Today we will be discussing the causes or factors that "move us" or underlie or energize our behavior, namely, our motivations.

The slide set for the topic of motivation is here.
We will examine the following motivational issues:

• The major functions of motivation (activation of the organism, directing it towards a goal, and enhancing performance)
• A typology of motivations—the major types and an interesting idea about how they relate to one another
• Yerkes-Dodson Law
• The evolution of the adaptive mechanism of homeostatic control and how control systems operate
• A basic model of the functioning of primary (physiological) drives, how they fit into the above model, and why they are so important and adaptive
• Some examples of non-homeostatic motivations and how they fit into an overall structure of our motivations.