However, some people have greater needs than other people. These people may have learned that they want more stimulation, so they become more driven to engage in risky behavior such as skydiving, racing, and drug abuse. Exploratory motives may also involve a need to simply explore or discover our environment. If motives are the desires and needs that underlie specific behaviors, emotions are the feelings we have in association with our motives. Thus, motives and emotions are intimately connected.
Arousal associated with emotion is a physiological experience.
It involves activity of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and thus includes such things as increased or decreased heart rate, increased or decreased perspiration, etc. Although there may be slight differences in specific physiological activities associated with different emotions, general arousal seems to be mostly similar across different emotions. The fact that arousal is mostly similar across different emotions, presents problems for those who conduct lie detector tests. These tests specifically measure the arousal component of the emotion we call guilt. Some individuals have attempted to identify common behaviors associated with different emotions.