abstract 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. IncentiveImplicit motive From the very beginning, motivational theories of personalityhave emphasized the inseparability of persons and situations forthe prediction of behavior. Murray (1938) considered behaviorto be the result of a match between a persons motivationalneedand a press, that is, a suitable incentive present in the environ-ment that arouses the need and provides an opportunity for itsexpression. Building on Murrays work,McClelland, Atkinson,Clark, and Lowell (1953)later used situational arousal of the needfor achievement (nAch) to devise a picture-story-based content-coding measure to determine peoples dispositional need to excelat challenging tasks. Even this new measure of nAch was not con-sidered to predict behavior across all contexts; rather, McClellandet al. made the presence of suitable incentives and situationalcontexts a cornerstone of their theory of motivation. Indeed, thepicture-story measures developed for the assessment of motivesare themselves critically dependent on the inclusion of properpictorial cues to elicit the motive of interest (e.g.,Pang & Schul-theiss, 2005) and appear to assess stable patterns of if-then con-tingencies between situational cues and behavioral responses(Schultheiss, Liening, & Schad, 2008). As a result of the inherentrelationship between motivational needs and incentives, the jointconsideration of individuals motives and situational cues is partand parcel of theorizing and research in the eld of implicit mo-tive research to this day (e.g.,McClelland, 1987; Schultheiss,2008; Woike, 2008).But motivational concepts do not only provide a natural linch-pin between the person and the situation in the prediction ofbehavior, they also add a dynamic component to the relationshipbetween both that is absent in classic trait theories of personality.Incentive attainment has a temporary damping effect on the moti-vational need: after a full meal, even a previously hungry personceases to think of food and starts thinking of other things. In theirdynamics of action theory,Atkinson and Birch (1970)presented amodel that formally incorporated such dynamic effects of incentiveconsummation and need satisfaction on subsequent behavior.Dynamics of action theory thus presaged modern biopsychologicaland neuroscience accounts of motivation that highlight the chang-ing reward value of incentives. For instance,Cabanac (1971)dem-onstrated that the same stimulus (e.g., immersion in warm water)can be experienced as pleasant or unpleasant, depending on theneed state of the organism (e.g., whether it is in a state of hypo-or hyperthermia). He termed this effect alliesthesia, that is, aneed-dependent change in the hedonic value of an incentive. Alli-esthesia effects have been observed for several domains of motiva-tion, including sexual motivation and feeding behavior. As a case inpoint, Rolls, Sienkiewicz, and Yaxley (1989)showed that monkeysresponses to sweet glucose syrup change from greedy acceptanceto nauseous rejection with continuous ingestion and that neuronsin the orbitofrontal cortex closely track this change in reward valuewith their ring rate. We therefore suggest that motivational con-cepts provide a rich and fruitful framework for extending researchon the interplay between persons and situations into exciting newdirections.References