Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [323]
The arousal theory has not been abandoned, but theorists now say that arousal is not the source of the emotions but a concomitant of them. Nor is it a unidimensional condition; there are different types of arousal— behavioral, ANS, and cortical—each with its own characteristics.38
The higher-level cortical influences on motivation and emotion, in fact, have been in the forefront of research for nearly half a century. A single recent case history will document the broad-ranging role of the frontal cortex—the center of cognitive processes—on emotions. “Elliot,” a man in his early thirties, developed severe and incapacitating headaches, due to a large benign tumor behind his eyes. Surgeons removed it but could not help removing some of the surrounding frontal lobe tissue. Elliot recovered physically but lost the capacity to make decisions and, most curiously, had no emotional reactions to the many mistakes he began making in his career and personal life. The eminent neurologist Antonio Damasio examined him and reported, “I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration with my incessant and repetitious questioning.” When Elliot was shown disturbing pictures such as severely injured bodies, he said he knew the pictures were disturbing and that before the surgery he would have felt disturbed—but now felt nothing.39
Philosophic and religious traditions have held that our emotions and drives originate in our animal or physical side, but modern cognitive psychology, drawing on data of cases like that of Elliot and many other sources of more specific information, finds that many of our emotions and motivations are influenced by, or even originate in, the mind. Let us see the evidence.
Cognitive Theory
Psychologists, in stressing first the somatic and then the thalamic-limbic sources of motivation, were ignoring an everyday truth taken for granted by the average person: human beings and higher-level animals often exhibit emotions and motivations stemming from mental needs, not physiological ones.
Dog owners are well aware of this. They have seen their pet, turned loose in a new or unfamiliar house, immediately explore and sniff around the territory, driven not by hunger or any other somatic need but by a need to know.
Parents are aware of it. They have seen their small child happily push the buttons and pull the levers of a toy cash register or similar toy by the hour, driven by a need to find out how things work.
Everyone knows that after being housebound for a day or two by a storm or a minor illness, one feels a need to get out, look around, and see other places and faces, and after long hours of routine work, a need to do something refreshing to the spirit.
Hull, on a behaviorist basis, and Freud, on a psychodynamic one, held the basic motivation of creatures to be drive reduction, but in the 1960s, as cognition was again becoming the central concern of psychology, a number of researchers began to consider drive reduction theories seriously incomplete and to conduct experiments showing that more advanced creatures are often motivated by cognitive needs and processes.
We learned earlier of two such experiments. The monkeys that opened a window to watch a toy train and those that undid latches without any reward for doing so were motivated not by a physiological need or arousal of the primitive brain but by a cognitive need, namely, for mental stimulation.
Other experiments conducted in the 1950s and after showed that, contrary to behaviorist theory, rats will learn to behave in ways that are unrewarded—at least not by food, water, or other physical gratifications. In several studies, rats chose a path that led them not to food but into a maze, preferred to take a new path rather than a known one leading