Wild

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This movie has concepts from Chapters 11-12. Though as usual, you can also remark on other concepts from other chapters.

Your comment does not need to provide an overview of the movie (we have all seen it). Your comment should be an in-depth analysis of one or more principles from your text. You should use scenes and characters to provide examples of textbook concepts. Your comment should reflect that you are in an upper division, university level Motivation and Emotion course and clearly link elements from the movie to the textbook.  This is a comprehensive assignment (linking course lectures, textbook, and the movie) and you cannot do that in just a few short paragraphs.

BE SPECIFIC. At the bottom of your comment, please put a list of the ME terms you used.

500 words


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In Wild, Cheryl goes through many things that trigger several different emotions for her. Through all of these events she learns more about how to control emotions. Although she may not have realized it her emotions also are what motivated her to begin hiking the Pacific Coast Trail and what helped her to finish.
Cheryl is very confused when it comes to her emotions in the beginning. She knows she loves her husband Paul but she doesn’t want to stay with him and cheats on him. She also experiences sadness when she loses her mother to cancer. Along with this sadness comes anger. During her hike, she is able to reflect on this anger and realizes that she cannot be angry with her mother because it was out of her control. I think all of these emotions she was not use to experiencing are what helped to motivate her to hike the PCT. Cheryl really didn’t know how to cope with it all but when she stumbled upon the book about the trail she just had this feeling that she needed to do it. Once on the hike she was better able to cope with her emotions. She began to enjoy the little things such as Snapple and one could infer that it was those little things that helped her to continue on.
One example I remember is when Cheryl came upon two men who immediately made her feel uncomfortable. She was having a negative appraisal of the situation and wanted to escape it as quickly as possible. When she assessed the situation she was able to decide it was better to try and seem comfortable in order to not cause any issues with the men. Her assessment of the situation ended up being correct when the one man returned but she was already ready for the situation because of the emotions she had been alerted to earlier. In another situation I think Cheryl’s appraisal of the situation was incorrect. She started the hike believing she was fully prepared and it was going to be a breeze for her. Once beginning the hike she quickly began to feel discouraged because she realized she was in fact wrong.
I also was able to relate Cheryl’s experience to her trying to find her self. She no longer had a set identity and seemed to need to find that. Losing her mother seemed to flip a switch that sparked her to want to go out and discover whom she was. The hike pushed her to figure out what she capable of as well as assess who she wanted to be after the hike ended. The people she met along the way also helped to form who she would become at the end of the hike by helping her learn more about herself. Before beginning the hike, she even switches her last name because she feels as if her old last name was no longer fitting. By the end of the hike, although she is unsure of where she will end up she has set goals for her self and has a better understanding of what she wants to do with her life.

Terms:
Emotions
Anger
Motivation
Sadness
Appraisal
Self
Goals
Identity

The movie Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon, Cheryl Strayed experiences a string of hard life events. First her mother dies of cancer, then she gets pregnant unintentionally, and her husband files for a divorce. She thinks about how to solve these problems and turn her life around and comes up with the solution. She wants to hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, one of the longest, hardest hikes in the Western United States. She packs a huge backpack and starts her journey with no hiking experience whatsoever.
If we look at this situation through the four components of emotion (figure 11.1 in the textbook), we can try and figure out why she would do this. The first component that we can observe is her feelings. Her feelings are subjective and has meaning to her. The intensity of the emotion is felt at this level and is within the subheading of cognition. The next component is bodily arousal; this includes the hormonal system, neural activation, and the body’s coping system being activated. This helps prepare us to protect ourselves. The sense of purpose component is goal-directed to help us focus on the future. The person will sometimes require social activity and sometimes require to be alone. Finally, the social-expressive component is how we express the emotion. Some people use their posture, gestures, vocalizations, and facial expressions. There are many variations of each of these that would represent different emotions. An example of Cheryl’s feeling would be when she hears about her mother’s cancer diagnoses. She immediately feels awful (this is subjective) and is aware of the consequences of her mother’s death. Her sense of purpose is going on the hike to collect herself before she tries to get back on track. Her bodily arousal kicks in when she finds out she is pregnant. Her friend gives her a shovel to get the car out of the snow, so she can go tell the father of the baby. She starts to cry and her heart beats faster. This is trying to prepare her for what is to come. Her social-expressive component comes in a lot of different times. One time that stands out is when her toe is bleeding profusely. Her face is in a grimace as she rips the toenail off. She is screaming and because of these things, we know that she was upset and in pain.
The perspective that makes the most sense to observe Cheryl from is the two-systems view. Her reactions and emotions are sometimes innate because she has never experienced hiking like this before, but she still knows how to react and continue on. She reacts to emotional stimuli without thinking of it. An example would be when she tells the farmer that she wouldn’t quit. She didn’t know how to keep on, but she wasn’t going to cheat or give up. The second system (cognitive) is seen when she reacts culturally and socially with others. She meets a lot of hikers and friends along the way. Whenever she meets someone new, she grips her rape whistle because in her culture, bigger men have been known to do bad things to smaller women. She knows the feeling of not wanting sex, and wants to make sure. Another example would be when the farmer tells his wife to go with (jokingly). She laughs and says that women shouldn’t be doing that. This is a cultural belief. Robert Levenson (from the textbook) discusses how the two systems overlap and interact. According to him, the affect one another to create emotions, interactions, and reactions.
Terms: Four components of emotion, Feelings, Bodily Arousal, Sense of Purpose, Social-expressive, Two-system view, and Cognitive system

The movie Wild relates in many ways to the topics of emotions and how we as humans handle the events that come up in our lives. The movie takes place focusing on a young women Cheryl that goes through many events in her life which are several trigger points for several different emotions. In the beginning of the film it starts off with Cheryl being recently divorcing her husband in the beginning of the film she still believed or felt like she loved him but she wasn’t truly sure of what she wanted and she then later cheated on him and ended the marriage this was when she began her journey to begin hiking the Pacific Coast trail. She was not so sure of her emotions in the beginning she was sort of lost has a person with it being the fact that she lost the person she was with for so long and at once was close and loved and then she also loses her mother which takes another big hit on her as a person. When Cheryl first began her journey on the trail she didn’t really realize in the beginning but it was her emotions that motivated her to hike the trail and what helped though to finish it. There was a couple different things she faced such as her mother passing away from cancer. She was motivated by the sadness of her mothers death that helped her to keep going on her hike. There was also times in which she used her emotions to help motivate her behaviors in ways that were for the better. There was the time when she was hiking and run into two men and during the time of them talking was when she realized that the men were making her feel quite odd and she was not getting a good feeling around them. This was when she decided that it would be better to pretend things were okay and talk to play it off rather than make it noticeable that she was uncomfortable. This was the way she used her emotions to have certain behaviors. This movie also seeming to cover the journey of one trying to find themselves. For a while Cheryl seemed to have her life figured out as she was a married women and she had her mother but then she felt the need to make a change and get out she was just seeming to be losing sight of herself. She then got a divorced and lost her mother and decided to set out on something that she wanted to do in order to find herself as a person. This film goes to show that emotions can create large motives in people in which get people doing something they at some points never knew or thought they would do. For her it was the losing of her mother and leaving her husband that showed her she could do it. Also along the way she met people in which showed her things about herself as well.

Terms:
Motivates
Emotions
sadness
anger
self goals

Wild is a movie that follows the character of Cheryl. Cheryl expresses many different emotions throughout the movie that motivate the way that she behaves. These motivating emotions are what influenced her to not only act in big ways, such as hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, but also in her smaller acts such as cheating on her husband at the beginning of the film.
At the start of the film, Cheryl is mixed up with her emotions. She expresses emotions of love for her husband, but also expresses emotions of wanting to leave the relationship. This situation can be represented through Arnold’s Appraisal Theory of Emotion. The situation is the life event of an unhappy marriage for Cheryl, in which she appraises as bad. This cognitive appraisal of the situation leads to a disliking emotion, which in turn motivates a withdrawal action. In the movie, this withdrawal action is the act of cheating on her husband. This is a specific example in the movie of how Cheryl’s emotions motivated her actions.
Another concept of chapter 11 that was represented well in the movie was the concept of the cognitive perspective of emotion and what causes it. With this perspective, it is suggested that an individual’s cognitive appraisal of the meaning of a situation or life event is what causes any certain emotion. This could be applied to the event of Cheryl’s mother’s death. At first, Cheryl experiences sadness and anger after appraising the situation as negative since her mother was gone. After additional appraisal and reflection while on her hike, though, Cheryl’s emotion changes to one of acceptance. Her change of the appraisal of the event changed her emotion regarding it, after realizing it was not her mother’s fault that she died.
In the movie, Cheryl expresses many of the basic emotions discussed in chapters 11 and 12 of the textbook. The first basic emotion is fear. This emotion arises after an individual interprets a situation as dangerous or a threat to well-being. Cheryl expressed this emotion during her encounter with the two men. These men initially gave Cheryl an uncomfortable feeling, and she experienced fear due to her appraisal of the situation as dangerous. Another emotion that was expressed by Cheryl’s character was anger. This emotion came from her mother’s death. Anger is a result of the interpretation that an individual’s plans , goals, or well-being have been interfered with by an outside source. Essentially, anger is caused by the sense that the situation is not what it should be. This is shown in the situation of her mother’s death as Cheryl’s well-being/life is interfered with by the loss of her mother. Death causes a situation to not seem as it should be, which is what Cheryl was experiencing. Sadness was another main emotion felt by Cheryl after her mother’s death. Sadness is caused by experiences of separation or failure. Cheryl was separated from her mother by her mother’s death, and in a sense felt like her mother had failed because she succumbed to death. Later in the movie during her self-finding hike, Cheryl realized the faulty thinking and accepted the situation.
TERMS
Arnold’s Appraisal Theory of Emotion
Cognitive Appraisal
Withdrawal approach
Cognitive perspective of emotion
Basic emotions
Fear
Anger
Sadness

In the movie Wild, our main character Cheryl goes through a rough period of time, and decides to go and spend time with nature, just like our last movie Into the Wild. She was recently divorced and lost her mother, so after they drop her off she decides to hike from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, alone. She brought books, and a journal for her thoughts, but ultimately it seems like she went to find some quiet in her busy life which had spun out of her control.

She has tons of time to think on this hike, so she comes to feel many of the staple of basic emotions listed in the chapter. Anger, disgust, threat, and joy are some of the things she was able to experience on her hike. Through this time alone she was able to come to peace with her mother’s passing, but was still pretty upset about it, as we saw when the kid asks her what happened to her mother. On her journey she learns to survive, and gains friends along the way. They made fun of her giant backpack that she always struggled to put on, but showed her tips to get new boots that actually fit. She had become part of a social circle, just by joining a hobby.

One of the basic emotions she experienced was fear when the trucker picked her up for some food. She lied about having a husband waiting for her, to make it seem like there was someone expecting her. Eventually, she learns to trust the man but she showed her innate sense of fear speaking for her and trying to keep her alive. Another strong emotion she felt was disgust. She threw up several times throughout the movie, having flashbacks to her mother’s last days and her rowdy behavior she was trying to escape. Her emotions were making her physically sick, and they were strong enough to be part of the reason she decided to go on a 1,000 mile hike without any experience.

In the beginning, she kept telling herself she could quit at anytime. This helped her push on and keep going thinking if it got too much she would call someone and it would be over. Later, she starts to keep going because her mother passing and the sadness that follows seems to be driving her to complete her journey. She does not want to skip some parts other experienced hikers say are impossible, and covered in snow. Her response was that she did not come out here to ride a bus, which is completely different from the motivation she had at the beginning, which was to escape her life.

At the end of the movie, she has had time to think through her life, and reflect on what she has done. She stated she would not change any of it because it made her who she is today. Unlike the last movie, she survived her journey and was able to benefit from the things she learned about herself. She got to experience new things, and close out a difficult chapter of her life with something positive, which is something that likely would not have happened had she not gone on the hike.

