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Psychological Medicine Jul 2022Motivational processes underlie behaviors that enrich the human experience, and impairments in motivation are commonly observed in psychiatric illness. While motivated... (Review)
Review
Motivational processes underlie behaviors that enrich the human experience, and impairments in motivation are commonly observed in psychiatric illness. While motivated behavior is often examined with respect to extrinsic reinforcers, not all actions are driven by reactions to external stimuli; some are driven by 'intrinsic' motivation. Intrinsically motivated behaviors are computationally similar to extrinsically motivated behaviors, in that they strive to maximize reward value and minimize punishment. However, our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie intrinsically motivated behavior remains limited. Dysfunction in intrinsic motivation represents an important trans-diagnostic facet of psychiatric symptomology, but due to a lack of clear consensus, the contribution of intrinsic motivation to psychopathology remains poorly understood. This review aims to provide an overview of the conceptualization, measurement, and neurobiology of intrinsic motivation, providing a framework for understanding its potential contributions to psychopathology and its treatment. Distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are discussed, including divergence in the types of associated rewards or outcomes that drive behavioral action and choice. A useful framework for understanding intrinsic motivation, and thus separating it from extrinsic motivation, is developed and suggestions for optimization of paradigms to measure intrinsic motivation are proposed.
Topics: Humans; Motivation; Reward; Punishment; Mental Disorders
PubMed: 35796023
DOI: 10.1017/S0033291722001611 -
Journal of Family Psychology : JFP :... Jun 2016Whether spanking is helpful or harmful to children continues to be the source of considerable debate among both researchers and the public. This article addresses 2... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis
Whether spanking is helpful or harmful to children continues to be the source of considerable debate among both researchers and the public. This article addresses 2 persistent issues, namely whether effect sizes for spanking are distinct from those for physical abuse, and whether effect sizes for spanking are robust to study design differences. Meta-analyses focused specifically on spanking were conducted on a total of 111 unique effect sizes representing 160,927 children. Thirteen of 17 mean effect sizes were significantly different from zero and all indicated a link between spanking and increased risk for detrimental child outcomes. Effect sizes did not substantially differ between spanking and physical abuse or by study design characteristics. (PsycINFO Database Record
Topics: Aggression; Child; Child Abuse; Child Behavior; Child, Preschool; Humans; Male; Parent-Child Relations; Parenting; Punishment; Research Design
PubMed: 27055181
DOI: 10.1037/fam0000191 -
Scientific Reports Jan 2023A fundamental question in social and biological sciences is whether self-governance is possible when individual and collective interests are in conflict. Free riding...
A fundamental question in social and biological sciences is whether self-governance is possible when individual and collective interests are in conflict. Free riding poses a major challenge to self-governance, and a prominent solution to this challenge has been altruistic punishment. However, this solution is ineffective when counter-punishments are possible and when social interactions are noisy. We set out to address these shortcomings, motivated by the fact that most people behave like conditional cooperators-individuals willing to cooperate if a critical number of others do so. In our evolutionary model, the population contains heterogeneous conditional cooperators whose decisions depend on past cooperation levels. The population plays a repeated public goods game in a moderately noisy environment where individuals can occasionally commit mistakes in their cooperative decisions and in their imitation of the role models' strategies. We show that, under moderate levels of noise, injecting a few altruists into the population triggers positive reciprocity among conditional cooperators, thereby providing a novel mechanism to establish stable cooperation. More broadly, our findings indicate that self-governance is possible while avoiding the detrimental effects of punishment, and suggest that society should focus on creating a critical amount of trust to harness the conditional nature of its members.
Topics: Humans; Cooperative Behavior; Punishment; Game Theory; Altruism; Social Interaction
PubMed: 36681708
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-28372-y -
Behavioural Processes Mar 2023Learning to stop responding is an important process that allows behavior to adapt to a changing and variable environment. This article reviews recent research in this... (Review)
Review
Learning to stop responding is an important process that allows behavior to adapt to a changing and variable environment. This article reviews recent research in this laboratory and others that has studied how animals learn to stop responding in operant extinction, punishment, and feature-negative learning. Extinction and punishment are shown to be similar in two fundamental ways. First, the response-suppressing effects of both are highly context-specific. Second, the response-suppressing effects of both can be remarkably response-specific: Inhibition of one response transfers little to other responses. Learning to inhibit the response so specifically may result from the correction of "response error," the difference between the level of responding and what the current reinforcer supports. In contrast, the inhibition of responding that develops in feature-negative learning, where the response is reinforced during one discriminative stimulus (A) but not in a compound of A and stimulus B, is less response-specific: The inhibition of responding by stimulus B transfers and inhibits a second response, especially if the second response has itself been inhibited before. The results thus indicate both response-specific and response-general forms of behavioral inhibition. One possibility is that response-specific inhibition is learned when the circumstances encourage the organism to pay attention to the response-to what it is actually doing-as behavioral suppression is learned.
