Talk:Motivation and emotion/Textbook/Motivation and emotion/Animals

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This textbook chapter is shaping up nicely - well done on putting your plan/outline up, wikifying it and experimenting with images and links. I've tweaked the image captions so that they display with the images and I've adjusted the heading levels to be consistent with the style for the textbook. Let me know if I can do anything else as you go along. BTW - Did you see this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL1-rFk2KDg Sincerely, James. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 00:49, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps consider swapping the order of the emotion and motivation sections? (I mainly suggest this because the structure for the book will be motivation then emotion. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 00:51, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Just popped in to see your page and wow it has really advanced over the past month - great effort. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 00:09, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

I've had a closer look over the draft so far - which is very well advanced, although I think it could now mainly benefit from a significant trimming with some =restructuring and redrafting to integrate and focus on theory and research about motivation and emotion in animals. Hope this helps. Some more specific suggestions are below: -- Jtneill - Talk - c 03:12, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) The current draft is very long (over 12,000 words - thesis length!) - whilst there is no upper limit, the original suggestion was to aim for more like 2,500 for 4,500 - so where possible, in redrafting, look to abbreviate and concentrate the chapter on some key underlying focus questions and the main topic. Content that is less directly relevant (e.g. supplementary) could be put into subpages, allowing you to trim down the main chapter with links off to sub-pages with more detailed information.
 * 2) The heading structure should ideally use = for the title, then == (Level 2) for the chapter's next level of headings, then === for their sub-headings etc.
 * 3) The layout in general is very good, with excellent use of images.
 * 4) Introduction
 * 5) Maybe change "Theories of motivation and emotion in animals: An overview." to "Motivation and emotion in animals: An overview" or just "Introduction".
 * 6) Check grammar of sentence two.
 * 7) man's -> human's?
 * 8) scientists and pet lovers -> and psychology students?
 * 9) The image could have a more meaningful caption.
 * 10) I think this Introduction is promising and is currently reasonably good. I think that it would benefit from specifying either some focus questions and/or providing a more indepth outline of what topics will be covered in the chapter and why.
 * 11) I love the questions asked at the end of this section - perhaps these could go up front in the section to stimulate initial interest. But I don't think these are focus questions; focus questions should be more generic.
 * 12) What's the link for at the end: http://www.learner.org/discoveringpsychology/08/e08expand.html? (explain)
 * 13) Theories
 * 14) Excellent use of links to Wikipedia
 * 15) "There is plenty of literature available" - e.g., references?
 * 16) Darwin vs Lamarckian - lacks direct connection/application to motivation/emotion in animals (i.e., too general, broad) - how does it help to address the focus questions?
 * 17) Pavlov - this is a simpler, clearer section - but again, it could be made more obvious what the connection is to motivation/emotion in animals - yes, this is about animal behaviour, but what about motivation/emotion?
 * 18) Watson - ditto; this says nothing about motivatin/emotion in animals - it does perhaps say something about the use of animals in psychological research, but that is not the topic
 * 19) Rest of the theory sections - similar comments to above. This is a good summary of animal behaviour research, but some work needs to be done to tailor this section more closely to the motivation/emotion in animals. Perhaps it would make more sense to organise this not so much in terms of individual reseachers but more in terms of theoretical perspectives e.g., evolutionary, biological, and learning/behavioural paradigms. Alternatively keep this section very short of eliminate it and then incorporate relavant theory into subsequent sections.
 * 20) Seligman and learned helplessness could be added?
 * 21) Lorenz' work could be added?
 * 22) Emotion in animals
 * 23) It would be helpful to know how/why you are conceptualising emotion and motivation as separate constructs in animals - i.e., explain these concepts first before the specific focus here on emotion (also note that earlier I've suggested considering putting motivation first)
 * 24) Maybe incorporate both theory and research into this section e.g., something like "This section discusses current theory and research on emotions in animals and consider implications for animal welfare." For example, the discussion about Harlow is split across two sections; it would be good to integrate these. Similarly, discussion about Skinner's work is split across sections.
 * 25) The last paragraph is somewhat confusing - better to set up and connect to the immediately following section.
 * 26) "Do animals experience emotions such as love, fear, anger, rage, despair, frustration, boredom and contentment?" - why not just "Do animals experience emotions?"
 * 27) This section appears to be a response to a focus question (but it's not obvious). Perhaps a better question could be "What emotions do animals experience?" and "How do animal emotions differ between species?"
 * 28) This section is 1400 words and could definitely be abbreviated. There are lots of interesting ideas and information but the paragraphs seem to be quite disjointed. What's the overall of this section - provide an introduction, body and summary, then lead into the next section.
 * 29) Motivation in animals
 * 30) Where links to videos are added, it could be helpful to include in brackets how long the video is e.g., (2 mins)
 * 31) Maybe integrate the video placement with specific, relevant sections in the text.
 * 32) Again, some focus questions and/or stated aims could be helpful.
 * 33) I skimmed the rest of this section - it was quite long and definitely could be abbreviated - my main perception is that many similar topics (such as learning) were raised again, so there was much overlap. It could be better in this case to integrate discussion of emotion and motivation (it's not clear to me that there is sufficient justification for treating them as separate topics when discussing animals - they are different, but are also very related), focusing on the main theories and relevant research about each theory.
 * 34) Bringing man and animals together - interspecies communication
 * 35) I think having an applied section on training is an excellent idea. But it represents almost 4000 words and I suspect could perhaps even sit as a separate article/chapter, with the chapter itself containing just some highlights. Interspecies communication is interesting... but it is relevant to this chapter only to the extent that it bears direct relation to understanding theory and research about motivation and emotion in animals. So, I would suggest being quite selective about the examples to focus on and to explictly point out the connections with motivation/emotion and particularly previous theory and research.
 * 36) Recommended reading - not sure about this, seems to be a lot about horses as opposed to the chapter topic per se - maybe put into a separate page
 * 37) External links - as for Recommended reading. I would be quite selective and in general try to place the links in relevant places in the body text. Only put some very particularly relevant recommended links here at the end, or include all links on a separate sub-page.

-- Jtneill - Talk - c 14:04, 13 December 2010 (UTC)