feelings and emotions that often guide behaviour. He gives a detailed outline of various theoretical perspectives on what it is to be a human being: whether a biological organism with biological needs, a responder to environmental signals of pleasure, or a cognitively aware agent continuously processing information regarding current circumstances. His review of both cognitive and biosocial approaches conveys the liveliness of debate and argument within psychology at the time, and demonstrates that an understanding of all views is necessary to illuminate fully the complex nature of human behaviour.

The central argument of this book is that cognition is not the whole story in understanding intellectual functioning and development. To account for inter-individual, intra-individual, and developmental variability in actual intellectual performance, it is necessary to treat cognition, emotion, and motivation as inextricably related. Motivation, Emotion, and Cognition: Integrative Perspectives on Intellectual Functioning and Development: *represents a new direction in theory and research on intellectual functioning and development; *portrays human intelligence as fundamentally constrained by biology and adaptive needs but modulated by social and cultural forces; and *encompasses and integrates a broad range of scientific findings and advances, from cognitive and affective neurosciences to cultural psychology, addressing fundamental issues of individual differences, developmental variability, and cross-cultural differences with respect to intellectual functioning and development. By presenting current knowledge regarding integrated understanding of intellectual functioning and development, this volume promotes exchanges among researchers concerned with provoking new ideas for research and provides educators and other practitioners with a framework that will enrich understanding and guide practice.

What produces emotions? Why do we have emotions? How do we have emotions? Why do emotional states feel like something? This book seeks explanations of emotion by considering these questions. Emotion continues to be a topic of enormous scientific interest. This new book, a successor to 'The Brain and Emotion', (OUP, 1998), describes the nature, functions, and brain mechanisms that underlie both emotion and motivation. 'Emotion Explained' goes beyond examining brain mechanisms of emotion, by proposing a theory of what emotions are, and an evolutionary, Darwinian, theory of the adaptive value of emotion. It also shows that there is a clear relationship between motivation and emotion. The book also examines how cognitive states can modulate emotions, and in turn, how emotions can influence cognitive states. It considers the role of sexual selection in the evolution of affective behaviour. It also examines emotion and decision making, with links to the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics. The book is also unique in considering emotion at several levels - the neurophysiological, neuroimaging, neuropsychological, behavioural, and computational neuroscience levels.

Emotions are an inescapable part of the human experience. They motivate actions and reactions, guide our interpersonal and business relationships, inspire political and societal trends, and influence our sense of self and well-being. Emphasizing the broad practical reach of this field of study, Understanding Emotions draws from neuroscience, psychiatry, biology, genetics, the humanities, economics, and more to provide a strong foundation in core concepts. An easy-to-follow narrative arc encompasses the entire life span, while representative studies provide immediate insight into the real-world implications of important findings. This new Fourth Edition continues to provide clear and concise guidance toward the factors that drive emotion, with new, revised, and expanded discussions that reflect the current state of the field. Detailed coverage of social and anti-social motivations, moral judgment, empathy, psychological disorders, the physiological components of emotion, and many more equip students with the conceptual tools to probe deeper into the material and apply methods and techniques to their own personal lives.

This book provides a complete overview of motivation and emotion. Well-grounded in the history of the field, the fourth edition of Motivation: Biological, Psychological, and Environmental combines classic studies with current research. The text provides an overarching organizational scheme of how motivation (the inducement of action, feelings, and thought) leads to behavior from physiological, psychological, and environmental sources. The material draws on topics that are familiar to students while maintaining a conversational tone to sustain student interest.

Examines basic biological and physiological systems underlying motivational and emotional responses, arguing that, in the course of human evolution, increasingly complex social influences have liberated most human behavior from direct biological / physiological control.

This book defends the much-disputed view that emotions are what Hume referred to as ‘original existences’: feeling states that have no intentional or representational properties of their own. In doing so, the book serves as a valuable counterbalance to the now mainstream view that emotions are representational mental states. Beginning with a defence of a feeling theory of emotion, Whiting opens up a whole new way of thinking about the role and centrality of emotion in our lives, showing how emotion is key to a proper understanding of human motivation and the self. Whiting establishes that emotions as types of bodily feelings serve as the categorical bases for our behavioural dispositions, including those associated with moral thought, virtue, and vice. The book concludes by advancing the idea that emotions make up our intrinsic nature - the characterisation of what we are like in and of ourselves, when considered apart from how we are disposed to behave. The conclusion additionally draws out the implications of the claims made throughout the book in relation to our understanding of mental illness and the treatment of emotional disorders.

Motivation: A Biosocial and Cognitive Integration of Motivation and Emotion shows how motivation relates to biological, social, and cognitive issues. A wide range of topics concerning motivation and emotion are considered, including hunger and thirst, circadian and other biological rhythms, fear and anxiety, anger and aggression, achievement, attachment, and love. Goals and incentives are discussed in their application to work, child rearing, and personality. This book reviews an unusual breadth of research and provides the reader with the scientific basis for understanding motivation as a major variable in human and animal life. It also offers insights that can be applied to immediate and practical problems. Various areas are examined in depth, such as the relationships between reward, incentives, and motivation. The discussion of biological rhythms shows that humans and animals are more alert at certain times than others, and these rhythms also affect performance. The topics in the book span the ways in which motivation connects with many aspects of contemporary psychology. Basic issues of design and methodology, details of research procedures, and important aspects of definition and measurement, are discussed throughout the book. Motivation: A Biosocial and Cognitive Integration of Motivation and Emotion examines the way motivation functions and how it interacts with other important variables: physiological processes; learning, attention, and memory; rewards and stressors; the role of culture as well as species characteristics. The presentation makes clear in what important ways motivation, as a construct, contributes to the scientific understanding of behavior. The book offers advanced undergraduate and graduate students a broad overview of motivation. It also is of value for the professional psychologist who seeks an integrated overview of the classical and contemporary literature in the field of motivation. The book provides information on a broad range of issues and thus can be used also as supplementary reading for courses on cognition and biological as well as social psychology.