Topics: Animals; Conditioning, Operant; Extinction, Psychological; Learning; Punishment; Inhibition, Psychological
PubMed: 36702436
DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2023.104830 -
Neuropsychopharmacology : Official... Jul 2018
Topics: Humans; Mental Disorders; Punishment
PubMed: 29728646
DOI: 10.1038/s41386-018-0062-4 -
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Feb 2022Aversive motivation plays a prominent role in driving individuals to exert cognitive control. However, the complexity of behavioral responses attributed to aversive... (Review)
Review
Aversive motivation plays a prominent role in driving individuals to exert cognitive control. However, the complexity of behavioral responses attributed to aversive incentives creates significant challenges for developing a clear understanding of the neural mechanisms of this motivation-control interaction. We review the animal learning, systems neuroscience, and computational literatures to highlight the importance of experimental paradigms that incorporate both motivational context manipulations and mixed motivational components (e.g., bundling of appetitive and aversive incentives). Specifically, we postulate that to understand aversive incentive effects on cognitive control allocation, a critical contextual factor is whether such incentives are associated with negative reinforcement or punishment. We further illustrate how the inclusion of mixed motivational components in experimental paradigms enables increased precision in the measurement of aversive influences on cognitive control. A sharpened experimental and theoretical focus regarding the manipulation and assessment of distinct motivational dimensions promises to advance understanding of the neural, monoaminergic, and computational mechanisms that underlie the interaction of motivation and cognitive control.
Topics: Animals; Cognition; Humans; Motivation; Punishment; Reinforcement, Psychology; Reward
PubMed: 34910931
DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.12.016 -
Journal of the Royal Society, Interface Feb 2021One-shot anonymous unselfishness in economic games is commonly explained by social preferences, which assume that people care about the monetary pay-offs of others.... (Review)
Review
One-shot anonymous unselfishness in economic games is commonly explained by social preferences, which assume that people care about the monetary pay-offs of others. However, during the last 10 years, research has shown that different types of unselfish behaviour, including cooperation, altruism, truth-telling, altruistic punishment and trustworthiness are in fact better explained by preferences for following one's own personal norms-internal standards about what is right or wrong in a given situation. Beyond better organizing various forms of unselfish behaviour, this moral preference hypothesis has recently also been used to increase charitable donations, simply by means of interventions that make the morality of an action salient. Here we review experimental and theoretical work dedicated to this rapidly growing field of research, and in doing so we outline mathematical foundations for moral preferences that can be used in future models to better understand selfless human actions and to adjust policies accordingly. These foundations can also be used by artificial intelligence to better navigate the complex landscape of human morality.
Topics: Altruism; Artificial Intelligence; Cooperative Behavior; Humans; Mathematics; Morals; Punishment
PubMed: 33561377
DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2020.0880 -
Ugeskrift For Laeger Jan 2020
Topics: Humans; Pedophilia; Punishment
PubMed: 32052732
DOI: No ID Found -
PLoS Computational Biology Dec 2022Protection often involves the capacity to prospectively plan the actions needed to mitigate harm. The computational architecture of decisions involving protection...
Protection often involves the capacity to prospectively plan the actions needed to mitigate harm. The computational architecture of decisions involving protection remains unclear, as well as whether these decisions differ from other beneficial prospective actions such as reward acquisition. Here we compare protection acquisition to reward acquisition and punishment avoidance to examine overlapping and distinct features across the three action types. Protection acquisition is positively valenced similar to reward. For both protection and reward, the more the actor gains, the more benefit. However, reward and protection occur in different contexts, with protection existing in aversive contexts. Punishment avoidance also occurs in aversive contexts, but differs from protection because punishment is negatively valenced and motivates avoidance. Across three independent studies (Total N = 600) we applied computational modeling to examine model-based reinforcement learning for protection, reward, and punishment in humans. Decisions motivated by acquiring protection evoked a higher degree of model-based control than acquiring reward or avoiding punishment, with no significant differences in learning rate. The context-valence asymmetry characteristic of protection increased deployment of flexible decision strategies, suggesting model-based control depends on the context in which outcomes are encountered as well as the valence of the outcome.
Topics: Humans; Prospective Studies; Learning; Reinforcement, Psychology; Reward; Punishment
PubMed: 36534704
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010805 -
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of... Jan 2021In his book Coercion and Its Fallout Murray Sidman argued against the use of punishment based on concerns about its shortcomings and side effects. Among his concerns...
In his book Coercion and Its Fallout Murray Sidman argued against the use of punishment based on concerns about its shortcomings and side effects. Among his concerns were the temporary nature of response suppression produced by punishment, the dangers of conditioned punishment, increases in escape and avoidance responses, punishment-induced aggression, and the development of countercontrol. This paper revisits Sidman's arguments about these putative shortcomings and side effects by examining the available data. Although Sidman's concerns are reasonable and should be considered when using any form of behavioral control, there appears to be a lack of strong empirical support for the notion that these potential problems with punishment are necessarily ubiquitous, long-lasting, or specific to punishment. We describe the need for additional research on punishment in general, and especially on its putative shortcomings and side effects. We also suggest the need for more effective formal theories of punishment that provide a principled account of how, why, and when lasting effects of punishment and its potential side effects might be expected to occur or not. In addition to being necessary for a complete account of behavior, such data and theories might contribute to improved interventions for problems of human concern.
Topics: Aggression; Humans; Punishment
PubMed: 33283288
DOI: 10.1002/jeab.653