Motivational paper

Motivationchapter16article.pdf

Home >English homework help >Article writing homework help >Motivational paper

Preparing and Motivating Behavior Outside of Awareness Henk Aarts,* Ruud Custers, Hans Marien

T he observation that the mere activation of the idea of a behavioral act moves the human body without the person conscious-

ly deciding to take action has long been a topic of scientific interest (1–3). Initially, this ideomotor principle was used to explain extraordinary ac-

tivities such as compliance under hypnosis, auto- matic writing, dowsing, and swinging pendulums. Lately, research on social cognition and neuro- science has revealed that seeing or reading about a behavior available in the individual’s repertoire increases the tendency to perform it, which has been interpreted as a result of the common code that action concepts share with motor programs. Whereas activating the mental representation of behavior outside of awareness—that is, subliminal priming—indeed prepares people to initiate rap- idly the corresponding behavior, an important issue recently addressed is how such subliminal priming effects may acquire an intrinsic motiva- tional property in the sense that people mobilize additional resources and actually spend effort on a task (4). We studied the emergence of such un- conscious motivation by examining how sub- liminal priming of the action concept of physical exertion causes people to spend effort.

Building on research on the basic role of af- fective value in reward learning and motivation, we propose that the mechanism that turns sub- liminal priming of action concepts into motiva- tion relies on the tagging of positive affect to the

action concept (5). Specifically, we investigated that activating the behavior representation of exertion through subliminal priming prepares the execution of the corresponding behavior and that this priming actually motivates effort- ful behavior when that representation is co-

activated with positively valenced stimuli that act as a reward signal. To test this, we subjected 42 participants to a priming task that enabled us to combine the subliminal priming of words representing exertion with briefly presented, al- though consciously visible positive words [Sup- porting Online Material (SOM) text]. Accordingly, three different conditions were created: a (con- trol) condition in which only positive stimuli were presented, a (priming) condition in which exertion was subliminally primed but not di- rectly paired with positive stimuli, and a (priming- plus-reward) condition in which exertion was subliminally primed and immediately linked to positive stimuli.

After the manipulations, we recorded handgrip force, which allowed us to differentiate between action preparation and motivation. Participants were instructed to squeeze a hand grip for 3.5 s when the word “squeeze” appeared on the screen. Results (Fig. 1) showed that participants in the priming and priming-plus-reward conditions started to squeeze earlier and increased their force faster than those in the control condition: The reaction time was shorter, and the initial

slope toward the maximal force (rate of increase in applied force) was steeper in these two prim- ing conditions. This faster initiation of the re- sponse to squeeze the hand grip and the faster development of force indicate that acting force- fully was more strongly prepared (2). Crucially, participants in the priming-plus-reward condition displayed more total effort (mean force over time) than those in the other two conditions, showing enhanced motivation (fig. S1 presents the mean scores on the three measures for each cell in the design).

These results confirm that subliminally prim- ing exertion prepares people to display forceful action, but when these subliminal primes are

accompanied with a positive stimu- lus it motivates people to spend extra effort. Previous research on motiva- tion agrees that positive affect acts as a motivator to engage in a task or behavior when it refers to a reward for performing the behavior, even if the reward is subliminally primed (6). We tested a more basic and content- free process by showing that such motivation also emerges when the activation of the behavior representa- tion of exertion is directly accompa- nied by positive stimuli that do not explicitly pertain to the execution of the behavior itself but nevertheless act as reward signals. These effects occur even though participants were unaware of the behavioral primes and thereby of their contingency with the reward sig- nals. This study thus demonstrates the human capacity to rely on mental pro- cesses in preparing and motivating behavior outside of awareness.

References and Notes 1. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Macmillan,

London, 1890). 2. M. Jeannerod, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action

(Blackwell, Malden, MA, 1997). 3. D. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (MIT Press,

Cambridge, MA, 2002). 4. J. Bargh, Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 36, 147 (2006). 5. R. Custers, H. Aarts, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 89, 129

(2005). 6. M. Pessiglione et al., Science 316, 904 (2007). 7. This work was financially supported by the Netherlands

Organization for Scientific Research (VENI grant 451-06- 014, VIDI grant 452-02-047, and VICI grant 453-06- 002). We thank S. de Groot, L. Koopmans, and R. Rexwinkel for helping with the experiment.

Supporting Online Material www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5870/1639/DC1 Materials and Methods Fig. S1 References and Notes

12 September 2007; accepted 7 January 2008 10.1126/science.1150432

BREVIA

Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS Utrecht, Netherlands.

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]

0 2000 4000

Time (ms)

F o

rc e (

N )

Control

Priming

Priming + Reward

Fig. 1. Mean pattern of force over time as a function of the experimental treatments.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 319 21 MARCH 2008 1639

o n D

e ce

m b e r 9

, 2 0 1 9

h ttp

://scie n ce

.scie n ce

m a g .o

rg /

D o w

n lo

a d e d fro

http://science.sciencemag.org/

Preparing and Motivating Behavior Outside of Awareness Henk Aarts, Ruud Custers and Hans Marien

DOI: 10.1126/science.1150432 (5870), 1639.319Science

ARTICLE TOOLS http://science.sciencemag.org/content/319/5870/1639

MATERIALS SUPPLEMENTARY http://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2008/03/20/319.5870.1639.DC1

CONTENT RELATED http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/319/5870/1689.2.full

REFERENCES

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/319/5870/1639#BIBL This article cites 3 articles, 1 of which you can access for free

PERMISSIONS http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions

Terms of ServiceUse of this article is subject to the

is a registered trademark of AAAS.ScienceScience, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. The title (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203) is published by the American Association for the Advancement ofScience

American Association for the Advancement of Science