Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [314]
But despite Darwin’s eminence, most early scientific psychologists avoided the topic of the emotions. (William James and, of course, Freud and other psychoanalysts were notable exceptions.) Nowadays, because of the broad acceptance of psychotherapy, many people think of the emotions and the behavior they beget as the major concern of psychologists, but during the first half of the twentieth century, says Ernest Hilgard in his history of psychology in America, there was a “peculiar lack of interest among academic psychologists in the great emotional themes of literature and drama.”4
This was the result of their naïve efforts, in those decades, to be as rigorously objective as physicists, with the result that they considered reports of subjective states, including feelings or emotions, to be outside the bounds of science. From the time of Thorndike’s experiments with cats in puzzle boxes until midcentury, researchers sought to link behavior to observable physiological states, such as hunger, thirst, or pain, not to subjective states, such as the emotions.
Between the discomfort of such physiological states and the resulting behavior, however, there must be some directing mechanism or force. If not, why should hunger lead to prowling and seeking, or sexual desire to courting behavior, rather than to random agitated movement?
In the early years of the last century, psychologists were content to say that the behavior prompted by a physiological need or state is specified by instinct. This simplistic answer said nothing about how an instinct operates at the psychological level and offered no psychological condition that could be experimentally investigated. But in 1908 the psychologist William McDougall suggested an explanation and developed it more fully in 1923. A creature aroused by a physical need is in pursuit of a known goal, and its behavior is therefore purposive or motivated; the psychological impetus that results in the behavior, motivation, is a condition that can be experimentally manipulated, measured, and studied. A new field of psychology was launched.
Although human activities ranging from buttoning one’s shirt to writing a sonnet are motivated, psychologists of the behaviorist era limited themselves chiefly to studying motivation in the laboratory rat. In that relatively simple animal, they could create basic physical needs like hunger that were quantifiable in terms of the hours or days of deprivation, and could easily and objectively measure the behavior produced, primarily prowling and maze running.
With the advent of the new cognitivism in the 1950s and 1960s, mental processes again became a legitimate field of study, and some researchers began investigating motivation and emotion in human beings. But for some years, most of the attention of cognitive psychologists was on “cold cognition” (information processing, reasoning, and the like). Only within the past twenty-five years or so has it turned more toward “hot cognition” and how it is related to motivation. Not until 1988 could Ross Buck of the University of Connecticut, a leading figure in motivation and emotion research, proclaim, “Psychology has rediscovered emotion,” and it was only in the 1990s that emotions actually resumed a place on center stage of psychological enquiry.5
(Unfortunately, emotions and motivations are somewhat like a scrambled egg—yolk and white are both present but impossible to separate. Emotions or the physiological states that arouse them are often what power motivation (for instance, infatuation motivates the