Terms:
Emotions
Fear
Disgust
Sadness
Motivation

Wild follows the true adventures of Cheryl Strayed and her quest to hike almost half of the nearly 3,000-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). This decision occurs because of problems in Cheryl’s life, her mother passing away of cancer, her ruined marriage because she turned to heroin and promiscuity following her mother’s death, and an abortion of a pregnancy Cheryl received from her promiscuity. The hike is Cheryl’s very last attempt at trying to find herself following her mother’s death. She begins her journey in Southern California, meeting several hikers, farmers, and campers who help her move along her way. After California, she arrives in Oregon, where she meets more friendly faces and is told she’s become a bit of a celebrity along the PCT for leaving her name and inspirational quotes/poems in the hiker’s record books along the trail. In Oregon, she runs into a boy, his grandmother, and their llama, and Cheryl talks with the boy about her mother, to which the boy sings “Red River Valley,” a song that the boys mother used to sing to him. This causes Cheryl to break down and cry when the boy parts ways with her. Finally, reaching the Bridge of Gods on the Columbia River, Cheryl completes her journey. Along the final stretch of the trail, Cheryl keeps seeing a red fox along the trail, and became convinced it was her mother’s spirit watching over her (her mother had red hair, just like the fox). Cheryl then resolves to get her life back on track, and even sets some goals by the end of the film, to marry again in four years, have a son in five years, and one year after the son she will have a daughter and name it after her mother.

Inspecting Wild from a psychological perspective, the character of Cheryl Strayed is the perfect example of Lazarus’ Appraisal Model of Emotion at work within the human mind. Appraisal is a cognitive-perspective concept within the study of emotion, so it focuses on how the mind personalizes incoming information to give events their emotional significance. The event itself does not cause the emotion, nor does the physical brain structure (as in the biological perspective). Rather, the individual’s appraisal is what gives the event an emotion and therefore significance and motivational power.

In the case of Cheryl, the entire movie is one long appraisal process. While there are multiple, smaller ones, the main issue she is trying to tackle the entire movie is the death of her mother. According to Lazarus, there is a state of primary appraisal, where the individual decides whether the event has significance to their personal life or not (possible benefit/harm/threat). Obviously, this part was easy enough for Cheryl. The death of a parent, especially a mother, falls under the sixth “at stake” of primary appraisal, the well-being of a loved one. Therefore, Cheryl interpreted this event as significant to her life, for it affected her mother (“loved one”) and therefore affected her. This causes autonomic nervous system (ANS; heart/muscles) arousal, which creates the energy for action to correct/cope with the event.

The stickler for Cheryl comes in the next part of Lazarus’ Appraisal Model, secondary appraisal. This is where the individual decides their ability to successfully cope with the perceived benefit/harm/threat. This is the process that goes on throughout the movie, as Cheryl unsuccessfully attempts to cope in a multitude of ways. The initial decisions for coping were drugs and sex. However, these served only to numb her emotions and destroy her remaining relationships as opposed to regulate coping, so it constituted unsuccessful coping. As with Lazarus’ design, unsuccessful coping leads to continued ANS activation and distress and anxiety. Obviously feeling this stress, especially following the stressful act of aborting, Cheryl sets out on her next and biggest coping strategy: Hiking. The entire hike that occurs during the film is Cheryl attempting to outrun her inability to cope with her mother’s death. She doesn’t wish to confront these emotions, and so when they finally come full-force following the encounter with the llama boy, she breaks down. All the anxiety and stress building up from her failure to cope crashes down on her and this is what prompts her actual healing. Therefore, at the end of the journey she resolves to better her life because she finally felt the emotion as opposed to numbing it or running away from it. She then sets goals for her life to better adapt to a life without her mother, intending to cease being lonely and to become a mother herself.

Terms Used:
Emotion – Pg. 301
Cognitive Perspective of Emotion – Pg. 344
Appraisal – Pg. 344
Lazarus’ Complex Appraisal Theory – Pg. 346
Primary Appraisal – Pg. 346
Secondary Appraisal – Pg. 347
Lazarus’ Conceptualization of Emotion as a Process – Pg. 349

The movie Wild is full of emotion and motivation. At the very beginning of the movie, we see Cheryl throwing her other boot down the mountain and screaming. We can tell that she’s angry by the amount of energy she used screaming and the way that she forcefully threw her boot. We can also tell by the words she said, which I will not be repeating. However, we see that she is angry and can possibly guess that it’s from the climb, but we do not find out until much later what life event caused her to become this angry and shout those words.

Throughout the movie, bits and pieces of Cheryl’s past show up. One scene in particular show us how different her mother’s emotions were compared to Cheryl’s and that is when her mom is singing in the kitchen. Cheryl asks her mom to stop humming a particular song. Her mom just giggles, which presses Cheryl to ask what’s wrong with her. The mother replies that she’s happy and that happy people sing. Obviously, Cheryl doesn’t understand why her mother is happy and points out that they have nothing. This scene shows us that Cheryl most likely experiences more negative emotions than her mother. Her mom seems to create a positive affect and focuses on the good in her life, which helps her stay happier for longer. Cheryl, however, focuses more on the bad which creates a more negative affect on her.

As we watch the movie, we see that Cheryl becomes very frustrated with herself and her life. She was married, then her mom died of cancer, and then Cheryl sort of spiraled out of control. Once she realizes how out of control she is, she decides to make a life change, which is what motivates her to hike the 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. One of the most prominent emotions I noticed was fear, which is a more negative emotion.

During her very first night on the trail, Cheryl is definitely experiencing some fear. As she is laying in her tent, she hears the breaking of sticks and the rustling of brush around her. One obvious sign that she is frightened is her physiological changes. Once she hears the noise, her body jerks and tenses as if ready to fight whatever it is. I can’t be 100% sure because it’s not my body, but I would assume that her heart rate would speed up and begin to race. Her breathing also picked up, which would help us assume that her heart rate went up. Her fear motivated her to turn her flashlight on to see if there was anything outside or to frighten off whatever was out there.

Another time she is seen fearful is when she goes up to the farmer working late. Cheryl had accidentally bought the wrong gas for her camping stove, so she could only eat cold mush and became very hungry very quickly. Because of her physiological need for food became so intense, she went up to the farmer and begged for his help and for a way to get to food. He denies her help at first, but then allows her to wait in the truck and she could stay at his place for dinner and a shower. Normally, she might have actually refused and just kept moving on because his offer was a little creepy, but she was so hungry that she chanced it. Once the man gets in the truck with her, we see that she is pushing herself as far away from the man and close to the door as possible in case the man tries something. This fear happens with other male characters in this movie as well such as the scene with the two hunters in the woods.

Throughout the rest of her journey, her emotions start to change. She experiences small amounts of joy like getting packages at each stop, which create a positive affect that help her through the rest of her journey. Once she is at the very end, she has a much calmer demeanor and reflects on the journey and how it has helped her overcome her grief and sorrow.

Terms: emotions, motivation, anger, fear, physiological needs, physiological behavior, positive/negative affect

Wild is a movie starring Reese Witherspoon in which the jagged story of Cheryl Strayed is told. Cheryl has a lot of baggage, this baggage could be interpreted as physical and mental. She in the course of her life time has brought herself into these situations in which life has turned for the worst, with cheating on her husband, doing drugs, having meaningless sex, etc. So when she decided to go on the Pacific Coast Trail and take this hike over the next three months she was faced with having to evaluate her problems and live off the land. Emotions were very high during this movie. Emotions are multidimensional and exists as these subjective feelings, as they make us feel a particular way. The three most present emotions in this movie were joy, fear, and anger.
Joy is an emotion that is motivated by desirable outcomes. Joy facilitates our willingness to engage in social activities. Joy also has a soothing function. An example of joy from the movie is when Cheryl and her mom were going to highschool together. Cheryl had these overjoyed feelings of her mom going back to high school to get her diploma. While they had this rule of not communicating while in school you could tell in their conversation in the kitchen that Cheryl was proud of her. Joy is an emotion that is not usually present in a lot of these kinds of situations.
Fear is an emotional reaction that arises from a person’s interpretation that the situation they face is dangerous and a threat to one’s well being. Fear is our instinct to perceive dangers and threats can be psychological or physical and also motivates our defense mechanisms. Lastly, fear can also provide the motivational support for learning new coping responses that remove the person from encountering danger in the first place. Fear is experienced in the movie when Leif doesn’t want to go to the hospital and see his mother dying so he just acts like it isn’t happening. Leif, Cheryl’s mom, will not accept that their mom is dying and Cheryl wants him to accept it. He is afraid that if he sees his mom than this will make the reality more real to him. This fear is real and I think it motivated him to stay away from the hospital.
The last emotional reaction that is prevalent in the movie Wild is anger. Anger is an emotion that arises from restraint, as in the interpretation that one’s plans, goals, or well being have been interfered with by some outside force. Anger also arises from a betrayal of trust, receiving unwarranted criticism, lack of consideration for self and others, and cumulative annoyances. The essence and the key motivation behind anger is the belief that the situation is not what it should be. By making this situation not what it should be the restraint, interference, conflicts, or criticism is illegitimate. This is also the most dangerous emotion because its purpose is to destroy barriers in environments. Anger is present when Cheryl’s mom and Cheryl find out that Cheryl’s mom cancer was spreading fast and affecting her tailbone to where she could no longer ride her favorite horse. Cheryl’s mom was angry because she loved her horse and being told that she couldn’t ride it anymore was making her get to this place of helplessness and wanting to cry and destroy barriers between the cancer and doing something she loves. She finally does get to this place where she can cope with her fate so that way she can live her life with her family before she leaves. Coping functions occur for a reason and the main reason is to survive. To survive we must explore our surroundings, vomit harmful substances, develop and maintain relationships, attend to emergencies, avoid injury, reproduce, fight, and have an element of caregiving. Cheryl’s mom coped with this cancer by living her life and adjusting so she could still be involved with her family.


Key Concepts
Emotions
Joy
Sad
Anger
Coping Functions
Coping functions

Four years after her mother dies, Cheryl decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in hopes that she can become the person that her mother thought she was. During her 3 month long hike, Cheryl faces many emotions that she has been avoiding. In the film there is emotion, a relationship between emotion and motivation, and managing emotions. After her mother died, Cheryl tries to deal with her grief by using drugs and having random sex with any man that is willing. She finds out she is pregnant, gets an abortion and decides to go on the hike to redeem herself.

Emotions are shown in the film in many ways. Emotions are multidimensional, subjective, biological, and social phenomena. Two days in when she realizes she has the wrong kind of gas for her stove makes her upset that she has to eat cold mush until she can go buy the right kind of gas. There are many times in the film when Cheryl felt worried for her safety. The first time was when she was waiting in the farmers car and she found the gun, and then again when he suggested that she go back to his place with him for a hot shower and a meal. She only feels safe once she realizes he has a wife. Another time she felt fear was when she found a muddy pound to refill her water and while she was waiting for it to filter two hunters came by and later that night one came back while she was setting up camp. The man told her he liked her pants because they showed off her figure. She was so scared that she packed her stuff up and hiked through the night. Silvan Tomkins stated that emotions are a type of motive that energize and direct behavior. Cheryl’s fear of the men motivated her to keep hiking through the night to get as far away from them as possible. Cheryl mainly experiences joy in her flashbacks, but a few times in present time. Joy is the emotional evidence that things are going well. While she is in a car on her way to the beginning of the trail, she has a flashback of her dancing in the kitchen with her mom as a child and it makes her smile. In a flashback she told a therapist that when she was using drugs and having the meaningless sex she felt happy, but in reality she was just numbing the pain of losing her mother. She experiences joy at the end of her hike when she makes it to Gods bridge and realizes that she could have quit at anytime but didn’t. She stuck with it to find herself, and that brought her joy. Sadness is another emotion that Cheryl experienced on her journey. Sadness is the most negative emotion, it arises from experiencing separation from a loved one through death, divorce or circumstances. She felt sadness when her mother died and again after that little boy sang to her. Him singing to her reminded her of her mother and made Cheryl miss her.

There are two relationships between emotion and motivation. The first is that emotions are a kind of emotion, I have already mentioned that. The second relationship is that emotions serve as an ongoing “readout” system to indicate how well or how poorly personal adaptation is going. Positive emotions signal that everything is going great, while negative emotions signal that something isn’t right.

Cheryl managed her emotions pretty well in the film, though there were a few times where she kind of lost it. Instead of throwing a fit and giving up when she had the wrong gas, she kind of brushed it off and just ate cold food until she could get some gas. When her mother died, she did a very bad job managing how she felt. Instead of seeking help from her husband, she turned to drugs and random sex. She also didn’t handle her emotions well when one of her shoes fell down a steep hill, so she threw the other one and started yelling profanities.

