Sunday, December 12, 2010

FINAL POST*

Before this class I never knew the exact meaning of motivation and how each individual is motivated in life. Last semester I took a class called “Sex, Power, & conflict” and it talked about some of the evolutionary antecedents of motivation. We learned about what motivates us to choose certain mates and foods we like. We learned about what motivates people who use and abuse substances like marijuana and alcohol. I never knew there were different types of arousal; for example physiological arousal, brain arousal, and psychological arousal.
In this class we learned a lot about the interaction between an internal motive and an external incentive (push and pull). I never realized how much our personalities also affect our behaviors and motivators. We learned about positive and negative incentives and their values and utilities. We did learn about Fechner’s law but it was sort of confusing. We learned about losses loom larger than gains which means the loss of something is more dissatisfying than the gain of it. I never knew about the origin of motivates and how goals are more important, complex, cognitive, and are usually single occurrences. We learned the cost of motivated behavior is measured in various ways. I really liked the last two chapters about emotions, moods, and their motives.
The most interesting part of this class was learning about stress and how life’s events can impact us. I think we all have experienced strain in our lives which is a reaction that occurs when a person’s resources are beginning to be inadequate to meet demands. I, personally, never knew how to cope with life’s stressful events. I don’t deal with physical stress often unless its winter time but I do often feel psychological symptoms of stress. I often feel helpless, hopeless, and bored. I never really experienced behavioral stress when I felt the need to drink alcohol or smoke nicotine. I do agree with the facts in this chapter that one stressful event will make my whole day bad. Negative life demands produce stress while positive life demands produce good stress. I think there are ways I could prevent stress from occurring if I know an outcome of the situation at hand. I particularly found the College Students Life Events Scale interesting provides a quantitative measure of life change units for demands faced by university students. I do think that I have been more stressed since my car accident in October 2005. I often had reoccurring nightmares about that day but eventually they went away. In this chapter we also learned about racism and how it causes stress. I do believe the most important factor of this chapter was about the bodily effects stress has on us. Stress can weaken the immune system and increases the likelihood of certain diseases. From this chapter it taught me a lot but my favorite part was about having a sense of humor and how that can have a positive effect on dealing with stress because a sense of humor can help with stressor appraisal and reduce the impact of stress
This is a video of my friends and I trying to learn the dance routine from Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video. Before I transferred to Stockton I took a dance class at ACCC and this was a project to learn a dance from a video. I don’t know what motivated us to get intoxicated while learning it but I know I was motivated to get a passing grade!










..as i was looking through my videos i came across a video i recorded at dinner on my carnival cruise this past may. every night at dinner the crew members danced and it was simply amazing.. our tables waitress told me a little about herself. i learned that the crew members worked on cruise ships for 6 months straight. they worked 12 hour shifts for 4 days a week and then 3 off. i also learned that their pay was untaxed mainly bevause majority of the time they were out of the states. as i listened to her story i relly thought what kind of person would be motivated to be away from their family for about 6 to 8 months. i personally would not be able to do thier job but as from the looks of the video atleast they enjoy it


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