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Instinct and Tension Reduction is a theory of causation, or motivation, of behavior – causation from a behaviorist perspective, motivation from a mentalist perspective. The idea is that when an inherent instinct, such as a need for food, exceeds a threshold value we act to reduce the tension so caused. In other words, when our bodies need food we are motivated to act to reduce the feeling of the tension of hunger by obtaining food and ingesting it. This idea goes back at least as far as Sigmund Freud’s theory of drive that, sans tension, went on to underpin the behaviorist theories of Drive Reduction in the 1940s.
Introduction: Freud and Drive
Freud the histologist developed psychoanalysis, at least in his mind, as a scientific project in the light of his education in a mechanistic enlightenment deterministic paradigm set against a background of German romanticism – the so-called dark enlightenment. Therapy aside, Freud’s aim was to explain the...
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Brown, B. (2018). Instincts and Tension Reduction. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1388-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1388-1
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