Terms: Emotion, fear, motivation, joy, sadness, managing emotions

In the movie Wild, a story is told about Cheryl. Sheryl had been through some tough times prior to the point in her life that she is in currently, which is the hike. Throughout her life she had been through her mother, Bobbi, dying of cancer, a divorce from her husband, a heroin addiction, and multiple hook-ups with anonymous men. She decided that she has a plan to turn things around. She decides that she wants to do a very hard hike of the Pacific Coast. She is hoping that this will offer her some peace in her life that is currently spinning out of control. Throughout the hike, she meets a couple really cool people, and some creepy ones as well. As she’s hiking, she keeps seeing flashbacks of her past life. Ultimately, with a lot of persistence, she is able to finish the hike. At the end of the movie, it is explained that she was able to turn her life around and remarry and has two children. She was able to reflect on her past and realized that she would not have changed a thing from it as it had led her to where she was today.
I thought that a good example from this movie that tied in with the book was the destructive behavior that Cheryl took part in while she was still in her marriage. This in my opinion is an example of Arnold’s Appraisal Theory of Emotion. She appraised her current situation with her marriage as a situation that she didn’t like and as a result, she began to withdraw from her marriage. This withdrawal led to the destructive actions such as cheating on her husband, which ultimately led to her addiction to drugs. This is very similar to the idea of perspective in the chapter as well. Her appraisal for her marriage is ultimately the same thing as her perspective of it. She wouldn’t have appraised her marriage as bad and had a good perspective of how her marriage is going. Perspective has a strong tie to the emotions felt and the actions that are brought about by emotion. I think that is an important takeaway from this chapter. Sometimes we have a say in our perspective and the way we perceive what is happening around us. The more we can sway those perceptions towards the positive side of the spectrum, the happier we will be. Throughout the movie, Cheryl continues to appraise her situation and reacts accordingly. The whole idea of the hike was due to a poor appraisal of how her life is currently going and she wanted to change something in order to create a positive appraisal in the future. This movie can also be an example for the previous chapter that we covered on self. She is not pleased with her current self and is motivated to do something that she perceives will help her fall in line with the person she wants her future self to be.
This movie was somewhat of a refreshing ending compared to the ending last week but it was also a similar plot to an extent. Both movies were about someone who had lost themself and were motivated to take action and find themselves. In this movie, the path that Cheryl took to help her find equilibrium between her self and future self worked and she was able to live a life that she had hoped for herself after. Sadly, that was not the case in the last movie. Nonetheless, I thought this movie was a good example of the chapter, and of past chapters that tied into emotion. It also reminded us that it isn’t always a bad idea to take a leap of faith.
Arnold’s Appraisal Theory of Emotion
Perspective
Self
Future Self
Emotion
Motivation

Wild opens with Cheryl Strayed throwing her shoe off the side of a cliff, screaming profanities. Anger. Cheryl had taken off her boots to see care for her many blisters, and one of her boots fell down the cliff. She assessed the situation as a bad appraisal, which she disliked, so she expressed anger by throwing her other boot and screaming. Anger develops out of the belief that the situation is not what it should be. Losing a boot off the side of a cliff was not the situation Cheryl wanted. Thus, she was angry. This is just one of many examples of Cheryl’s experiences of emotions throughout her hike of the Pacific Crest Trail.
The most interesting thing about emotions is that they are motivating. The whole reason we have emotions is because they can provide solutions to our challenges. I think it would be an understatement that Cheryl encountered many challenges in her life. Her mother’s death was a challenge that made her angry and sad. She was angry because the situation was not what it should have been; her mother died too young. Sadness comes from separation or failure. Cheryl was sad because she was separated from her mother. The problem with being both angry and sad is that anger is the most passionate and therefore, dangerous emotions, and sadness is the most negative and aversive emotion. Initially, Cheryl didn’t know how to control these emotions. They caused her to be dysfunctional because she let her emotions regulate her, rather than regulating her emotions. In her anger and sadness, she turned to sex and drugs. She distanced herself from people who loved her. Eventually, she reached a point where she realized she needed to make a change.
She was pregnant and needed a new start. She told her friend, “I’m gonna walk my way back to the woman my mother thought I was… I’m going to put myself in the way of beauty.” This statement (and decision) was rooted in so much emotion. Cheryl was probably fearful, disappointed, hopeful, angry, sad, interested, and so much more. All of these emotions motivated her to hike the PCT. According to the textbook, there’s no such thing as “bad” emotions because all emotions direct behavior.
Along these same lines, I think Cheryl (and her mom) might argue that there’s no such thing as “bad” decisions because all decisions shape you into the person you are. Near the end of the movie, Cheryl starts using attributions to turn events she previously experienced as negative emotions to positive emotions. An attribution is a reason a person uses to explain an important event. For example, Cheryl’s mom said she didn’t regret marrying an “abusive, alcoholic asshole” because it gave her Cheryl and Cheryl’s brother. This attribution generated positive, appreciative emotional reaction for Cheryl’s mom. Near the end of the movie, Cheryl starts taking on this positive reflection of her past experiences. “…But if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t do a single thing differently…What if heroin taught me something?… What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?” What she learned from her experiences before and throughout the trail were what turned Cheryl into the person she is now. These attributions are what gave Cheryl a way to cope with the hurt, what gave her peace.

Terms: anger, appraisal, emotions, sadness, fear, interest, attributions

Cheryl Strayed shows many emotions throughout the film, Wild. Her most prominent emotions in the film revolve around sadness and anger, however, each emotion can be found in the film including fear, joy, interest, sadness, and anger. Cheryl has experienced loss, frustration, and achievement. Her emotions energized and directed her behavior in adaptive ways. The loss she experienced was her mother. Cheryl coped with this sadness by turning to drugs and sex, because of her behavior after the death of her mom, she loses her husband too. Strayed faced frustration many times in the film, my favorite was when took off her boot to look at her toenail and she lost her shoe so she had to improvise and make shoes out of sandals and duct tape. Cheryl reached the life task of achievement when she finally attained her goal of hiking 1,100 miles of the 2,650-mile trail in 94 days. Strayed’s surroundings also changed drastically because rather than being surrounded by family and friends in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Cheryl became surrounded by nature and encountered very few social interactions.
Fear appears in the film when hunters approached Cheryl and make her feel threatened and scared. Her fear directs her attention to trying to get away from these hunters and energizes her to run away. Strayed experiences sadness many times throughout the film, mostly stemming from the death of her mother due to cancer. A time that Cheryl experienced anger was when her hiking boot had fallen off a cliff. However, there were times in Cheryl’s journey that she experienced joy and interest. She was joyful when she met Frank and his wife, who offered her a meal and warm shower. She was thankful for this after a couple of days without being able to cook food because she had brought the wrong kind of gas for her stove. Strayed showed interest when she met a camper named Ed who helped her adjust her backpack and gave her advice for the rest of her hiking journey. From this interest, Cheryl was able to learn from Ed, and she retained the information because of her interest in the subject.
Thinking about her childhood and mother during the hike impacted her everyday mood. When reflecting on her childhood, she experiences positive affectivity, but when she thinks about her recent struggles with losing her mother, husband, and baby she experiences a negative spin on her everyday mood.
The book mentions emotions under the context of natural selection. The best example for this I think fits with the example of when the hunters approached her. If she had not been scared of them, she could have put herself in harm. If she had not been angry about losing her boot, she might not have been desperate for footwear and use shoes that she put together herself which may have resulted in infection or parasites from the trail. If she was not interested in what Ed was teaching her about how to organize her overweight backpack, she would not have used his information and would have severe back ache. By the end of the film, Cheryl had found her sense of purpose and had made specific long-term goals in her life, such as getting remarried and having children, specifically a daughter named Bobbi after her mother.
Terms:
Emotions, sadness, anger, fear, joy, interest, achievement, everyday mood, natural selection, goal

Wild is the story of Cheryl Strayed and her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail during which she becomes in touch with herself and her emotions. Cheryl’s journey is not just one of emotion but a journey to find herself and shape her identity. The way she had been living her life prior to the hike caused dissonance within her. Her mother had raised her to be one person and she was acting like the complete opposite. Her pregnancy is the final straw as she no longer has sufficient justification for her actions and launches herself in a journey that she believes will restore her identity. The hike helps her establish self-regulation and, in the process, she grows and nurtures a better well-being within herself.
Cheryl experiences many emotions throughout her trip. According to the James-Lange theory, emotions arise out of physiological response to life events. When she first starts out her journey, she encounters a rattlesnake. Cheryl does not think; her body just reacts. Her heartrate quicks and she is filled with fear. In another instance, Cheryl asks for a ride from a farmer. While in the car together, the farmer begins to offer her food and booze. In this instance, Cheryl has time to think about the situation that is occurring. She appraises her situation and deems it to be one that could be potentially harmful to her and experiences fear. Due to her fear, she lies that she is not alone and has a husband waiting for her. She is motivated to keep herself safe and will say anything to preserve her well-being. Cognitive theorist believe that emotions are formed in reaction to an event. This applies to Cheryle as much of the emotions she has been suffocating under are a result of her mother’s death. That single event has created so many emotions in her that she cannot manage them and instead turns to sex and drugs to try to create happiness. This leads to her pregnancy, which only leaves her feeling more empty and hollow than the happiness she had intended to create.
Cheryl’s hike is an example of secondary appraisal. Despite it being four years since her mother’s sudden death, she has yet to address the baggage she carries from it. While hiking by herself, she allows herself to reflect on all the emotions she has been carrying around. For the first time, she gives herself coping strategies. Her autonomic nervous system has been allowing her to avoid her emotions and stick them in a corner for a later date. Being alone in the wilderness, her ANS helps her engage in approach behavior where she can scream, cry, and experience joy in peace. When she finishes her hike, her ANS begins to turn off and she can finally experience calm after dealing with the anxiety inducing storm of emotions she has been avoiding for the last four years.
Terms: identity, dissonance, self-regulation, James-Lange theory, appraisal, fear, motivation, secondary appraisal

Wild is a self-told story about a woman who makes the bold decision to walk nearly half of the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs up and down the entire state of California and even into Oregon, in order to find herself again after her mother’s passing from cancer. When Cheryl was only 22, nearly done with college, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and given only a year to live. A month later she passed away and Cheryl fell apart. She fell into a deep sadness that only being alone could get her out of. Her trip on the Pacific Crest Trail was the only way she was going to be able to get out of it. Before making this trip her source of coping, she coped through other ways.
Sadness, one of the six basic emotions, is the most negative and aversive one among them all. Sadness arises mostly from separation or failure. Separation being the loss of a loved one, and failure comes from any situation in which someone didn’t succeed at the level they wished they could or believed they were capable of. Sadness is used as a motivator by motivating the person towards the environment that was present before the loss or failure. The person experiencing sadness becomes motivated to initiate whatever actions necessary to alleviate the pain. In regards to separation, these actions typically are presented in an inactive, lethargic way that essentially leads to withdrawal. When Cheryl’s mother passed away a month after being diagnosed, she fell into a deep sadness that led her to withdrawal from everyone she loved. Her initial response was to try to keep her family connected, but when her effort failed, she gave up. She withdrew from her step-father and from her brother. After that she withdrew from her husband by cheating on him, doing drugs, and distancing herself from him. Once her sadness takes this toal on her, her sadness does help her maintain and motivate productive behaviors when it comes to choosing to adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail.
The coping functions of emotions have developed over time to help animals deal with fundamental life tasks, such as exploring their surroundings, developing and maintaining relationships, receiving and providing caregiving, attending immediately to emergencies, and more. All these types of reactions are forms of coping. When we experience fear, the emotional behavior is to run away, when we feel joy the emotional response is to smile and laugh, when we experience disgust the emotional response is to push the person away, and when we feel surprise the emotional response is to become alert and feel surprise. The emotional responses humans have to specific emotions is formed in a long list. These emotional responses are the bodies way to coping to the specific situation. In regards to Cheryl, her coping strategy for her sadness was to sleep with random people and doing drugs at first, but then she turned to focusing on the PCT and finding herself again. Her form of coping was first unproductive but then became productive.
Overall, Cheryl is full of emotions because of hers mother’s passing, but she finds a way through it. She finds a new identity, a new sense of self, and finds a way to cope with the pain she feels.

