Abstract

This review takes a historical perspective on concepts in the psychology of motivation and emotion, and surveys recent developments, debates and applications. Old debates over emotion have recently risen again. For example, are emotions necessarily subjective feelings? Do animals have emotions? I review evidence that emotions exist as core psychological processes, which have objectively detectable features, and which can occur either with subjective feelings or without them. Evidence is offered also that studies of emotion in animals can give new insights into human emotions. Beyond emotion, motivation concepts have changed over decades too, and debates still continue. Motivation was once thought in terms of aversive drives, and reward was thought of in terms of drive reduction. Motivation-as-drive concepts were largely replaced by motivation-as-incentive concepts, yet aversive drive concepts still occasionally surface in reward neuroscience today. Among incentive concepts, incentive salience is a core motivation process, mediated by brain mesocorticolimbic systems (dopamine-related systems) and sometimes called ‘wanting’ (in quotation marks), to distinguish it from cognitive forms of desire (wanting without quotation marks). Incentive salience as ‘wanting’ is separable also from pleasure ‘liking’ for the same reward, which has important implications for several human clinical disorders. Ordinarily, incentive salience adds motivational urgency to cognitive desires, but ‘wanting’ and cognitive desires can dissociate in some conditions. Excessive incentive salience can cause addictions, in which excessive ‘wanting’ can diverge from cognitive desires. Conversely, lack of incentive salience may cause motivational forms of anhedonia in depression or schizophrenia, whereas a negatively-valenced form of ‘fearful salience’ may contribute to paranoia. Finally, negative ‘fear’ and ‘disgust’ have both partial overlap but also important neural differences.

Highlights

  • This review discusses the history of motivation and emotion concepts in psychology and affective neuroscience, drawing on both animal studies and human studies, in order to gain a better perspective on recent concepts and debates

  • To aid that distinction I will use quotation marks around ‘wanting,’ ‘liking,’ ‘fear’ and ‘disgust’ to distinguish those as objective core processes, that can be either merely unconscious or conscious, from accompanying always conscious feelings denoted by the same words without quotation marks

  • Bitter tastes oppositely elicit ‘disgust’ reactions of mouth gapes, headshakes, arm flails and so on. Some of these affective facial expressions to taste are shared by apes and other primates, and even by rats and other non-primates (Grill and Norgren, 1978; Berridge, 2000). Using this schematic measure of ‘liking’ versus ‘disgust,’ we found that drug disruption of dopamine failed to reduce facial ‘liking’ reactions to sweetness, contrary to our anhedonia-based prediction (Treit and Berridge, 1990)

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Summary

Introduction

This review discusses the history of motivation and emotion concepts in psychology and affective neuroscience, drawing on both animal studies and human studies, in order to gain a better perspective on recent concepts and debates. My own view is similar: that affective reactions can occur unconsciously, as well as consciously, and that we share many emotional processes and their brain circuitry with animals.

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