PSYC 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Dorothy Dix, Analgesic, Social Isolation

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Heather Jenkin

Document Summary

Motivation- psychologists define motivation as a need or desire that energizes and directs behavior. Our motivations arise from the interplay between nature (the bodily push ) and nurture (the pulls from our thought process and culture). Early in the twentieth century, as charles darwin"s influence grew, it became fashionable to classify all sorts of behaviors as instincts. If people criticized themselves, it was because of their self- abasement instinct. if they boasted, it reflected their self- assertion instinct. Instinct- (a complex behavior that is rigidly patterned throughout a species and is unlearned). Some human behaviors, such as infant"s innate for rooting and sucking, also exhibit unlearned fixed patterns, but many more are directed by both physiological needs and psychological wants. Instinct theory failed to explain most human motives, but its underlying assumption continues in evolutionary psychology: genes do predispose some species- typical behavior.