“In these years, we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.” – Jose Ortega y Gasset, “The Revolt of the Masses”

MOTIVATION is a central topic in psychology and has been recently defined simply as “the energizing of behavior in pursuit of a goal” (Simpson & Balsen, 2016). Among major motivational concepts are: homeostatis/allostatis, setpoints, hydraulic drives, appetitive and consummating behavior, opponent processes, hedonic reactions, dedicated drive neurons, neural hierarchies, and incentive (Berridge, 2004). The construct of incentive figures prominently in economics, and in this century there has been a rapprochement of the two disciplines, yielding behavioral economics, whose arguably leading practitioner, Richard Thaler, building on the work of Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, received the Nobel Prize earlier this year. But of that, more presently. First, a few words about the behavioral neuroscience of the phenomenon.

Mesolimbic dopamine is often noted as the key chemical player in motivation, especiallyl in addiction studies, and it involved structures such as the dorsorostral nucleus accumbens and posterior ventral palladium. (Even today, some people do not realize that alcohol has a primary, not just secondary, stimulant effect on the CNS because of its action on the ventral striatum, which is coincident with dopamine release.) But while critical to exertion of effort and decision making, dopamine is only one part of a distributed circuitry including multiple neurotransmitters and brain areas.

There are six main theories of motivation, centering on: instinct; incentive; drive; arousal; expectancy; and humanism (Maslow’s hierarchy, etc.).

Also, like affect and memory, motivation can be implicit, i.e., unconscious. Psychologist Drew Westen cites numerous experiments demonstrating this. Much of the research comes from a combination of self-report and projective tests (especially the Thematic Apperception Test). “The correlation between these two types of measures,” Westen writes, “typically hovers around zero (e.g., self-reported and projective assessments of the need for power tend to show no relation to each other. In other words, conscious and unconscious  motives appear to reflect the operations of autonomous systems.” He further notes the comment of psychologist John Bargh of automaticity fame: The habitual, automatic, unconscious motives people develop through repeated experiences in a given situation are often better guides to action than the conscious, presumably ‘rational’ analysis they might construct of a current instance, which may not be adequately informed by their history of prior learning” (Westen, 1999). Differential motivational accounting can also be seen in split-brain patients.

The incentive theory of motivation builds on classical drive theories established by early psychologists such as Clark Hull and is based on the idea that behavior is primarily extrinsically motivated, driven by the promise of reward rather than enjoyment of the actions in questions. Thus, the term’s use in economics. But mainstream economics has traditionally operated on the assumption that behavior in the marketplace is basically rational. This notion has always been suspect among critical thinkers, and the empirical justifications for such suspicion started emerging with the work of Herbert Simon and his notion of bounded rationality. It evolved through the rigorous psychological studies of Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky to the more recent developments in behavioral economics by, most notably, Richard Thaler, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Unlike philosophical irrationalism, bounded rationality, which is key to behavioral economics, essentially means that a realistic account of rationality entails acknowledgment of the inherent limitations of cognitive capacity and the ubiquity of missing information (often complicated by time pressure). Thus, decision-making is, in general, suboptimal, and motivation as incentive will be less rational than predicted by traditional economic models of human behavior. In other words, individuals tend not to “maximize subjective utility.”

It is easy to see why motivation would be relevant to mental illness, especially schizophrenia and depression. The technical term in this context is “avolition”. In schizophrenia, there are positive symptoms (e.g., florid excesses of madness, hallucinatory actions, etc.) negative symptoms, such as muted response to stimuli, and this would include the abnormal motivation. The difference between motivation deficits between the two illnesses appears to be that in depression, the problem is hedonic reaction, or anhedonia: an incapacity to experience pleasure. In contrast, schizophrenic persons have problems with hedonic processing: an impairment in translating reward experience to anticipation and action selection (Simpson & Balsen, 2016).

One of the most effective psychotherapies for alcohol misuse is motivational interviewing, the key component of which is to develop the discrepancy between the client’s most deeply held values and their current behavior so as to enable the values to overcome the dysfunctional habit: that is, to identify ambivalence about the disorder, and to get the client to move in the direction of strengthening the motivation for abstinence. Also, computational approaches to motivational deficits may be of clinical value. Decision theory offers a way to quantify motivation, as the cost that patients would accept to endure in order to get the benefit of achieving their goal. Studies have shown that the trade-off between effort and reward involves specific cortical, subcortical, and neuromodulatory systems, such that it may be shifted in particular clinical conditions and reinstated by appropriate treatments (Pessiglione, 2017).

Finally, on a literary (and personal) note, the Victorian poet Robert Browning wrote in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett, “I have no pleasure in writing…none in the mere act, though pleasure in fulfilling a duty…My heart sinks whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it.”

~ Wm. Doe, Ph.D. – January 2018

SELECTED REFERENCES

E.H. Simpson, P.D. Balsen (2016). The behavioral neuroscience of motivation: An overview of concept, measures, and translational applications. Curr Top Behav Neuroscie, 27

K. C. Berridge (2004, April). Motivational concepts in behavioral neuroscience. Physiol Behav., 81(2)

D. Westen (1999, Fall). The scientific status of unconscious processes: Is Freud really dead? J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc.. 47(4)

J. D.. Salomon et al (2015). Activational and effort-related aspects of motivation: Neural mechanisms and implications for psychopathology. Brain, 139, 1325-47.

M. Pessigione et al (2017). Why not try harder? Computational approach to motivation deficits in neuro-psychiatric diseases. Brain (e-submission ahead of print)