Terms: Sadness, Coping Functions, Emotions

Wild is a movie about a woman named Cheryl decides to leave Minneapolis, Minnesota after a series of negative events to hike 1,100 miles across the Pacific Crest Trail in hopes to experience a sense of self-discovery and healing.

After watching the movie, sadness was in my opinion the biggest emotion that is being played out in the movie. Separation which is the loss of a loved one through death, divorce, circumstances, or argument is a key part of sadness. In the movie Cheryl experiences separation through the death of her mother and through divorce. Throughout the movie Cheryl keeps having flashbacks and many of the flashbacks are of the positive and negative moments she has either shared with her mother, brother worrying about her mother, or with both her mother and brother. After losing her mother sadness played a big part in how she alleviated the pain of losing one of the people she was closest to. She became very depressed and used heroin and anonymous sex to forget about the situation she is in (mom dying) or to “alleviate the distress-provoking circumstances before they occur again” (Reeve, 315). Another example of sadness I noticed in the movie has to do with the divorce she got with her husband Paul. “Sadness motivates the person to restore the environment to its state before the distressing situation” (Reeve, 315). I thought that the flashback scene where Paul and she are getting matching tattoos was a perfect example of the quote from the textbook because although they are about to get a divorce they are trying to try to repair their relationship as much as possible before the divorce.

When it comes to disgust the first example I noticed in the movie was that Paul was motivated through the emotion disgust to get a divorce after finding out that Cheryl had been cheating on him. The textbook. Another example of disgust I noticed in the movie was that after finding out that Cheryl was pregnant. She probably felt disgust while she was cheating on him or after he found out, but getting an abortion shows that thinking about the baby led her to think about all the times she cheated on Paul and how the cheating and heroin use destroyed her marriage disgusted her, which is one of the reasons why she decides to go on the hiking adventure.

I thought the scene where Cheryl reaches Kennedy Meadows was a perfect scene example for the emotion joy. Before reaching Kennedy Meadows, she meets a hiker named Greg and he agrees to meet her at Kennedy Meadows. When she arrives at Kennedy Meadows you can see that through successfully reaching the desired location (Kennedy Meadows) and progressing towards the end of her hike has brought joy into her life. The textbook says that joy “facilitates our willingness to engage in social activities” and that “smiles of joy facilitate social interaction” (Reeve, 316). Once she reaches Kennedy Meadows and sees Greg and the others she can’t stop smiling and is very friendly and social to the other hikers/campers.

In closing I thought this movie was a perfect example of how emotions motivate people to do certain things and feel certain ways. I also loved this movie because it showed how being able to cope and contain your emotions is very important to help improve your life.

Motivate
Emotion
Sadness
Separation
Disgust

The film “Wild” portrays a young women who chooses to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in order to attempt to find herself and the women she believes she needs to be in life. Throughout the film Cheryl is faced with several obstacles throughout her journey of self-discovery. Several concepts from chapter 11 and 12 can be seen throughout the film.
One of the key concepts that is evident throughout the film is emotion. Cheryl displays a variety of emotions both in her flashbacks and during her journey. One of the emotions that Cheryl displays is anger. This is evident in flashback when she is speaking to her mother and explains that their lives are terrible and that nothing is going right. She is angry at her mother because she believes that her mother was a cause for their bad lives due to her bad decision of marrying a terrible man. Aside from this example, Cheryl expresses her anger when she loses her water bottle in the beginning of the film. She begins to yell and throws one of her boots down the mountain. It is evident that she is angry and frustrated with the hardships of the trip and of her past. Aside from her anger, Cheryl also displays sadness when she learns that her mother is dying. She begins to cry with her brother and even goes as far as to pray for a miracle. Cheryl displays her sadness because she feels hopeless in helping her mother and she desperately wants to find a way to help her get better. Throughout her journey, Cheryl also displays sadness whenever she feels that she can no longer continue her journey and begins to have thoughts of giving up.
Although Cheryl has certain episodes of negative emotions, she does display positive moods. Although she constantly speaks to herself about quitting, she refuses and as a result provides her with more confidence. An example of this is when she pushes through the snow and gets past a point of the journey where many individuals have quit. She proves to herself that she is capable of completing the journey and as a result provides her with a positive mood. Another example of Cheryl’s positive mood is when she is interacting with other hikers during her journey. During her interactions, she realizes that she is not alone and that she has the support of others as motivation to continue her journey of self-discovery. Cheryl demonstrates her positive mood when she is smiling and laughing at a campsite with other fellow hikers.
Biological aspects of emotion are also evident throughout the film. Cheryl displays various emotions and many times are due to certain situations that she encounters. One example of this is when she encounters a rattle snake during her hike and her fight-or-flight response is activated. She chooses to carefully walk away from the snake and proceeds to run away. As previously discussed, Cheryl is smiling and laughing during one of her encounters with other hikers around a campfire. She feels a sense of calmness and relief and cannot help but smile due to these circumstances. The cognitive aspects of emotion are also displayed in the film. The best example of this is when she accepts a ride to man’s home due to her desperate need for food. She picks up on his initial habits and develops a sense of fear and does everything in her power to make sure she is safe. Her fear quickly turns into relief when she realizes that the man and his wife are harmless. The social and environmental influences was also a factor that played into her journey. Throughout the film we see many hikers who are attempting to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, however they are choosing to do so out of fun and enjoyment. Cheryl on the other hand is hiking in order to find her purpose. The different social and environmental influences are evident because Cheryl views the trip as essential while others view it as a fun experience.

Terms:
-Emotion
-Mood
-Biological Aspects
-Cognitive Aspects
-Social and Cultural Aspects
-Motivation
-Fear
-Anger
-Sadness
-Fight-or-Flight

In the movie Wild, Cheryl, the protagonist of the film gives us many examples of this week's topic: emotion. Throughout the film we see that Cheryl has been through quite a lot of emotionally taxing situations. She embarks on her journey as a means of escaping all that emotional turmoil, it seems. She embarks on this journey despite being horribly inexperienced with hiking and camping, as well as being pretty unprepared. Through her first 5 days on the trail, Cheryl experiences a lot of anger, she seems to be irritated that she convinced herself to take on this challenge. Though, she never seemed too crazy excited for this walk in the first place. Cheryl gives us a great example of how emotions direct our behavior in her first encounter with another person on the trail. Cheryl meets a farmer while walking. At this point she has the wrong kind of fuel to cook food, and is desperate for a hot meal. She asks the man for help, who eventually agrees. Cheryl, realizing she may have gotten herself into a bad situation, lies about her husband being ahead of her on the trail. This is a sort of threat, meaning to tell the man that if she is to go missing, someone will know about it. This is a blatant lie told by Cheryl out of pure fear that the man is going to harm her or kidnap her. Another great example of emotion is when Cheryl encounters a rattlesnake when hiking. She jumps back as soon as she hears the rattle and is almost frozen in fear. This is a perfect example of the biological theory of emotion; stating that emotions arise from our instinct to survive and reproduce. Cheryl experienced fear in this situation because she knew recognized there was a threat to her life in front of her.

Cheryl experiences other emotions though besides fear. She seems to have a sense of determination to accomplish her goal and hike the entire trail without cheating herself. Throughout her journey she is haunted by flashbacks as well. Flashbacks of her and her husband, as well as her and her mother and brother. Cheryl seemed to have had a strong relationship with her mother. Cheryl felt a sense of pride because her mother was attending school with her, even though her mother felt this was probably embarrassing for her. The memories where her and her mother had positive interactions seemed to make Cheryl feel more at peace and happy. The memories of her mother when she was sick and dying, as well as the negative interactions they had make Cheryl feel great despair. The memories of her brother's helplessness make her feel the same way.

Cheryl does experience joy also when she triumphs over obstacle along her journey. Such as when she successfully cooks her own meal, she feels happiness to the point of howling with the wolves. She also seems to be rejuvenated when she meets another person. The isolation of walking the trail makes her feel much more eager about interaction with other people.

Terms:
Emotion
Anger
Despair
Sadness
Goal

The movie Wild portrays many of the concepts we learned about emotion in chapters 11 and 12. The main character, Cheryl Strayed, hiked 1,100 miles in 94 days on the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995. In one of her many flashbacks, Cheryl’s mother is humming and dancing around the kitchen. Cheryl get mad and says “why are you happy? We have nothing, mom …. What part of it do you not get?” Her mother responds by saying “If there is one thing I can teach you, it’s how to find your best self, and when you do, how to hold on to it for dear life.” Her journey to find herself began shortly after her mother’s death due to a losing battle against cancer, a failed marriage due to infidelity, an unintended pregnancy, and turning to heroin to bring her happiness again. The feelings of fear, pain, and anger are what motivated her to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. While on the trail, Cheryl has time to think about everything that happened to her. These thoughts and experiences she faced while on the trail triggered many flashbacks and emotions. Emotions have dimensions of feeling, arousal, purpose, and expression. Feelings give emotion a personal meaning, arousal prepares the body for coping behaviors, purpose gives emotion a goal directed motivation, and expression is how emotion is communicated through facial expressions. The emotions she felt helped her adapt to her physical and social environments. An example would be toward the beginning of the movie when she ran across a farmer on the tractor. She asked him for a ride to town so she could get a new fuel tank. While sitting in his truck, she finds a gun under the seat. When the farmer sits next to her in the truck, she is fearful. She is afraid he could kill her or try to rape her. He picks up on her lie about her husband and notices she is afraid because of her facial expression. In the end, he takes her home and his wife cooks her a dinner, she showers, and he takes her back to the trail, a friendly encounter. Later on in the movie, she comes across two men in the wild that tell her she has a nice figure. She is afraid of both of these men as they could easily team up on her and have their way. She assessed the situation, knew she felt uncomfortable, and decided to lie to them and says she needs to continue on, but one of them catches her in a lie. The feeling of fear motivates her to keep hiking to get as far away from these men as possible. Emotions energize and direct behavior, just like motivation. By the end of the movie, we see a whole new Cheryl. She has finally learned how to cope with her emotions. For example, the sadness she feels due to the loss of her mother was turned into finding her best self out in the wild. She has overcome so many obstacles, both in life and on the trail. If there isn’t emotion, there isn’t motivation. There were positive events that happened throughout the movie, such as, receiving packages, meeting friendly people, and the small survival accomplishments she made, that made her smile and truly feel joy.

Terms used:
Emotion
Motivation
Facial expression
Fear
Anger
Joy

In the movie Wild, Reece Witherspoon’s character, Cheryl Strayed, finds herself on a one thousand mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in search of clarity, happiness, and peace. Sadness and confusion are the two main emotions that drive her to engage on this trek even though she has no previous hiking experience. In general, some researchers suggest that emotions are the primary motivational system; one argument is that it is not the homeostatic imbalance that drives humans to act, but rather it is the feeling of panic, anger, sadness, etcetera that drive humans to act a certain way. As for in the movie, Cheryl, uses her emotions to motivate her because her homeostatic conditions are not being threatened.

Cheryl has the reputation of being promiscuous, which ultimately leads to her divorce. Why does she cheat on her husband with random men? She has a place to live and food to eat. She does not appear to be in any immediate danger. She cheats on her husband, not because of a homeostatic imbalance, but because she can; because she is reckless and impulsive and apparently needed to feel something that only these random men could give her.

According to the James-Lange theory, an emotion is quickly followed by bodily changes. For example, when Cheryl loses her toe nail she is angry and in pain, as a result, her facial expression changes, she becomes red in the face, and she begins to breathe heavily. Another example of this is when her mother, Bobbi, is talking to her in the kitchen. Her mother is in a very cheerful mood and it is obvious because her eyes are sparkling, her voice is high pitched, and she is moving freely around the kitchen.

Cheryl’s emotions are all over the place through out this movie. She has flashbacks to happier times as well as flashbacks to les happy times, like when she was cheating on her husband. She uses these feelings, both happy and sad, in order to motivate her to complete her mission of self discovery, clarity, and closure. She wants to quit hiking constantly; however, she persists because she wants to prove to herself that she is competent and capable of being self motivated.

Even though Cheryl feels a lot of anger, sadness, and confusion through out the movie, she feels happiness at the end. She meets hikers who speak highly of her, she gets new boots, and she completes her hike. Although her life was not what she wanted it to be, she made it what she wanted it to be. Her emotions motivated her to act and to change her life; nothing else motivated her to fix her situation. Ultimately, in the end, I believe the good times in Cheryl’s life have outweighed the bad ones. I believe she begins to feel in control of her life after decades of feeling helpless.

