Emotional and Motivated Brain

Your brain doesn’t just focus on a task at present, but also whether you would like to do the task (motivational state) and your mood while doing it (emotional state.). Thus with a challenge, performing tasks in order to solve it, the willingness to do the task and your specific mood needs to be taken into account.

1.Specific brain structures generate specific motivations when stimulated, when area damaged it takes the capacity away.

2.Brain structures have receptors sites on them that endow them with the potential to be stimulated; bio-chemicals that stimulate these receptors are neurotransmitters (the communication messengers of the nervous system) and hormones (communication messengers of the endocrine system).

3.While knowledge of how the brain works helps us understand motivation and emotion we still need to link the events in our lives to brain activation, how day-to-day events stir neurotransmitters and hormones and hence brain structures into action.

Amygdala

-Regulates the emotions related to self preservation (fear, anxiety, anger)

- Regulates how we perceive other’s emotions

-Processes emotional information

-When hormone removed, become calm and docile

Anterior Cingulate Cortex- Controls day-to.day moods and choices. Decreased activity leads to sadness and depression

Prefrontal cortex- stimulation can indirectly generate emotional states

-Right: negative feelings stimulated from thoughts

Left- Thoughts stimulate positive feelings

Dopamine- a hormone that occurs with anticipation of reward as well as promoting good feelings: “…a neural mechanism by which motivation gets translated into action.”

Hormones- stress and cortisol hormone. Elevated cortisol has been associated with poor intellectual functioning, negative affect and emotions and poor health outcomes. It is created from stress.

Oxytocin- a bonding hormone, and is used when seeking comfort and support.

Bothe hormones are used in coping situations.

*In any tough situation for dancers, the dancer will behave and react in a certain way depending on how heavily the experience they are having at that present time affects them. In general, an emotions controls and organize a certain experience which can be categorized in four ways (relating it to a dancer's perspective):

-Feelings: How the individual feels from a certain situation, and possibly expresses it

- Physiological:  How the body adapts physically to situational demands. The body will react in a certain way (instinct). For e.g. when injured, it is natural to protect the injured part. When feeling sad, a person might not be as motivated to exercise.

-Function: What we want to achieve at that present moment, I.e. working towards a specific goal to overcome a challenge

-Expressing: How a dancer expresses heir emotions

Sources of motivation

Motivation is one of the key ingredients for working at a dancer’s best in order to reach their goals and perform at their best:

*Needs: “Generate wants, desires. And strivings that motivate whatever behaviors are necessary for life and well being.”

Dancing for a ballet dancer provides their needs- Provides them with their salary, and a sense of belonging (refer to blog post with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)

*Cognitions- mental events with thoughts, beliefs and expectation. What helps is to always have a goal in mind where the individual holds beliefs about their own abilities. A very important factor to consider towards self-confidence

*External events- Environmental, social, cultural motivation

Intrinsic motivation connects to emotional well being:

“Leads to better psychological well-being than extrinsic goals.”

-Emerges spontaneously out of an individual’s psychological needs

-Promotes more persistence, creativeness, conceptual understanding and optimal well-being (all qualities needed for emotional resilience)

Extrinsic motivation

To regulate this type of motivation and maintain positivity, an indiviadual needs to learn how to operate effectively within their environment

“Learning to engage in behaviour that produces attractive consequences while also learning that to engage in behaviour that produced aversive consequences, e.g. rejection.”