La unidad elemental e indivisible del significante y la voz. La pregunta por el ser

In addition to identifying motivation’s perennial problems and its subject matter, one more introductory task remains —namely, specifying how motivation expresses itself. In other words, How can you tell when someone is motivated? Or is not motivated? Or is only a little bit motivated? Or is motivated toward one thing rather than another? All people are motivated, so we first need to reframe the question as, How can you tell the quality (or type) and the quantity (or amount) of another person’s motivation? For instance, as you watch two people —say, two teenagers playing a tennis match—how do you know that one person is more motivated than is the other? How do you know whether one player harbors a higher quality of motivation than does the other?

Motivation is a private, unobservable, and seemingly mysterious experience. You cannot see another person’s motivation. That is, as you walk down the street, you cannot look at passersby and see their thirst, goals, or extent of achievement motivation. Instead, we can observe what is public and observable and monitor this information to infer such motivations.

Two ways exist to infer motivation in another person. The first way is to observe motivation’s behavioral manifestations. To infer hunger, for instance, we watch to see whether Joe eats more quickly than usual, chews vigorously, talks about eating during conversation, and forgoes social manners for the opportunity to eat. Behaving quickly, vigorously, and narrowly implies that some force must be energizing and directing Joe’s consummatory behavior. The second way to infer motivation is to pay close attention to the antecedents known to give rise to motivational states. After 72 hours of food deprivation, a person will be hungry. After feeling threatened, a person will feel fear.

After winning a competition, a person will feel competent. Food deprivation reliably leads to hunger, a threat appraisal reliably leads to fear, and objective messages of effectance reliably lead to feeling competent. When we know the antecedents to a person’s motivation, we can predict people’s motivational states in advance, and we can do so rather confidently. But these antecedents are not always knowable. More often than not, motivation must be inferred from its expressions via the person’s behavior, engagement, physiology, and self-report.

Expressions of Motivation 11 Behavior

Eight aspects of behavior express the presence, intensity, and quality of motivation (Atkinson & Birch, 1970, 1978; Bolles, 1975; Ekman & Friesen, 1975): attention, effort, latency, persistence, choice, probability of response, facial expressions, and bodily ges-tures. The eight aspects of behavior shown in Table 1.2 provide the observer with data to infer the presence and intensity of another person’s motivation. When behavior shows on-task attention, intense effort, short latency, long persistence, high probability of occurrence, facial or gestural expressiveness, or when the individual pursues a specific goal-object in lieu of another, such is the evidence to infer the presence of a relatively intense motive. When behavior is occasionally off-task and shows lackadaisical effort, long latency, fragile persistence, low probability of occurrence, minimal facial and ges-tural expressiveness, or the individual pursues an alternative goal-object, such is the evidence to infer an absence of a motive or at least a relatively weak motive.

Engagement

Engagement refers to the behavioral intensity, emotional quality, and personal investment in another person’s involvement during an activity (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004;

Halusic, Tseng, & Reeve, 2008; Wellborn, 1991). To monitor another’s engagement, one needs to keep track of that person’s behavior, emotion, cognition, and voice, as sum-marized in Figure 1.3. Behavioral engagement represents the extent to which the person displays on-task attention, effort, and enduring persistence (i.e., the behavior discussed in the preceding paragraph). Emotional engagement expresses the extent to which the per-son’s activity is characterized by positive emotion, such as interest and enjoyment, rather than by negative emotion, such as sadness or anger. Cognitive engagement expresses the extent to which the person actively monitors how well things are going and uses sophis-ticated learning and problem-solving strategies. Voice expresses the extent to which the person expresses the needs, preferences, and desires of the self and seeks to change one’s environmental circumstances for the better. For one example, to infer the

Table 1.2 Behavioral Expressions of Motivation

Attention Concentration and on-task focus.

Effort Exertion put forth while trying to accomplish a task.

Latency The time a person delays a response following an initial exposure to a stimulus event.

Persistence The time between the initiation of a response until its cessation.

Choice When presented with two or more courses of action, showing a preference for one course of action over the other.

Probability of response Given a number of different opportunities for the behavior to occur, the number (or percentage) of occasions that particular goal-directed response occurs.

Facial expressions Facial movements, such as wrinkling the nose, raising the upper lip, and lowering the brow (e.g., a disgusted facial expression).

Bodily gestures Bodily gestures like posture, weight shifts, and the movements of the legs, arms, and hands (e.g., a clenched fist).

Extent of Engagement

(Interest, Enjoyment)

(Strategies, Self-Regulation)

(Self-Expression, Participation) (Attention, Effort,

Persistence) Behavioral Engagement

Emotional Engagement

Cognitive

Engagement Voice

Figure 1.3 Four Interrelated Aspects of Engagement

underlying motivation of the student who sits next to you during class, observe his or her attention and effort (behavioral engagement), interest and enjoyment (emotional engagement), deep processing and monitoring of how things are going (cognitive engagement), and verbal participation in and contribution to the lesson (voice). These four aspects of engagement are all positively intercorrelated, and they collectively communicate the underlying and moment-to-moment status of the person’s motivation during an activity.

Brain Activations and Physiology

As people and animals prepare to engage in various activities, brain sites become acti-vated and the nervous and endocrine systems manufacture and release various chemical substances (e.g., neurotransmitters, hormones) that provide the biological underpinnings of motivational and emotional states (Andreassi, 1986; Coles, Ponchin, & Porges, 1986).

In the course of a public speech, for example, speakers experience acute emotional stress to various degrees, and that emotionality manifests itself physiologically through a rise in plasma catecholamines (e.g., adrenaline; Bolm-Avdorff, Schwammle, Ehlenz, & Kaf-farnik, 1989). To measure such neural and hormonal changes, researchers use blood tests, saliva tests, psychophysiological equipment, and machines that observe neural activity in the brain (e.g., positron emission tomography, or PET scan). Using these measures, motivation researchers monitor a person’s brain activity, hormonal activity, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, pupil diameter, skin conductance, skeletal muscle activ-ity, and other indices of physiological functioning to infer the presence and intensity of underlying motivational and emotional states, as listed in Table 1.3.

Self-Report

A fourth way to collect data to infer the presence, intensity, and quality of motivation is simply to ask. People can typically self-report their motivation, as in an interview or on a questionnaire. An interviewer might assess anxiety, for instance, by asking how