TERMS USED

Competent
Drive
Emotion
Happy
Homeostasis
James-Lange Theory
Sad

Wild is a movie that demonstrates many different emotions and makes you, yourself, experience many different emotions. Cheryl Strayed sets out on an adventure to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) after her life goes off course due to the death of her mother. Cheryl turns to heroin and sleeping with lots of men to cope with her mother’s death. One thing that I noticed was how different Cheryl’s emotions were compared to the other characters. Her mother was a happy woman who tried to see the positive in each day, while she was a more serious and stern individual. After the death of her mother, she becomes even more serious and an unhappy individual, which most are after the death of loved one.

An emotion is a short- lived multidimensional psychological construct that coordinates and unites its four components (biological, purposive, subjective, and social) into a synchronized pattern to elicit adaptation in the face of opportunity/challenge. Cheryl demonstrated sadness when her mother died and even anger at some points. There are multiple appraisals in the movie, but the main one if Cheryl trying to get over her mother’s death. There is a state of primary appraisal where the individual decides whether the event has significance to the life or not. Obviously, the death of Cheryl’s mother made a significant impact on her life. This event falls under the “at stake” of primary appraisal.

Another emotion that is prevalent is anger. Anger is an emotion that arises from restraint, as in the interpretation that one’s plans, goals, or well being have been interfered with by some outside force. Anger also arises from a betrayal of trust, receiving unwarranted criticism, lack of consideration for self and others, and cumulative annoyances. The essence and the key motivation behind anger is the belief that the situation is not what it should be. By making this situation not what it should be the restraint, interference, conflicts, or criticism is illegitimate. This is also the most dangerous emotion because its purpose is to destroy barriers in environments. Anger is present when Cheryl finds out that her mother has cancer. She wishes there was something that she could do and becomes angry because her mother does not have much time to live. The doctors say that her mother has a year, but she becomes very very sick just within a month of finding out about the cancer.

Terms: Emotion, Anger, Appraisal, Sadness

Wild is a film that has the main character Cheryl who is taking part in a solo trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. This film as a whole screams the term emotion. Throughout her hike and adventure she recollects memories from her past. Some being good and many being bad. In this film we can firmly see all of the basic emotions being displayed. With anger, we see how Cheryl has the personal turmoil of failed relationships and the loss of her mother that has caused her a large amount of anger. We see in a few scenes that she is yelling at either a counselor or her brother when she is faced with real life questions about either death or the importance of life itself. The chapter explains that anger is created when we believe that the situation or circumstance is not how it should be; either there is restraint, interference or criticisms that are not legitimate. With the concept of fear, we see a deeper reflection within the film. Of course we see the fear of the trails when she sees the snake and the fox and other wild animals, but what we also see is the fear of letting go. We see that she struggles with many components of her love life and is holding onto her past relationship. I feel that this entire journey is her trying to find out who she actually is and a key part of that is letting go of that fear of losing some of the small things in her life and finding the better things. Along with anger and fear disgust is also displayed. We see how she is inevitably disgusted with the way she was living her life, doing drugs, sleeping with random strangers all of the time, and sadly losing her mother, that she takes this trek to remove herself from it all. The book says that disgust comes from our interaction with something that we believe is contaminated. I feel that the contamination in this film is her past life. Lastly, motive involvement and satisfaction are displayed in the film as well. These two themes combine the emotions of interest and joy. When there is an event that benefits our wellbeing and it gains our interest and brings us joy we experience motive invoementt and satisfaction. When we have an interest in what is going on we do what is needed to keep it going in order for us to feel joy. To reflect this concept onto the film, we see that Cheryl experiences joy from seeing some of the new people on the trail. As she gets closer and closer she gets more and more interested in completing her goal and there is a spike in her interest and joy. At one point she stops in a small town and meets a guy and has a good time and that brought her some joy to her. When she eventually completed the trail we see the overall feeling of satisfaction. She says that the trail taught her a lot about herself and that she finally grasped her own life.

Terms:
Interest
Anger
Sadness
Fear
Motive involvement
Satisfaction
Joy
Disgust

Jon Lutz - section 01

To say Cheryl’s journey is emotional would be an incredible understatement. She laughs, cries, postures defensively, screams and smiles and again she cries. She displays the full spectrum of emotional expression and utility, ranging from the subtlest glance to the man at the bar, a complex microexpression in a highly social context, to the most primitive fight or flight appraisals in the wilderness. Across these extreme stags we find evidence for the four dimensions of emotion: subjectivity, biology, purposive, and social.
Social dimension seems like a no brainer in the city, where a person is surrounded by social interactions yielding emotional spikes. One of Cheryl’s angriest scenes in response to her unsatisfying interaction with the college counselor, an energizing spurt attempting to reclaim some control in the wake of losing her mother. Socially charged emotions can even be triggered over the telephone. Cheryl’s facial musculature in response to her ex husband's snide comments signal that she is pissed, even though he can’t see her. Social instinct followed her into the wild. Many times even thinking about past interactions would get a rise out her for better or for worse. Her greatest fear response, demonstrated by her sprinting and expending a lot of water and calories, is in response to the creepy hunter in the woods. This interaction has prehistoric consequences but remains a thoroughly social phenomena.
The purpose of her emotions ultimately serves to increase her well being by bringing her energy and direction. While on the trail she avoids dangers despite her exhaustion. She seeks sustenance and ignores what could be debilitating pain. Before the trip her life took a dramatic turn for the worst: anger, anxiety, self loathing. She tells the counselor, “The rest of the time I feel like dying.” The journey she decides to take is incredibly difficult, even Greg the seasoned hiker drops out. Cheryl can barely carry her pack at the beginning. Her high motivational response only makes sense when you see the intensity of her emotions. She claims a “burst of energy” is generated just by thinking about the reasons for her trips. Without the emotionally charged energy it would be expected for Cheryl to fail her thousand mile trek.
Many time while on the trail she performs classic biological emotional responses. All three of Jeffrey Grey’s neural circuits control her behavior. The behavioral approach system is activated when sees fresh water, finds a person who can help, or when she has home cooked meals scarf down. Her fight or flight system activates when she runs from the snake, caterpillar, or the creepy hunter. In the early moments of her fight or flight experiences her behavioral inhibition system locks her body motionless, until a avenue for escape is established. Her vital physiology also responds depending on her situation. When she runs out of water the sound of pumping blood dominates the audio, expressing to the audience he racing heart and the intense emotion of fear tied to her physiological need for water. The same emotional energy for hydration motivated her to dump the last of her water bottle over her head, perhaps the least efficient use. This is how powerful emotions are, with enough energy in the wrong direction humans are compelled to do fatally stupid things.
With goals in mind, our higher level functions, we can manage our emotions. Cheryl does this very well while in the Wild but very poorly while in the city. Using conscious thoughts to give calming or distracting feedback to her whole appraisal process, she facilitates emotions that parallel her goals. She thinks to herself, “happy people sing” and “ I’m not afraid.” She uses the fact that she “can quit at any time” to mitigate the dread of the daunting task ahead of her. Before her journey, Cheryl uses drugs and reckless sex to distract herself from the loss. While these strategies provided momentary relief they were harmful for her overall wellbeing.
There are three scenes that demonstrate the difference between biology and cognition via appraisal theory. First is the snake and the caterpillar. This event came the same night she saw the rattlesnake on the path. Her expense informed her appraisal process in a way that a caterpillar in her sleeping bag elicited an alarming flight response. Once she saw it was only a caterpillar, her secondary appraisal suppressed all her excitatory mechanisms. Second is in Frank’s truck. She is desperate for food so she gets in Frank’s truck. After seeing his gun and hearing some suspicious comments she appraises his presence negatively. She is compelled to lie, look nervous, and posture defensively. Once he mentions the lickerish and his wife, Frank passes Cheryl’s secondary appraisal letting her relax.Third is handsome man. After her terrifying interaction with the creepy hunter in the woods her primary appraisal of the charming man who invites her to the concert is also negative. She quickly recoils from his advance, but after her secondary appraisal she realizes how innocent and dreamy his is.


Emotion
The four dimensions of emotion
Musculature
Fear response
Well being
Motivation
Jeffrey Grey’s circuits
Primary and secondary appraisals

Wild is a movie that was based off of the author of the book. Motivation and emotion can be generalized in a few questions, including, “what causes behaviors?”, “what starts behavior”, and “why does behavior change its direction?”. I found myself asking these questions as I went from different scenes in the movie. This movie does an excellent job of showing an individual going from multiple stages of motivation throughout the whole movie. Chapter 11 deals with the nature of emotions, and everything behind emotions. Emotion ties into motivation in two main ways. The first way is that emotions are one type of motive, meaning emotions energize and direct behavior. Next, emotions serve as an ongoing “readout” system to indicate how well or how poorly personal adaptation is going. After her mother passed away Cheryl’s life was turned upside down and her behavior changed direction completely. Cheryl started doing drugs and having sex with random guys and this ultimately led to the divorce of her husband. The emotion behind her mother passing away can explain her actions with these men. Cheryl was adapting poorly to her environment and this was being portrayed through her emotions. Encountering a significant life event will activate cognitive and biological processes. Emotion exists because life is full of challenges and stress, and emotions are the solution to these problems. Social interaction is where we find that we experience a greater amount of emotion when we are with people versus when we are alone. Cheryl was on her hike alone and was able to take time to herself and get away from the string emotions she had back home. I think that this can show how emotions when she is around people were stronger than when she was alone. Doing the hike alone is what led her to get passed her mother dying. In our book the word fear was discussed, and this is often showed by Cheryl. Fear is an emotion that is present when something is threatening your well-being. The main example I can think of from this movie was when two hunters approached Cheryl making sexual jokes. Cheryl had obvious fear and packed up, she also ran through the woods making sure to have distance between her and them. Lazarus Appraisal Model can explain Cheryl extremely well, being that an individual’s appraisal is what gives the event an emotion and therefore significance and motivational power. Through the whole movie we are able to see how Cheryl is faced with a situation and then is able to appraise the situation and react to it. Another theory that was shown was when Cheryl experienced James-Lange theory, emotions come from the psychological response to life events. This is shown on her journey when she runs into a rattlesnake and her body reacts before she can even think about it. The chapter tells that some researchers argue that emotion is our primary motivational system. Based of off this movie, I believe that this statement would be true. Cheryl had never been someone who went hiking and then her emotions motivate her to hike the Pacific West Trial alone. Overall I think this was a good movie to go with this weeks chapters!

TERMS:

Emotion
Social interaction
Cognitive and biological process
Stress
Well-being
James Lange Theory
Lazarus Appraisal Model
Psychological response

Wild was the book that I read for the semester book report, and probably my favorite movie that we’ve watched so far! It involves a woman named Cheryl Strayed who documents her journey through the Pacific Crest Trail in order to experience self-discovery and a sense of self.
One of the first things that this movie really relied on were emotions, or feelings, throughout her hike. For example, at many times throughout the film she went from feeling elated to sad, angry to hopeless, and at times confused about where to go from her current place. Emotions took place at times where things had happened to affect Cheryl in that moment, such as her boot falling off of the mountain or cheating on her husband. However, her mood also fluctuates in the movie. Emotions have to do with things that happen outwardly, or direct events, but moods occur when people internalize things, or the things that they think about. For example, a death in the family would cause sad emotions. However, thinking about the death at a later time may put you in a sad mood. In Cheryl’s case, she was extremely upset when thinking of her mother passing away. At another time, she felt disappointment just by thinking of failing herself by not completing the journey. Both of these basic emotions are considered negative emotions, which offer threat or harm to the individual. Opposite to these are known as positive emotions, which help to provide emotional support. One example of this is when Cheryl meets her first couple, who allow her to stay at their house for dinner and a shower causing her to feel joy for the first time since her hike began. Cheryl’s emotions also helped her to cope in a plethora of situations in the movie. One example is when she first notices the lone man, and there are physiological signs of fear such as perspiration. This can be a sign of coping because it helped Cheryl to size up the situation to protect herself. Much as the book talked about an example of a little girl seeing a strange man and determining whether or not he was a good stranger, Cheryl has to face the same encounter multiple times through her trek. Cheryl also expereicnes a great deal of both negative affect and positive affect. She begins her journey feeling hopeless, as she only makes it a couple of miles before stopping, only to find out that her stove won’t work because she didn’t buy the right gas for it. She is high in negative affect in the beginning because she is shown multiple times as irritable, nervous, and dissatisfied with herself. However, as she moves forward she begins to rise in positive affect, which she shows as she becomes more determined and enthused about getting closer to reaching her goal [the end of the journey.] As her positive affect rises, her motivation to complete her goal rises as well. Cheryl, lastly, follows with the theory of facial musculature and how muscles in the face can convey different emotions universally. For example, at times Cheryl is seen scrunching her eyebrows together. At one point this symbolizes anger, feeling like she is going to fail her hike, and at another point her eyebrows tighten when she is sad and having flashbacks of her mother listening to and oldies radio station.


