What drives people to do better or to do worse? Some would say extreme emotions are the cause for this. For example, enthusiasm can cause people to overreact or get even more motivated, while depression can become the reason for someone losing the motivation to do anything. When it comes to human behavior, we usually focus our questions on what changes or influences the human mind, but we never truly branch out from this topic beyond that. Today, we’ll explore this topic regarding the human mind and motivation, via its relationship to negative and positive forms of emotion.

When it comes to motivation, there are lots of details that must be acknowledged. Motivation comes from a want to do something may it be a simple interest or wild fascination. Examples of this is when kids are growing up, their career goals or dream jobs tend to develop into a main focus for them. First, a child would beg their parents for more information on the specified job or goal. Then, they would ask the parent to be able to do activities related to it. Lastly, when the basics are learned, their college days start up. The activity may include reading engineering books hoping to become an engineer, taking dance lessons to become a famous dancer, to taking boxing lessons to become a boxer. However, even after growing up they are still learning about the world and themselves so this should at least let you help them through the rough transition, their focus can be easily taken away. So, the solution to this problem should be simple, simply get them to be interested in what their main goal is.

How you can accomplish this is called “Academic Motivation”. Academic motivation is what happens when someone tries to persistently pursue knowledge of a certain type of education. Something else to be noted however is a negative emotion called “Academic Stress”. Academic stress is emotional strain due to too much studying or circumstances related. This, along with upcoming other examples, is a practice in which authors Haiying Liang and Xu Mao ran a study of people from a College in China. The study in question examines “The interplay between emotion regulation, perceptions of academic stress, and academic motivation among university students in China who are learning English as a second language.” In doing this it shows a correlation between academic motivation and controlled emotions in a college environment. The study results prove that when a positive emotion was displayed by a student, it was helpful to their academic growth. While under academic stress, a negative emotion, it displayed a hurtful result to their academic growth. This suggests a correlation between emotion and motivation. If someone faces negative emotions while doing something, their motivation may be harmed and dampened by it, while if they felt positive emotions whilst doing the same thing, the opposite may be proven true. 

Emotion regulation and perceptions of academic stress as key predictors of academic motivation in second language learning.

By Liang, Haiying and Mao, Xu

Agent-based persuasion model with concessions dependent on emotion and time beliefs

By Wu, Jinghua; Cao, Ruiyang; Zhang, Ya; Li, Yan