Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [318]
Clearly, many kinds of behavior are motivated by complex needs generated by the autonomic and central nervous systems and the mind; this was what emotion and motivation researchers had been ignoring.
Over the years, however, as researchers explored the complexities of conflicting motivations that could not all be accounted for by internal drives or needs, they recognized that some behavior is motivated by “incentives”—external stimuli or rewards not directly related to biological needs. Many people will stay up late watching a movie although they need, and know they need, to go to sleep; many will keep nibbling canapés at a party to be social, even though they feel overfull. Eventually, in 1989 and 2001, the British psychologist Michael Apter advanced a “reversal theory” of “metamotivation”: We can switch from one motivational state to its equally rewarding opposite, but can never be in a state where both pertain. For instance, we are in an achievement oriented motivational state when working on some important project, but may at some point reverse to an enjoyment-motivated state to take a break and have a snack; both states gratify needs but in opposite ways. Apter’s team asked parachute jumpers about their feelings just before and after jumping: In both conditions the reward was one of great arousal, but before jumping the arousal was due to great anxiety, afterward to great pleasure.18
But now we must get back to our story.
Although behaviorists could observe and measure the external activities associated with motivation, they could neither observe nor measure physical indices of emotion. A rat could not tell them what it was feeling, and though a human being could, they regarded such information as unverifiable and scientifically valueless.
Not all psychologists, however, felt bound by the behaviorist prescription for acceptable evidence; some were willing to accept a human being’s identification of what he or she was feeling. But even they, during the early decades of the century, were interested chiefly in the physiological changes accompanying the emotions the subjects said they felt and which, the researchers believed, were the source of those emotions.
This theory, as we saw earlier, had been advanced by William James in 1884 and almost simultaneously by Carl Lange, a Danish physiologist. The James-Lange theory held that—contrary to our impression that some fact excites an emotion in us and this gives rise to bodily changes—an exciting fact brings about bodily changes, and our perception of those changes is the emotion. (As James put it, we meet a bear and tremble, and because we tremble feel afraid.)
The James-Lange theory was generally accepted for many years, and by the 1920s, as new techniques of physiological measurement were developed, researchers were able to measure objectively the bodily states James had been able to describe only subjectively. Their aim was to see how specific changes in blood pressure, pulse, and respiration correlated with the emotions the subjects said they experienced.
In the free-wheeling spirit of the time, some of the researchers imposed stresses on their subjects that would be considered outrageous today. A psychologist named Blatz, for instance, told his volunteers that the experiment they were taking part in was a study of heart-rate changes over a fifteen-minute period. Each volunteer was tied in a chair, blindfolded, wired to equipment that monitored pulse, breathing, and skin conductance, and left alone for a quarter of an hour. After three such sessions during which nothing happened—some subjects actually fell asleep—at some point in the fourth session Blatz threw a switch causing the chair, hinged in front and standing on a trap door, to drop backward. It was smoothly stopped by a door check after falling through a 60-degree arc. The volunteers exhibited a burst of rapid and irregular heartbeat, the abrupt cessation of breathing