Emotion and Motivation

To ask questions about motivation is to ask why animals do what they do. There have been many theories of motivation over the years! At one end of the spectrum was Maslow (1954), who argued that humans have a hierarchy of needs (physiological → safety → social → esteem → ‘self-actualization’, e.g. painting and composing), and must fulfil lower-level needs before addressing higher ones. It’s pretty useless experimentally; it doesn’t make very many testable predictions, except that nobody should starve to death for their art. Middleton Manigault, 1887–1922, did just this attempting to ‘see colours not perceptible to the physical eye’. It takes all sorts.