Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [328]
In some cultures, the female breast, normally concealed, is powerfully exciting to men; in those where it is routinely exposed, it is not. Similarly, at the turn of the century, a woman’s ankle was an erotic sight for Western men; by the 1980s, in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse photographs of completely nude women were considered marginally erotic and only those featuring a clear view of the pudenda, preferably tumescent and open, were thought of as highly arousing.
Alfred Kinsey’s historic surveys of American sexual behavior, conducted during the 1940s and published in 1948 and 1953, found that women were much less often stimulated by erotic materials than men. But a national survey made nearly three decades later found that the sexual revolution and the women’s movement had made women far more arousable by erotic material than formerly. Again, in Kinsey’s era women were much less likely than men to experience orgasm in intercourse; by the time of the later survey they had become considerably more orgasmic.61
Volunteers in an experiment were exposed to erotica while carrying out difficult arithmetical tasks; although they were aware of the erotic stimuli, they did not become aroused. Apparently, to become excited by erotic material, the viewer or reader must fantasize himself or herself as part of the action; the participants in the experiment were too preoccupied by their work to do so.62
As early as the 1930s, but chiefly from the 1950s on, researchers in other areas of psychology were also turning up evidence that cognitive processes are a major source of human emotions and motivations. To do justice to the diverse research would require volumes; we will content ourselves with a few paragraphs about each of four examples:
I
I In the mid-1930s, as we have seen, the Harvard personality researcher Henry Murray developed the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to measure aspects of personality, especially unconscious ones. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, he framed these in the form of thirty-five needs: for orderliness, dominance, deference, aggression, abasement, nurturance, affiliation (belonging and friendship), and others. Each of the thirty-five was a motivating force, and many were investigated from that angle in the following years.
Perhaps the most intensively researched was the need for achievement, or, as it is referred to in psychological literature, nAch. In the 1950s and 1960s, David McClelland and his colleagues at Wesleyan University in Connecticut produced a number of valuable studies of the personality and behavior of people with high nAch and of its sources. Among their findings: Persons high in nAch prefer tasks that offer concrete feedback and hence tend to choose work in which it is possible to see growth and expansion … Boys high in nAch had mothers who expected them, from an early age, to be independent and self-reliant, and who put fewer restrictions on them than mothers of low-nAch boys … A survey of twenty-three modern societies found that the value a society places on achievement is reflected in its children’s stories and is correlated to its increase in electrical production in recent years.63
All of which indicates that motivation to achieve is acquired from one’s parents and society, and is thus cognitive in nature.
II
Freud held that the ego or largely conscious self develops as the child learns to control his or her impulse to obtain immediate gratification, and to postpone seeking satisfaction for the sake of greater reward or social acceptability. Thus, motivation in the older child and adult, though powered by the