Week 10 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 10 — What Moved Them, and What Did They Feel? A Motivation and Emotion Brief — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Psychology Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 9 of the term — compute two short counts from this week's studies and worked example, label what moved a person and what a feeling is made of, and tell someone new to psychology what the hunger hormones really do.

This week you learned four ways to explain what moves people to act, how the body and the mind both shape hunger, and three theories that disagree about what comes first in a feeling. In Week 3 you met the hypothalamus and the amygdala; both come back here, as part of hunger and of fear. In this assignment you work two short problems, interpret each one, and explain to someone who has never studied psychology what the hunger hormones really do. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Analysis Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

The Yerkes–Dodson law (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908) says performance is best at a moderate level of arousal, with the best level lower for a difficult task than for an easy one. Maslow's hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943) runs physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, and self-actualization, and it is a descriptive model whose strict ordering is not well supported by evidence. The week's five everyday scenarios are the midnight snack, the marathon, the scholarship, the hobby nobody pays you for, and the bear on the trail.

Work these two problems, showing your arithmetic:

Yerkes and Dodson published their law of arousal and performance in 1908, and Maslow published his hierarchy of needs in 1943. How many years separate the two?
This week's worked example uses 4 motivation labels and 3 emotion theories. How many labeled moves does it make in all?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation. For problem 1, explain which theory of motivation explains a runner choosing a marathon and why drive-reduction theory cannot, use the Yerkes–Dodson law to describe the best arousal level at the start line and for a hard exam, and place the hobby nobody pays you for on Maslow's levels while naming one limit of the model. For problem 2, narrate the bear on the trail through the James–Lange, Cannon–Bard, and two-factor theories, saying what comes first in each, and sort the moment into physiological arousal, expressive behavior, and cognitive appraisal, naming the amygdala's role in fear.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend who has never studied psychology says, "Leptin is the hunger hormone, so when I raid the fridge at midnight, that is my leptin talking." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, which hormone signals hunger and where it comes from, what leptin does instead, and one limit: hormones help regulate appetite, and habits, company, and culture pull on eating too. Explain any technical term in everyday words.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a roommate who asks why they get so thirsty after a bag of salty chips. Model answer: "Your body likes to keep its water and salt in balance, and the salty snack tipped that balance. The thirst you feel is your body's signal that it needs water to get back to normal; psychologists call that steady balance homeostasis. When you drink, the signal fades. Bodies differ, though, so how thirsty you get can depend on how much you ate and how active you were."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own explanation and evidence.

Deliverables

Submit a single motivation and emotion brief containing:

the two answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation;
your message to the friend, explaining in everyday words which hormone signals hunger and where it comes from, what leptin does instead, and one limit; and
a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your brief as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of the three emotion theories with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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