Posted: December 16th, 2015

Analyze the psychological and social needs of a character from a book or a movie.

Analyze the psychological and social needs of a character from a book or a movie. For this assignment, you will submit a 7-page double-spaced paper that applies the course concepts to a literary or cinematic work. You should structure your paper in 4 parts: 1) Synopsis of the movie, describing the plot and the main characters that are directly relevant to your analysis (i.e., don’t pad the paper with descriptions of peripheral characters – just give enough description to understand the role the person plays in the analyzed character’s life and only when relevant); 2) Explanation of the psychological and social needs with references and citations of the research literature and class materials; 3) Explanation of the observable features that allow you assess the character’s motivations (this section should make reference to expressions of motivation we discussed at the beginning of the course – effort, persistence, latency, choice, probability of response, facial expressions, and bodily gestures); 4) Analysis of the main character’s actions, expressed emotions and thoughts (as revealed by voice or inner dialogue as often occurs in written works). This fourth section should explain the character’s energy, direction, and persistence in her/his actions by appeal to the concepts used in our course. A solid paper will convey how the satisfaction or frustration of the various needs provides insight into the meaning of the literary or cinematic work under examination. This section may also critique the plausibility of the work you are analyzing if you find that the characters’ behaviors are at odds with what we know about motivation and emotion. [Side note: You might be surprised by how much more you can appreciate works of art when viewed through the lens of motivation.]
Your analysis should incorporate two peer-reviewed empirical articles on motivation or emotion found in psychology journals to support your own argument(s). Your use of these articles in the paper should involve a short, but adequate summary of each article (e.g., the researcher’s hypothesis, study design, the independent and dependent variables used, and what the researcher found in relation to their hypothesis).