General Overview:
Motivational
psychology was one of the more interesting psychology courses that I have ever
taken, and at this point in my education career I feel like I have taken a
million psychology courses. I enjoyed learning about topics in motivation such
as what pushes and pulls us towards something, addictions, personality and how
it has an effect on one’s decisions, temperament, how one chooses a mate, and
different theories from philosophers such as Freud, Charles Darwin, and Thorndike.
I also enjoyed learning the little influence that Positive Psychology is gaining
in the education world. I am now interested in learning about that topic as
well. Overall, the topics that we covered in this course I found to intrigue
me. A lot of it was very relatable to my own personal life, and how I find
motivation to play out. It was nice to be able to put an explanation for my
procrastination, or loss of motivation.
Favorite Part:
I have always been interested in people’s personality
traits, what makes people different/why, and how someone’s personality dictates
their actions. I was excited that personalities played a part in motivational psychology
as well. It is general knowledge that there are numerous different types of
personalities such as Type A, standoffish, avoidant, risk-taker, and so on,
what is interesting is that people with personality traits such as those who
have type A personalities are more like to be motivated and drive. In this
course we discussed traits and temperament. What I learned is that temperament is
more imbedded in our genes; it is inherited characteristics that we have that
effect our emotions. On the other hand, our personality comes from our
interactions between our temperament and social interactions. I was
particularly intrigued by the big five model. I recall learning about this
previously in a personality psychology course and finding it to be somewhat
subjective. I had to do research on the sincerity of it, and it proved to be
right on target, and a broad enough scale to cover all personalities. We also
talked about sensation seekers, and the four components: 1. Thrill and
adventure, 2. Experience, 3. Disinhibiting, 4. Boredom and susceptibility. I
enjoyed this example of sensation seeker, or people who have sensation seeking
personalities, because I am not one to seek out insane sensations such as cliff
diving, bunji jumping, or sky-diving. I like to keep my feet planted on the
ground, and so I liked to know what would motivate someone to seek out such
risky sensations.
Creative:
<iframe width="420" height="315"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ltRAmVJ01ss"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This video is based on four personality types, and ways
motivate each personality type differently. I thought it was very relevant to
what we learned in the course, and would be interesting for others to see as
well.
Extension:
I am thinking about motivation all the times. Every time I do
anything, eat, sleep, drink, exercise, make a decision, and so on… it can all
relate to motivational psychology. I thought it was very fascinating to learn
what pulls us towards something, and what pushes us away. I also liked how I could
make the relation to procrastination. I could totally relate to the example we
went over in class about getting up early to exercise and how important it was
to be when the time was farther away. I can’t tell you how many times sleep has
outweighed exercise. I thought that was very funny when we discussed that as an
example of losing motivation as the time came closer to doing it, but I enjoyed
that I was able to make the relationship to real life concepts to concepts
learned in this course.
No comments:
Post a Comment