Monday, June 13, 2011

Final Post

Before I took this class, I did not know that the word motivation was so intricate. Prior to reading the text, my definition of the word motivation was something that pushes you to do something. I know it is a third grade definition but that is because I never thought about it any other way.

In this course I learned about what motivation really is. I also learned about emotion which is cool because I never really made a connection between the two…which is actually an obvious connection the more I think about it. The text had 5 different sections that made it easy to focus on what was being covered. In part one, the history was covered and how research on motivation was conducted. The source of motivation is either internal or external, push or pull. In part two, biological properties of motivation were explained. This covered drug abuse and addiction, sex, stress, food, and fear. Part three consisted of psychological properties. Maslow’s Theory was mentioned, along with what drives us, and personality traits. Part four talked about external sources which explained extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, goals, which I personally enjoyed learning about, and economics of motivation. Part five came back to emotions and covered moods and arousal. Different theories were discussed like the James-Lange theory, the Cognitive Arousal Theory , and Cannon’s Theory of Arousal.

I liked learning about Emotions as Motives in Chapter 14 because I could really relate the chapter to my life. I am a cashier at Home Depot and I meet hundreds of people a day. I know I am not supposed to judge a book by its cover but it gets me threw the day. If I see a customer with an unhappy facial expression, I deal with them differently that I happy customer. The bottom of the receipts gives the customers a chance to rate the service that they received from the store and the cashiers. If by the end of the transaction, I didn’t make my customer happy, I don’t even mention the survey! Honestly, with out facial expressions, silent films would be worse than they already are! I think for the same reason as for why I hate text messaging. Facial expressions make communicating and understanding people a tad bit easier.

Now in this video, I have no idea what she is saying but I can tell that she is not furious and I can tell when she is asking a question by her facial expression. Kinda cool right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8BIzOMQfOU

4 comments:

  1. That is so funny that you do not even mention the survey. People with bad energy bring me down too. I refuse to wait tables anymore because people are some how motivated to treat their servers like slaves.

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  2. I love texting but for important things I like to have a face to face conversation and see people's reaction. A text can be read anyway and something pleasant can come off to the reader as something bad.

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  3. Spragued, if I mention the survey I'd be setting myself up for failure.

    Quacian, That's the main reason why my boyfriend and I fight so much :)

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  4. I loved your point abut the facial expressions. It's so true! In my theories of personality class, we had to study about how facial expressions are universal. It's amazing how people of different cultures manage to have the same facial expressions as others.

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