Abstract
How is the brain engaged when people are thinking about their hopes, dreams, and obligations? Regulatory focus theory postulates two classes of personal goals and motivational systems for pursuing them. Ideal goals, such as hopes and aspirations, are pursued via the promotion system through “making good things happen.” Ought goals, such as obligations or responsibilities, are pursued via the prevention system through “keeping bad things from happening.” This study investigated the neural correlates of ideal and ought goal priming using an event-related fMRI design with rapid masked stimulus presentations. We exposed participants to their self-identified ideal and ought goals, yoked-control words and non-words. We also examined correlations between goal-related activation and measures of regulatory focus, behavioral activation/inhibition, and negative affect. Ideal priming led to activation in frontal and occipital regions as well as caudate and thalamus, whereas prevention goal priming was associated with activation in precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex. Individual differences in dysphoric/anxious affect and regulatory focus, but not differences in BAS/BIS strength, were predictive of differential activation in response to goal priming. The regions activated in response to ideal and ought goal priming broadly map onto the cortical midline network that has been shown to index processing of self-referential stimuli. Individual differences in regulatory focus and negative affect impact this network and appeared to influence the strength and accessibility of the promotion and prevention systems. The results support a fundamental distinction between promotion and prevention and extend our understanding of how personal goals influence behavior.
Highlights
A person’s hopes, dreams, and wishes, whether attained or unattained, have always been seen as central to an individual’s identity—as the essence of who a person is because they represent that which a person strives to be (James, 1890/1948)
As Brodmann labels can be somewhat misleading (Zilles and Amunts, 2010), we report probabilistic anatomical labels for local maxima within statistically significant clusters derived from the Harvard-Oxford Cortical and blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) ACTIVATION: PROMOTION > CONTROL PRIMING We analyzed the fMRI data for promotion goal priming by contrasting responses to ideal priming with responses to yokedcontrol priming
There were no significant findings for behavioral activation system (BAS) or behavioral inhibition system (BIS) strength, but we found two areas in which activation for ideal primes compared to yoked-control primes increased as individuals reported higher levels of success attaining promotion goals (Table 2; Figure 3)
Summary
A person’s hopes, dreams, and wishes, whether attained or unattained, have always been seen as central to an individual’s identity—as the essence of who a person is because they represent that which a person strives to be (James, 1890/1948). The kind of individual we wish to be, and the kind of person we believe we must be, are powerful influences on behavior and affect whether we see ourselves as succeeding or failing to attain those wishes and obligations (Kelly, 1955). Goals are a central construct in theories of behavior because they provide a unified conceptual framework linking internal states (needs, motives, beliefs) and the social world. When people believe they have attained an important goal, they may feel joyful, satisfied, fulfilled, or worthy; when people believe they have failed to attain a goal, they may feel inadequate, hopeless, worthless, guilty, or ashamed (Sullivan, 1953; Rogers, 1961). To date there has been little research examining how neural systems are engaged when people think about their personal goals, both when the goals are attained as well as when they are not
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