Emotion
Mood
Sadness
Anger
Negative emotions
Coping
Negative affect
Positive affect
Motivation
Facial musculature

Chapters 11 and 12 were focused around emotions. During her hike, Cheryl went through so many different emotions. She had many, many flashbacks on her life while she was hiking. Some were good and some were awful. One thing that was talked about in the chapters was an idea that emotions come from biological and cognitive motivations. Biological motivations explain emotions in a manner of stemming from influences from our bodies, i.e. neural pathways in the limbic system. The cognitive motivations explain emotions in a way of external influences that cause certain mental events. In the beginning of Cheryl’s hike, she came upon a man working in a field and she had asked him for a ride. The man said he would once he was done with his work. When he finally got done and got into the truck he was in an under tank and he invited Cheryl back to his house. He then proceeded tell her that she can take a hot bath at his house and he asked her if she was a wild woman. Cheryl was very creeped out by all of this behavior. She was afraid of this man. It turns out that he was not a creepy man at all. He was married and very nice. This is an example of emotions deriving from cognitive motivations. Cheryl learned through her environment that the kinds of things that he was saying could be considered sexually perverse. She has also learned that a young woman all alone in the middle of nowhere is a very easy target for rapists and killers and so on. So, with all of this pre-learned information, Cheryl was scared of this man. She was afraid that he might try and make an unwanted sexual advance on her. another example of emotions being shown via cognitive motivation is when Cheryl gets the right kind of fuel for her small stove and finally lights a fire. She laughs and screams with joy because she lit a fire. Had she lit a fire at home in her backyard I doubt that she would be even remotely close to as excited as when she was in the Mojave Desert. The reason she showed emotions of joy is because she has learned through her environment that her cold rations are terrible and that the desert gets cold at night so the fire can help keep her warm. This dictated her emotions to be joyful rather than indifferent as if she had lit a fire in her back yard at home. An example of emotions being displayed via biological motivations was during her flashback when she said goodbye to her ex-husband for the last time the day of their divorce. She was crying but they were mixed tears, bittersweet if you will. She was sad that she hurt him and that things ended up the way that they did, but she is also happy that they can move on and find their own happiness. These feelings are not something that you learn, they are part of the “basic” emotions that all humans have.

Key Terms:
Biological motivation, cognitive motivation, emotion, limbic system

Wild is a movie based on a real life adventure of Cheryl Strayed played by Reese Witherspoon and her journey of self discovery. Her ultimate goal is to hike 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, and it follows her as she goes through with her task.
The book talks about what causes an emotion and says that people’s minds and body react in adaptive ways. It specifically says that significant situational events trigger cognitive and biological process which could result in feelings, emotions, sense of purpose, bodily arousal and social-expressiveness. Emotions help by being adaptive, and act as coping functions. For Cheryl, her mother’s death from cancer on her spine resulted in the emotion of sadness. In the book of figure 11.1 is expresses the functional view of emotional behavior. The emotion is sadness, due to the loss of a valued person being Cheryl’s mother. The behavior that is supposed to follow is crying for help to deal with grief, with the function of the emotion being reunion. In Cheryl’s case, her emotional behavior was different in that she fell into a depression, and as a result she turned to drugs like heroin and sex. Her emotion of sadness, and her turn to drugs and sex are could be a result of her mood, which is an aftereffect of a previously experienced emotional episode. Her emotion of sadness for Cheryl could have not been processed correctly, and in return her mood been negatively affected as a result.
Another important part that emotion has is that it acts as a form of motivation. Towards the end of the movie on day 58, Cheryl is out of water and in an act of desperation licks the dew off of her tent. Also like the book, Cheryl could of had a strong emotional reaction to her being dehydrated. She could have been afraid or she feared dying from dehydration. Her possible fear of dehydration and death gave her the motivation to lick her tent and to eventually to try and get some water by boiling water from a dirty puddle. Another example of this is when she is alone, she is approached by two hunters with one of them making suggestive remarks towards Cheryl. In this scenario she also is fearing for life, but also using fear as a coping function in that she is possibly in a hostile situation and runs. Darwin thought that animals acted this way as well in that if a dog was scared it would bare its teeth as a sign of defense to help cope with the situation. For Cheryl, her defense was to run and was a good indication that a coping function could have been present.
Another thing worth mention is James-Lange theory in that she seems to be experiencing new stimuli→bodily reaction→emotion. So during the film she meets a lot of people she doesn't know so every time she meets someone new she may experience things like sweating, an increased heart rate, and quickened breathing rate. These are things that can happen everyday by other forms of stimuli that may elicit different reactions and emotions.
Words: James-Lange theory, emotion, situational event trigger, coping functions, moods, fear.

In the film Wild we follow the journey of Cheryl Strayed, played by Reese Witherspoon, as she sets out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) which spans from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. Cheryl sets out on this hike so that she can escape the struggles of her current life, she is very upset with her present self. Her ultimate goal is to come to terms with her past misfortunes and mishaps along with discovering who her ideal self is. The struggles Cheryl is dealing with consist of the passing of her mother at the age of 45, a divorce, and a run in with heroine. While Cheryl hikes the PCT she takes with her an excessively large backpack. I find this large amount of literal baggage to be symbolic of the grand amount of emotional baggage Cheryl carries with her as well during this journey. I aim to elaborate on some of the emotions Cheryl expresses during this film and tie them into a theory or two.

Three of Cheryl’s most common emotions throughout this film, in my opinion, were fear, guilt, and joy. Fear is evident in many scenes, however my favorite scene happens to be when Cheryl encounters the farmer who is out working late. Sitting in the truck with him she initially interprets her situation as being potentially dangerous and views herself as being in a vulnerable situation when the farmer cracks open his flask and offers her a sip. Cheryl responds by defending herself by stating that her husband is waiting for her arrival with the hope that any bad intentions will be stifled. What made me really enjoy this scene was when the farmer pulls out his licorice and offers Cheryl some while stating that his wife doesn’t like it when he eats candy. This information provides joy, more specifically relief, to Cheryl as she now knows that this man may not be so bad afterall. Guilt is a major part of this film. Guilt appears in a number of the flashbacks Cheryl has throughout the film when she is thinking about all of the wrong decisions she made and where her life took some wrong turns. Due to this guilt, Cheryl sets out to restore her life back to a state that she deems as being manageable.

One theory that I found to be rather apparent during this film is Lazarus’ Appraisal Theory. Lazarus’ Appraisal Theory focuses on how people perceive events as being relevant to their lives. Depending on how the individual appraises the situation at hand, corresponding emotions will arise, leading to motivation to act. Cheryl appraises the situations of her mom passing, her divorce, and her prior drug use as being significant negative events in her life. These negative events lead to negative emotions such as sadness and guilt. These feelings of sadness and guilt lead to arousal of Cheryl’s autonomic nervous system which arouses her desire to make a change, hence the hike along the PCT.

Cheryl’s long and challenging hike culminated with her discovering her true self, her ideal self. Along the way she lost some of the baggage that made her travels so difficult, and now she feels that she has regained some control over her life. So what’s the moral of the story here? Don’t carry an excessive amount of baggage with you during this long hike we call life.

Into the wild, follows the life of Cheryl, portrayed by Reese Witherspoon. To put it into easy terms, Cheryl has a life that is pretty unimaginable and messed up. She goes through some things that are extremely stressful, and needs some time away. Just like the last movie, Into the Wild, Cheryl sets out into the wild to spend some time alone in nature to try to understand herself a little better. The things that happen in her life like losing her husband, mother, and many other rough patches motivate her to make many decisions. From these hardships, Cheryl is overwhelmed by an abundance of emotions.
Cheryl faces many hardships over her life, making her a little confused and angry. Why is this happening to her? Losing a mother to cancer, a husband to divorce, and accidentally getting pregnant are not easy to deal with. It is like one thing after another. These actions made her scared and upset. After losing her mom, she realized that she probably took her for granted. She and her mom were not super close, and as she is on the hike she starts to get constant reminders of her mom, creating even more emotions.
At one point in the movie, she walks onto a farm, extremely hungry and looking for some food. She meets the farmer who is busy with work, but he offers to give her a ride if she waits for him to finish his job. She does, and they drive away to see where the night will go. This takes a lot of trust to get into a random strangers car and hitchhike to some food. She was physically so hungry that she was motivated to do just anything to get something to stay alive.
Another emotion that Cheryl constantly battles and feels is the feeling of fear. Fear can create that initial flight or flight response in us. The first time this can be seen is in the last example with the farmer. Although the farmer does offer her food and a place to stay for the night, her face is not exactly thrilled. She is hungry, so she is probably thankful for that, but it was a little worrisome when he offered to shower and stay, especially after seeing the gun in his truck. This fear of men seems to be prevalent throughout this film. It happened later again in the movie after a man made her feel uncomfortable by commenting on her body. Another example is throughout the movie, she fears she does not really know what is going to happen. However, as the movie progresses, things start getting better.
Cheryl dealt with some extreme highs and lows. At times, she could have easily given up. These emotions that she felt including sadness, anger, grief, and fear led her to where she ended up. They motivated her to make her next move. In the end of the movie, Cheryl ended up happier, finding herself and figuring out where she wanted to be in life after taking a long journey.
Terms:
Self
Motivation
Emotions
Fear

It is fairly clear from the start that anger was going to be an important theme of the movie, as we are greeted with Cheryl’s frustration at losing her hiking boot, then the cursing at her frustrations in packing, her displeasure at her mom cooking for her brother and his friend when her mom has her own needs to attend to, and then her struggle setting up the tent. We get glimpses of the back story along the way, that help us see how anger is a theme in her life. There is her father’s abuse of her mother, anger at the unfairness of her mother’s early death at a time when she is finally getting to be “in the driver’s seat of her life,” anger directed at her husband, and then anger turned inward. While the reading emphasizes anger as one of the fundamental emotions, in clinical practice with actual clients, we often see what is displayed in the movie: anger in many people’s lives is secondary to a more primary emotion such as fear or hurt or sadness. Further, anger is initially useful at getting out of bad situations, but often becomes self-destructive or destructive of relationships. This is certainly true for Cheryl. She is angry even at the intrusion of her memory of her mother singing (“happy people sing”). Is this really anger, or is the anger masking the deeper pain of sadness and fear of going on without the mother who has been so central to her life up until mom’s death? That anger carries over to anger at her self for making such a mess of her life (“I don’t know when I became such a piece of shit”), but even here, the anger seems more an expression of shame. Grieving often includes periods of anger (at the loved one who has been lost, and at self for having survived, and at the world for being unfair). So, while the reading focuses on anger as a fundamental biological emotion, this movie presents a more complex understanding of that basic emotion.

Fear is also a constant companion in this movie. As a young woman alone, Cheryl is always carrying the fear of male abuse with her. Going on a long trek alone in the woods makes her potential prey to any man who is willing to cross boundaries and behave inappropriately or violently. Even when they do not follow through, there is the menace of the threat of violence in the older man in the car she hitchhikes with and the bowhunter. She gives off non-verbal cues of fear that others pick up on. Frank can sense from the subtext of her statements to him and her facial expressions that she is afraid of him as a potential rapist. The bowhunter enjoys the thrill of power at triggering her fearful body language and facial expressions. There is also fear of the unknown challenges of someone unfamiliar with the world she is traveling through. The rattlesnake warns her, we see her eyes widen, her body tense for fight or flight, and know that noradrenaline is being pumped through her bloodstream by the adrenal glands in response to signals from the limbic system. It keeps her safe by helping her to motivate her to take steps to avoid the threat of the snake. Just as with all the men she encounters, she must respond to the alert that the emotion of fear triggers in her body. In some cases, she her risk-taking side overrides the instinct to retreat. There are also times where her fear causes her to react to minor stimuli that she mistakes for threats (such as the caterpillar that she believes could be a snake).

