Summary

Motivation is the process behind persistent, goal-directed behaviour — behaviour that is generated and sustained by underlying driving forces such as needs, drives, goals and incentives, and that can be traced through the recurring motivational cycle of need, drive, arousal, goal-directed action, achievement and reduced arousal. Motives are broadly of two kinds: biological (or physiological) motives such as hunger, thirst and sex, which are rooted in the body's own mechanisms, and psychosocial motives such as affiliation, achievement, power, and curiosity and exploration, which are learned mainly through interaction with the social environment — the two kinds constantly interact rather than operating as fully separate categories. Abraham Maslow proposed that human needs form an ascending hierarchy, moving from physiological needs at the base, through safety needs, belongingness needs and esteem needs, up to self-actualisation at the very top — with a lower level generally needing to be reasonably satisfied before the next level commands a person's attention, which is why relatively few people ever reach true self-actualisation.

Emotion is considerably more than a simple feeling or mood: it is a complex pattern combining physiological arousal, subjective experience, and a cognitive interpretation or label attached to that experience. A small set of emotions — joy, anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise among the most commonly cited — are recognised as broadly universal across human cultures, while many other emotions, and especially the richness of vocabulary used to name and elaborate them, are shaped quite differently from one culture to the next, whether in how they are outwardly expressed (as with cross-cultural differences in gaze behaviour) or in how finely they are categorised in language. Emotion is communicated through verbal channels (spoken words together with paralanguage) and non-verbal channels (facial expression, gestures and posture, and physical distance during interaction). …