Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [316]
All this may make emotion research sound remote from real life, and it is true that psychologists are interested in lofty questions about the emotions: what functions they serve, whether they are innate or acquired, whether they are universal or culturally variable, and how they are related to changes in the body and to mental processes. But psychologists are also interested in an eminently practical question: How are emotions related to behavior? Most of them agree that an emotion is not just a signal to the creature that some object or event is relevant to its needs; it is the means through which motivation becomes purposive action.11
Thus the ancient question—Why do we do what we do?—has become central to modern psychology, and the emotions are now seen as a crucial part of the answer. The study of emotion and motivation began with philosophic speculations, in the scientific era turned first to the investigation of physical needs, then to that of nervous system functions, later to that of cognitive processes, and finally to that of brain activation. It is a paradigm of the evolution of psychology itself.
Somatic Theory
What sort of person would starve a captive rat for two days, then put it in a box with a food pellet at the far end, which the rat cannot reach without scurrying across an electrically charged grid that shocks its feet? What sort of person would put a mother rat at one end of that box and her babies at the other?
A sadist, you might think. But Carl J. Warden was a very decent young man and not in the least sadistic; he was simply a typical experimental psychologist of the behaviorist era. The time was 1931, the place Columbia University, the apparatus his invention, the Columbia Obstruction Box, by means of which he was seeking to measure, as objectively as possible, the strength of two sources of motivation, the hunger drive and the maternal drive.
His data, he hoped, would validate the simple hypothesis that the greater the rat’s need, the greater its drive or motivation to allay that need. The measure of the need for food was simply how long the rat had been without any; the measure of the resulting drive was how frequently the rat would cross the electric grid for another morsel of food. The experiment proved Warden’s hypothesis correct up to the third day of deprivation; after that the rat became weakened and less driven to cross the grid. Motivation research could hardly have been more objective. (The trials with the mother and her babies yielded less satisfying results; the absence of the pups did not create as clear-cut a need as hunger.)12
In Warden’s report, as in other behaviorist writing, there was no talk of instinct. Behaviorists believed that almost everything a higher-order creature (like a mammal) does is the result of learning, and they viewed instinct theory as reactionary. By the 1920s they were calling the goal-directed energy of motivated behavior “drive” rather than instinct. Robert S. Woodworth, who proposed the concept of drive in 1918, said that although organisms possess innate mechanisms for such activities as seeking and devouring food, these lie idle until activated by a drive that directs the creature toward goals it has learned will allay the need. Behaviorists found drive a comfortable concept. Moreover, unlike instinct, it was one they could experimentally generate, measure, and modify by conditioning in the effort to determine the laws of motivation.
One of those hypotheses