We also see evidence that she is having trouble coping with her emotions. She lacks the capacity to handle the powerful emotions after her mother’s death, and turns to numbing behaviors (heroin and anonymous sex). But we cannot selectively numb just the painful emotions. She loses the ability to experience joy, she loses the ability to maintain healthy relationships with people close to her, along with the numbing of the negative emotions of anger, sadness, and fear. The disgust/shame and dissatisfaction with her life leads her to undertake different kind of risk to find herself in the hike. She must rediscover a consistent self by challenging herself. She is still taking potentially life-threatening risks, but she is testing who she is and whether her self-concept is consistent with the evidence of her lived experience (self-concordance). Through setting a specific goal, mastering new challenges, she reconstructs herself. She gains a sense of efficacy through experiencing having agency and capacity to overcome challenges after having this shaken by her mother’s death. She learns what she values, including listening to other people (“funny, that’s a hobby—one I hadn’t even realized I had”). She starts to rediscover joy and integrate the inherited sense of joy from her mother (the small things like sunrises, sunsets, foxes in the wilderness, conversation, the kindness of others who could have turned out to be threats), and to finally mourn her losses rather than fend them off through outwardly and inwardly directed anger.

Terms: emotions, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, shame, biological theory of emotions, facial expression, self-concept, agency, self-efficacy, self-concordance, goals, noradrenaline, limbic system, coping.

In the movie Wild, a woman named Cheryl Strayed is an avid hiker that participates in hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. The movie follows her amazing journey through the preparing of the journey to the actual journey she takes on the Pacific Crest Trail. The lessons and material covered in this book also reflect the lessons we covered in chapters 11 and 12.

The chapters this week were about emotion. In the beginning of the movie, Cheryl is on top of a cliff removing a boot that she has on. When she peels the sock away, her toenail was coming off so she completely removes it. Doing this, she knocks the boot off of the edge on accident. Her immediate emotion was anger, and uses this to throw the remaining boot off as well. Emotions evoke an immediate response. When the boot falls off the cliff, she reacts in an instant with anger. Another emotion that Cheryl experiences is fear. Cheryl goes through flashes of her memory where many things occur. The most important one for this is her shooting heroin. This causes her fear in present day due to the effects of it. The last emotion is interest. The only reason Cheryl continues her journey on the Pacific Crest Trail is because she shows interest in it. This excites and stimulates her, causing the motivation and behavior to be directed at succeeding. Without this emotion being experienced, the movie would have been completely different and the Pacific Crest Trail would have never happened in the first place for her.

Cheryl has many personal relevance appraisals from Lazarus. It asks the question, “is the event relevant to personal well-being?” She asks herself this question internally whenever she feels distressed with herself of the hiking trip goes wrong. When we ask this question, we expect a concrete answer in response. The other appraisal used by Lazarus is coping ability. This asks the question, “can I cope successfully with the event?” Both of these questions are directed towards her ability to succeed and to cope with the stress and emotions that will be felt during the trail. These questions are very important to ask when reflecting on the decisions you are going to make and how they will benefit you. If the answer to these questions is anything negative, most likely you shouldn’t proceed with doing the action.

The end of the movie was well depicted and showed a copious amount of joy radiating from Cheryl Strayed when she finished the trail. She ends up marrying again and has two children. Joy is the most important emotion in my opinion, and it’s also one of the hardest ones to obtain. Joy brings forth a dopamine rush which promotes happiness and direction. These dopamine rushes are what keep us going and to stay motivated when we have enjoyment. If Cheryl never received any dopamine rushes throughout her training or the actual competition, this story would have never happened. There would’ve been no motivation or drive to succeed.

Term:
Emotion
Anger
Interest
Motivation
Personal Relevance Appraisal
Coping Ability
Joy
Dopamine

For this week’s assignment, we watched movie called Wild. This movie was all about motivation and emotion. At the very beginning for the movie, the main character of the movie, Cheryl, throws one of her boot down the mountain and starts screaming. Judging by her facial expression and her body language, we can tell that she seemed very angry due to the amount of energy she used while screaming and the energy she spent when she threw her boot. Also, the word she used when she threw her boot can also be an indication of such anger. It is easy to tell that she feel furious because of the climb, but we find it later in the movie what other factors that she faced and many obstacles she has gone through, that caused all this outraged behavior and made her say whatever she said.

Throughout the whole film, we get to see many parts on Cheryl’s past life. There was a scene that I would like to mention when it shows the difference between Cheryl and her mother’s emotions and this happens when her mother is singing in the kitchen. That’s when Cheryl requests her mom to stop singing the song that she was singing. Cheryl’s mom starts laughing and Cheryl asks her the reason for giggling. Her mother response the reason for her singing is that she is feeling very happy and she states that “happy people sing”. Cheryl wonders since they have nothing, why her mother is feeling happy? This scene seemed very heart touching because it showed that Cheryl has experienced much more negative emotions than her mother. Her mom seemed to have a personality that was seemed to be totally opposite than Cheryl’s because she chose to focus on the good in her life which causes her to stay happier and act positively whereas, Cheryl focuses more on the negative which causes her to be sad and act in a negative way towards others.

Moreover, throughout the movie, we see Cheryl feeling very thwarted and disconnected with herself and people around her. There was a scene in the movie that explains why she feels this way. We learn that her mother died of cancer that caused her to act in a certain way. I really loved the scene where she finally realizes that she needs to change her behavior not only towards herself, but people around her as well. That’s when she feel very motivated and decided to hike about 1000 miles of Pacific Crest Trail. She does feel very nervous and fearful when she decided that but, I really liked the fact that she was motivated enough to keep going.

Furthermore, as Cheryl begins her journey, she shows many signs of fear, especially on the first night of being there because she wasn’t familiar with her surroundings. During the night scene in the movie, she experience many noises like breaking of sticks and murmuring of brush around her while she tries to rest in her tent. One of the first sign we get to see that she’s experiencing fearness is definitely her physiological changes because once she heard those noises, she can’t seemed to be feeling relaxed. She feels such a rush going through her body and it seemed like that she is ready to fight with whatever it is. I think anyone who is staying in such an isolated place would feel fear and frightened and their bodies would react in a certain way rather than feeling relaxed. Not only that, their heart rates would go up. I can say this because it is something that often happens to me when I’m feeling frightened. Moreover, we noticed that Cheryl starts breathing heavily. This could be another indication of her heart rate going up. That’s when she feels motivated and turns on her flashlight to examine if there’s anything around her tent.

Furthermore, one other scene showed her being very fearful when she goes up to the farmer who was working late. We saw that Cheryl bought the wrong stove with her which means that she could only eat cold food which made her hungry very quickly. This is where her physiological need for food goes up and she was willing to do anything at that point to fulfill her hunger. So she goes to the farmer who was working late and begs him and ask him for food. The farmer seemed to be a very reserved person who did not like talking much, so he denies her request but he notices quickly that she is feeling very hungry and desperate for food, so he asks her to stay in the truck and wait for the dinner. Later on, the man forces himself into the truck with her and Cheryl tries to push herself far far away from him just in case if he tries anything on her.

Overall, we noticed that as she her journey goes on and on, her emotions are starting to change. At the end of the movie, we can tell that she started to act in a different, but in a positive way. She is seemed to be much calmer and positive. I would say that this was a positive reflect of her journey that made many changes in Cheryl’s life for the good and that finally made her a positive and a happy person.

Terms Used:
Emotions
Motivation
Physiological changes
Positive effect
Negative effect
Anger
Fear

This movie portrayed the many emotions of Cheryl as she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail solo. Whether reacting to current events or reflecting on memories, Cheryl experienced a wide variety of emotions throughout the movie. Although many examples could be given of a plethora of emotions, I will focus on the basic emotions mentioned in chapter 11: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest.
Fear was evident during the scene in the woods with the two hunters. Cheryl had been creeped out by the two men who had made sexualized comments about her figure. Her unease was evident when she told the men she was leaving and rushed to pack up her belongings. Feeling the physiological need for thirst and also wanting to bathe, she hid for awhile, then returned to the water. She was unpleasantly surprised when she was clothing herself and spotted one of the men creepily watching her from the woods. He walked toward her and commented on how she was all alone in the woods. It was clear that Cheryl felt a threat to her well-being because she immediately became defensive, packed up all her stuff, and physically ran from the man.
Anger was prevalent in Cheryl’s relationship with her first husband, Paul. There was a flashback that showed Paul finding Cheryl after she had shot up some heroin and cheated on him. Paul was angry, wanting to gain control of the situation that felt out of control. During the car scene (after finding her in the hotel), Paul was passionately yelling at Cheryl as he was driving, and Cheryl was covering her ears with her hands, attempting to curl up into a ball. Paul had a goal of a long, happy marriage, and Cheryl destroyed this goal and betrayed her husband’s trust by cheating on him and doing drugs. The anger did help clarify their relationship problems, and they wound up getting divorced.
Disgust was easy to identify because Cheryl had a physical reaction; she vomited. Her family had a horse when she was young, but the horse was not well, so it needed to be put down. Cheryl had a vivid memory of her brother holding the gun and shooting the horse, which made adult Cheryl very sad and also caused disgust. Overwhelmed by the unpleasant memory, Cheryl rushed to get out of her tent, then proceeded to vomit.
Sadness was present on Cheryl’s face when she thought about her lost love with Paul; I am sure her personal personal decisions also weighed heavily on her, contributed to the sadness. At the end of the divorce scene, Cheryl cried as her newly ex-husband hugged her and kissed her for the last time. It was a memory of separation (from her husband) as well as failure (failure of marriage). Reflecting on past “mistakes” at the beginning of the movie caused sadness for Cheryl. After time, reflection, and growth (near the end of the movie), Cheryl said she would do it (the “mistakes”) all over again to learn and grow into the person she had become by the end of the movie. That was a slight surprise, since her growth process had caused her and Paul to have many unpleasant emotions.
Joy appeared in the movie when Cheryl experienced a personal achievement. When she had initially tried to cook food during her hike, she realized she had packed the wrong type of gas, so she was unable to cook warm food. After some time, she became extremely tired of eating cold food, so she went through the steps of hitching a ride to town with a stranger, then buying the correct gas for her stove. Back on her hike, she successfully lit the gas, then cooked warm food for the first time, experiencing competency. Her voice got higher as she yelled in excitement; she was smiling and laughing, and she began howling with the wild animals.
Interest was shown near the end of the movie, when Cheryl arrived in the town. She entered a store, interest shifting to her physical appearance, trying on lipstick shades. When she walked outside of the store, her interest shifted to the man handing out flyers. She was staring at him, likely considering her desire for relatedness. His interest was also piqued, so he crossed the street, approaching Cheryl, and gave her a flyer. Their interest in each other resulted in both of them going to the concert, then being physically intimate later in the night.

Terms: Fear, anger, sadness, disgust, joy, surprise, competency, physiological need, and relatedness

This week’s movie was Wild, an adaption of a book by Cheryl Strayed. In this movie, we follow Cheryl as she hikes the Pacific Coast Trail (PCT) on a journey of self-discovery. She chooses to do this hike after feeling that she has changed after her mother’s death. This journey shows many different elements of what we have learned about motivation and emotion so far. Through this blog post, I will consider Strayed’s needs, motivations, and emotions.

Firstly, Cheryl Strayed experienced physiological, psychological, and social needs during her hike. Due to the rigor of the hike, Strayed experiences physiological needs for hunger and thirst. The environment influences her wants and leads her to drink and eat things that are not needed for fulfilling her thirst and hunger needs. For example, Strayed often drinks Snapple and alcohol on her journey because of the taste and not because it actually replenishes her dehydrated body. For psychological, Strayed shows strong needs for autonomy and relatedness. The point of her hike was to go on a journey alone to rediscover who she was before her mother’s death. This need for autonomy is what makes her continue to hike alone even after meeting people on the trail that she could hike with. With that being said, her need for relatedness is fulfilled when encountering these individuals and helps to balance her needs for autonomy and relatedness. Lastly, Cheryl Strayed shows high social needs in achievement and affiliation/intimacy. The former is a need that arises from the desire to complete the hike itself and know that she was capable of finishing her goal. The latter is mostly portrayed through the flashbacks with her mother where she desperately tries to cling on to her strongest bond.

