Human Learning and Motivation: Key Insights

Posted on Feb 4, 2025 in Psychology and Sociology

Learning and Motivation

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior that reflects the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, such as study, instruction, observation, and practice. It involves association, learning from the consequences of behavior, and different learning types according to intelligence. Several factors influence learning, including personality, motivation, encouragement, emotions, and interests.

Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner proposed that humans have at least seven types of intelligence related to learning:

  • Linguistic Intelligence: Refers to people’s skills in public speaking and rhetoric.
  • Musical Intelligence: Music is used to communicate emotions (intellectual-artistic manifestation).
  • Logical-Mathematical Intelligence: The ability to reason and solve problems, knowledge and understanding of mathematics, logic, and so on.
  • Spatial Intelligence: The ability to solve problems or imagine visual elements.
  • Kinesthetic Intelligence: Applies to manual dexterity, a motor part of learning, such as the realization of a painting.
  • Personal (Emotional) Intelligence:
    • Intrapersonal: The ability to review and acknowledge one’s own feelings and emotions.
    • Interpersonal: The capacity to perceive and understand the behavior, emotions, and motivations of others.

Motivation

Motivation is an active force that directs behavior and underlies the tendency to survive. It is influenced by:

  • Biological Factors: Instinctive needs and impulses.
  • Cognitive Factors: Experience of events.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs:

  1. Physiological Needs: Hunger, thirst.
  2. Security Needs: Feeling safe and out of danger.
  3. Love and Belonging Needs: Connecting with others, being accepted, and feeling a sense of belonging.
  4. Esteem Needs: Achieving something, being responsible.
  5. Self-Actualization Needs: Finding satisfaction and realizing one’s potential.

Primary Needs

  • Biological Homeostatic: These are biological or vital needs.
  • Non-Homeostatic Biological: Not vital (e.g., sex).
  • Innate: The need for knowledge acquisition and adaptation (curiosity).
  • Hunger: A universal source of motivation.
  • Sex: Allows for the preservation of the species.

Human Sexual Response

  • Excitation:
    • Women: Lubrication, swelling of breasts and clitoris.
    • Men: Erection, tension of the scrotum, reddening of the genitals.
  • Plateau:
    • Respiration, pulse, and blood pressure increase.
    • Women: Vaginal walls contract.
    • Men: Maximum erection, drops of fluid containing sperm.
  • Orgasm: Contraction of the uterus every 0.8 seconds and ejaculation.
  • Resolution: The body returns to rest. Men are in a refractory period for 15-30 minutes.

Secondary Needs

  • Achievement: Developing the ability to do something, driven by a desire to excel.
  • Aggression: Behavior intended to harm someone or something.
  • Frustration: When something prevents or hinders meeting a need.
  • Conflict: Clash of two needs, opportunities, etc., where one must give something up.

Types of Conflict

  • Approach-Approach Conflict: Being attracted to two targets simultaneously.
  • Approach-Avoidance Conflict: Being attracted to a goal and repelled by it at the same time due to potential consequences.
  • Avoidance-Avoidance Conflict: Two possibilities are both undesirable.
  • Double Conflict: Being attracted to and repelled by several goals at once.

Stress

Stress is how we react to events or situations that threaten our physical and emotional balance. It can cause deterioration of body tissues, decreased ability to fight infections, headaches, back pain, skin irritation, indigestion, fatigue, and constipation.

Factors that Promote Stress

  • Environmental: Temperature, natural disasters, light.
  • Psychological: Feelings, frustration, insecurity.
  • Physiological: Hunger, thirst, allergies.
  • Social: Meetings, pressure, conflicts.

Ways to Cope with Stress

Turning threats into challenges, decreasing the intensity of the threat, modifying personal goals, maintaining physical health, and prevention.

When Does Stress Occur?

During exams, conflicts with friends due to work pressure, differences of opinion, and pressure to fit in.