Motivational development

Motivation is a concept that refers to some condition or force within the human organism that compels it to respond to stimulation or to perform some action. A human being has physiological needs, which in turn generate drives. Once these primary physiological needs are satisfied, they give rise to secondary drives. The ideational activities associated with such secondary drives undergo regular changes with development. Such motivational activities (including wishing, striving, hoping) may be distinguished from primary drives. They represent what the individual desires to experience or possess. Such activities are cognitive and have no necessary relation to overt action.

At any given stage of development some incentives (activating motivational states) are more potent than others and tend to dominate the child's ideational activities. Children differ in the ease with which an incentive can evoke a particular motivation.

Early motivational development is associated with efforts toward: gratification, reduction of uncertainty and anxiety, affiliation, genital stimulation, instrumental help, affection, effectance and hostility. No universal consensus has been reached on the list of human needs on the psychological level. They may include such needs as: achievement, deference, autonomy, exhibition, affiliation, dominance, aggression. They may also include: belongingness, love, esteem, and self-actualization. Some theories suggest that the motives of mankind are essentially the same from birth until death, whilst others hold that in the course of childhood development it is important first of all that the basic drives be gratified so that the child may later be freed to adopt less self-centred (growth) motives. Thus a child which has already known basic drive-gratification and security can in later life tolerate a frustration of these same drives more readily than a person whose whole personality is permanently pivoted on needs that were never adequately gratified. The latter theories allow for the extensive transformation in motives from infancy to maturity, or for the extreme diversity of motives found in adulthood. More recent theories tend also to allow for competence, self-actualization and ego autonomy as equally basic features of human motivation.