When considering extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, for Strayed, intrinsic motivation plays a pivotal role. Her initial decision to hike the PCT and her hopes for what it might help her discover about herself, comes from intrinsic motivation. With that being said, extrinsic motivation plays a part in helping her to persevere despite waning belief in her own ability to hike the trail. The extrinsic motivation she encounters comes from competition and desire. The former is in relation to her desire to reach the next stop on her trip before those she has met on the trail. In doing so, she pushes herself to walk longer days. The latter, on the other hand, is her want for Snapple or food that isn’t dehydrated. This works in a similar fashion and pushes her to keep moving.

For emotions, it is clear that this is central to why Cheryl Strayed even began this journey. The death of her mother sent her on an emotional, down-hill spiral, to the point that she didn’t recognize herself anymore. Due to this, Strayed plans this hike to help her think through her emotional baggage. In this way, her emotions motivated her to take action. Throughout her journey, Strayed experienced different emotions that also worked to motivate her. For example, the likelihood of snow-packed hiking trails strikes fear into Strayed that has her appraise the safety of the situation. In doing so, she realizes that it is too dangerous and decides to take an alternative route.

Terms:
Physiological Needs
Environmental Influences
Psychological Needs
Autonomy
Relatedness
Social Needs
Achievement
Affiliation/Intimacy
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation
Emotion
Appraisal

Wild is a film that very accurately portrays concepts learned from chapters 11 and 12 about emotion and why it is so important to motivation. This film takes place in the mid 1990’s starring the main character named Cheryl Strayed. Toward the beginning she is found to be hiking the pacific coast trial and it seems she does this to escape her everyday life and her everyday problems. Cheryl has been through a lot throughout her life such as using drugs, having a dissatisfying relationship with her husband, losing her mother to cancer, etc. She has never been great at understanding her emotions and this hike is a way to be at peace with herself and take the time to really figure everything out. There are many examples throughout this film about how Cheryl’s intense emotions are really what drives her to do that things that she is motivated to do. All her emotions directly influenced her thoughts, actions, and motivations.

One of the emotions that Cheryl deals with in this film is a lot of sadness which leads her on how to go about making most of her decisions. She believed she was in love with her husband at the beginning, but yet felt the need to leave the relationship and cheat on her husband. She was not happy enough in her relationship to be with just him and this made her unhappy for a couple different reasons. For one she is sad, because of the guilt she feels for the divorce, but also because she didn’t really have a good reason to not be happy with her husband. Cheryl also experiences a great deal of sadness after losing her mother to cancer and she has not truly accepted the fact that her mother is no longer in her life. Similar negative feelings can also fall into these situations such as anger, distress, or even fear. Losing a loved one is never easy and it really is an abrupt change in one’s life. Anger comes in, because she may think “why did I have to be the one to lose my mom, what could I have done better?” and fear, because she now had to figure out how to live without a motherly figure in her life.

The James-Lange Theory can be shown in multiple different scenes throughout this film when Cheryl is out on her long hike outside by herself. This theory is basically when an individual has a physiological response to events that are the interpreted into certain emotions. She obviously comes across different living creatures out on her hike such as bugs, snakes, small mammals, etc. When these creatures pop up out of nowhere she is instantly fearful which can be externally expressed by a scream or a jump. In this instance she doesn’t think about what emotions to have, it is more natural and once the physiological response has happened, one then realizes that they are fearful or scared. The appraisal theory and fear can be shown again in a scene where Cheryl hitches a ride with some guy in a truck. After him making offers of food, drink, etc. she starts to feel scared for her life. The appraisal part of the situation is her analyzing what is happening and what the outcome could be if she continues to engage in this situation. This is a well thought out response versus an instant physiological response and she is then able to come up with excuses to why she needs to get out of his truck.

Overall, Cheryl feels so many different emotions throughout this film and her life being portrayed in it. It can be extremely difficult to process all these different kinds of emotions when life doesn’t have a pause button. All these conflicting emotions are really what motivated Cheryl to do all of the things that she did. She did drugs in order to suppress her feelings and try to cope with all the negative in her life. She was motivated to cheat on her husband when she was dissatisfied leading up to her divorce. She was also motivated to hike the mighty trail that she did in order to take some time to herself and process her long overdue emotions. She needed time to herself to realize what she was doing and feeling and what she wanted for the future. All of her emotions drove her to do her actions and mostly directed her though process as well. This journey alone was a great way to get over old feeling and wrong decisions such as her mother’s passing. Toward the end of the film she was finally started to accept that her mother had passed due to illness and that she had to move on and make her mother proud.

Terms:
Positive Emotion
Negative Emotion
Distress
Anger
Feedback
Facial expressions
Biological perspective
Cognitive perspective
Emotions
Appraisal

The movie Wild, interpreted by Reese Witherspoon, perfectly shows many of the concepts discussed in chapter 11 and chapter 12.
Cheryl Strayed, an adventurous woman, tries to hike the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) in order to discover herself and fix her problems in the past. It is clearly seen how she is immersed in a self-regulation process where she evaluates decisions she made in the past and keeps track of her ongoing performance in this period of her life.
In order to change her motivation and behavior, she would have to go through a “cognitive restructuring process” that would have an impact on her emotions, according to Arnold’s Appraisal Theory of Emotions. Emotions can be understood from a multidimensional approach, and we can differentiate them in many contexts that Cheryl faces. They can be: 1) subjective, impacting Cheryl in a particularly different way than others, 2) biological, that energize her in moments that could threaten her life, 3) purposive, that direct her behavior to achieve a goal like climbing rocks, and 4) social phenomena, that allow her to communicate the intensity of her emotions to others.
We can see examples supporting both biology and cognition perspective of emotions in the movie: when she finds a snake on the path, she probably processed the information in her brain-fear circuit (fight or flight system) involving the amygdala and hypothalamus, two subcortical structures that do not need cognition to generate behavior. Some other events in the movie do not produce certain emotions until she attributes some information that could lead to different outcomes, as an example, Cheryl did not start feeling fear in the truck of the farmer until she saw the gun or until she thought that she could get raped. All throughout the movie, we can see a change in her attribution processes (or appraisal) that lead her to different emotions that elicit behaviors: When she was talking to the psychologist, she said that she was having sex with whoever asked for it, and now, she perceived those events as harmful, preceding a disliking emotion that leads to a withdrawal behavior.
There is also a change in Cheryl’s mood when she is hiking compared to her life in the past, where she seemed in a constant bad mood, arguing with her mom and brother, engaging in risky activities, and not caring about anything. This change in her mood is produced by a change in her mental events, that direct what she thinks about.
At the end of the movie, she starts thinking that she should not regret anything that she did in the past because that led to the woman she is in the present. This is a clear example of how she reduces her cognitive dissonance, by removing the dissonant belief that involves all the mistakes she has made in the past. This new way of thinking, strengthens her self-concept and will boost her self-autonomy because she finally achieved what she was looking for, to forgive herself.
Terms used: self-regulation, Arnold’s Appraisal Theory of Emotions, biology and cognition perspective, fight or flight system, amygdala and hypothalamus, attribution processes, appraisal, mood, mental events. cognitive dissonance, self-concept, self-autonomy.

As Cheryl begins her journey on the PCT it is easy to see that she is running from something, but unsure of what that something is. As I watched the film from beginning to end I believe that Cheryl uses the PCT as an emotional readout of her mother’s death and her divorce to Paul. On her journey, Cheryl begins facing many of the emotions that she had previously suppressed with heroin and sleeping with strangers. Heroin is the strongest suppressant present within the film, as it does “its job” of modifying Cheryl’s present emotional state, by ensuring that she wasn’t feeling any emotions or sense of purpose for her life.

The opening scene does a great job of portraying that as humans we cannot always control our emotions. As Cheryl’s boot rolls down the cliff, she shortly stands up and throws her other boot down the cliff and begins screaming. In this example, we can see Cheryl using attentional focus as she at first begins showing emotions of sadness, she quickly retracts and becomes proactive by expressing anger as she hurls the second boot off of the cliff (honestly don’t blame her though, I’d be pissed off with one boot as well).

While reading the section about things that cause an emotion, it made sense that significant life events can spill out emotions. In Cheryl’s case, I think that she begins recognizing her emotions because of the biological vulnerability she has put herself in. For example, heat exhaustion, dehydrating and alienating herself from minimal human contact. Coming from a city as fast-paced as Portland, on top of being sober, this gave Cheryl time to have her cognitive process by evaluating the flashbacks of events of her drug habit, sleeping with random men, her childhood, and her mother’s death. As Cheryl continues her journey, she processes her emotions by leaving quotes from her favorite authors at various checkpoints along the trail relating to the flashbacks she had thought about between checkpoints, ultimately making her coping process a two-systems view.

A touching scene in the film for me is when Cheryl begins writing Paul’s name in the sand on the beach and mentions that she had been doing it for nearly a decade. Cheryl said that it would be the last time she writes it, as she was ready to move on and close the chapter on wanting to make things work with Paul. I think the reason Cheryl comes to this conclusion as she has not been able to physically see Paul, and rarely calls him to check in and let him know that she is doing well towards the end of the film. Cheryl admits that she had done many things wrong in her life, but if she were to go back she would not have changed a thing (in this case her infidelity) and is able to come to terms of acceptance of what she had done in betraying Paul and her marriage. To me, this was the best example of ending an emotion that resonated with me the most.

ME TERMS:
Suppressant
Emotional Readout
Emotion Regulation-Reappraisal
Biological Process
Cognitive Process
Two Systems View
Ending an Emotion


In the movie Wild, Cheryl Strayed hikes the Pacific Crest trail and while doing so discovers the reality of her identity and emotions. As she hikes her way through the trail she comes to realizations of her past and the feelings that arise in her that are also able to shape who she is. Before she goes on the hike, she has only lived the life that her mother had raised her to live, which ends up being completely opposite of her life on the hike. This example displays the conflict experienced between the expectations of the life her mother desired for her and the life she was now living on the hike.

In her pregnancy, she realizes how her behavior and actions in her life are not enough to sustain the pain and brokenness still festering inside her. In this epiphany, she decides to go on this hiking adventure to find herself and restore the true Cheryl. The hike goes to show that she is able and willing to build up self regulation within herself and develop a healthier perception and well-being for herself.

Throughout the hike Cheryl goes through many emotions that she experiences physically in response to specific events. This is called the James-Lange theory. When Cheryl runs into contact with a rattlesnake, her body immediately reacts before she can even think and she experiences intense fear and her heart rate goes up. She also comes into contact with a farmer and gets a ride with him as he offers her some alcohol and food. In this example, she is able to think and asses the situation to see if it is safe for her or if she might be in danger. In this case, she appraises it and decides that there is a possibility that this farmer might be dangerous and harmful to her which causes her to feel fear and protect herself by informing him that her husband is with her and lies for her own safety. In lying to protect herself, Cheryl demonstrates the value in preserving her own life and safety by doing the only thing she could think of doing to be successful in preventing danger to herself. Her emotion displayed in these situations support cognitive theorists who believe that emotions stem from a reaction to a particular event.

Through the death of Cheryl’s mother, she deals with various emotions that are experienced as a reaction to this traumatic event. All of these emotions have created in her an overwhelming spiral of feeling she is unable to manage and organize and in return chooses to look to sex and drugs for satisfaction that will suppress these feelings. Though temporarily she seems to get by, she ends up hitting rock bottom, finding out about her pregnancy and feeling less and less satisfied with the life that she has in front of her. Her hike is a perfect example of second appraisal, where she is able to confront and address the emotions that she has carried with her for so long without acknowledgement. In journeying alone, she reflects and recounts her emotions and deals with the consequences of her actions that came out of suppressing her emotions after her mother’s death with sex and drugs. She learns how to cope and engage with her emotions to find joy and peace from facing her pain head on by letting out cries and screams of raw emotion. Through this she develops a sense of self and a sense of progress in dealing with her emotions by facing them and accepting them as they are which leads her to a greater peace of mind.

Terms: cognitive theory, identity, james-lange theory, joy, coping, suppress, appraisal

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