Assignment: What is the motivation

Assignment: What is the motivation

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Assignment: What is the motivation for eating, drinking, and sex?

Please respond to the two questions below. Remember to cite any sources that you use.

1. Which of the following options is more likely to lead to success in life? Why?

a. Above average intelligence coupled with average motivation to achieve success.

b. Average intelligence coupled with above average motivation to achieve success.

2. What is the motivation for eating, drinking, and sex? Is it the immediate pleasure that each activity provides, or that it ensures the survival of the individual and species? Explain.

Case #3

Harvey and Tina are a middle-aged mixed-race couple who present for counseling after 20 years of marriage. They state that there are no known problems in their marriage, but they would like to establish a safe space to discuss issues as they might develop. While gathering history, you learn that Tina was born as Anthony and went through sex reassignment surgery two years into her relationship with Harvey. Shortly after going through sex reassignment, Harvey and Tina married. Harvey and Tina appeared well groomed with superior insight and no plans to use insurance for counseling.

2. What is the motivation for eating, drinking, and sex? Is it the immediate pleasure that each activity provides, or that it ensures the survival of the individual and species? Explain.

Along with the need to drink fresh water, which humans can normally attain in all except the most extreme situations, the need for food is the most fundamental and important human need. More than one in 10 Canadian households contain people who live without enough nourishing food, and this lack of proper nourishment has profound effects on their abilities to lead productive lives (Yarema, 2013). When people are extremely hungry, their motivation to attain food completely changes their behaviour. Hungry people become listless and apathetic to save energy and then become completely obsessed with food. Ancel Keys and his colleagues (Keys, Brožek, Henschel, Mickelsen, & Taylor, 1950) found that volunteers who were placed on severely reduced-calorie diets lost all interest in sex and social activities, becoming preoccupied with food.

Like most interesting psychological phenomena, the simple behaviour of eating has both biological and social determinants (Figure 11.11, “Biological, Psychological, and Social-Cultural Contributors to Eating”). Biologically, hunger is controlled by the interactions among complex pathways in the nervous system and a variety of hormonal and chemical systems in the brain and body. The stomach is of course important. We feel more hungry when our stomach is empty than when it is full. But we can also feel hunger even without input from the stomach. Two areas of the hypothalamus are known to be particularly important in eating. The lateral part of the hypothalamus responds primarily to cues to start eating, whereas the ventromedial part of the hypothalamus primarily responds to cues to stop eating. If the lateral part of the hypothalamus is damaged, the animal will not eat even if food is present, whereas if the ventromedial part of the hypothalamus is damaged, the animal will eat until it is obese (Wolf & Miller, 1964).