Читать книгу The Behavior of Animals - Группа авторов - Страница 67

The word motivate means “to cause to move,” and I will use the concept of motivation to refer to the study of the immediate causes of behavior: those factors responsible for the initiation, maintenance, and termination of behavior. Thus, motivation is another word for aspects of Tinbergen’s causal question (see Chapter 1). Causal factors for behavior include stimuli, hormones, and the intrinsic activity of the nervous system. How do these factors cause a female rat to behave maternally to her pups? Or a chicken to bathe in dust in the middle of the day? Or a male stickleback fish to stop responding sexually to receptive females? These are the types of questions asked in the first part of this chapter.

Motivated behavior often produces emotion, but the concept of emotion is problematic because there is no consensus about its definition. In the second part of this chapter I will analyze the concept of emotion as applied primarily to humans and conclude with a section on nonhuman emotion and its relation to animal welfare.