Motivation and Personality : A Neuropsychological Perspective

Personality is strongly influenced by motivation systems that organise responses to rewards and punishments and that drive approach and avoidance behavior. Neuropsychological research has identified: (a) two avoidance systems, one related to pure active avoidance and escape, and one to passive avoidance and behavioral inhibition produced by goal-conflict; and (b) two approach systems, one related to the actions of reward seeking and one to experience and behavior related to pleasure on receiving reward. These systems mediate fluid moment-by-moment reactions to changing stimuli, with relatively stable person-specific sensitivities to these stimuli manifested in personality traits. We review what is known about these motivational traits, integrating the theory-driven approach based on animal learning paradigms with the empirical tradition of the Big Five personality model. People differ from one another, and this fact is obvious to everyone. It is common to talk about people’s personalities using lexical terms to describe their characteristic ways of thinking, feeling and behaving (e.g., ‘bold’, ‘lazy’, ‘intelligent’), and we use these descriptors to infer people’s intentions and likely future behavior. Personality psychologists have long analyzed the ratings of large numbers of trait descriptive adjectives to produce the most widely used taxonomy of personality: the Big Five, which includes the dimensions of Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience ⁄ Intellect (John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008). These Big Five traits also emerge from existing personality questionnaires that were not designed specifically to measure them (e.g., Markon, Krueger, & Watson, 2005), suggesting it is a good candidate for a consensual model in personality psychology. What the Big Five model does not immediately offer, however, is an explanation for the causal sources of personality traits. Why do people think, feel, and act in the ways that they do? People react to situations, of course; but different people react differently to the same situation, suggesting that they have different behavioral propensities. In order to answer this why question, we must discover what drives people’s actions and reactions. Inferring motivation from observed personality has been something of a dark art in psychology. However, one promising approach to this question is based on the biology of motivational control systems, studied by psychologists for over a century in non-human animals, and for somewhat less time in humans. This approach operates on the premise that stable individual differences in behavior (personality traits) must be due to relatively stable individual differences in the operation of brain systems that produce (state) behavior from moment-tomoment. From this perspective, each of our many traits reflects the operations of a set of brain systems that has evolved to respond to a different class of functional requirements (Denissen & Penke, 2008; McNaughton, 1989; Nettle, 2006; Pickering & Gray, 1999). Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7/3 (2013): 158–175, 10.1111/spc3.12016 a 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd In what follows, we focus on those motivational processes and personality traits most closely aligned with biological research on reactions to reward and punishment and associated approach and avoidance behavior. This focus is warranted both by the importance of these phenomena for motivation and by the existence of extensive research on them. Our aim is to offer an introduction for researchers wishing to explore the role of motivation in personality from the perspective of these underlying psychobiological systems. Only after a description of what is known about the operation of these systems do we branch out to consider the personality traits associated with them. Our major assumption is that most fundamental personality traits have a motivational core; and we aim to show that the descriptive personality research tradition, which produced the Big Five, can be integrated with the experimental research tradition that has focused on the sensitivities of basic motivation systems. In this review, we focus on systems related to approach and avoidance primarily at the level of explanation that Gray (1975) labeled ‘the conceptual nervous system’, which is based on analysis of behavior as well as neurobiology and attempts to describe important psychological processes without specifying their exact instantiation in the nervous system – this approach has afforded a detailed analysis of reactions to classes of motivationally significant stimuli and can be used to derive predictions concerning the functions of the real nervous system (e.g., in fMRI studies). Rather than going into extensive detail regarding the biological basis of the systems, we focus primarily on their functions, discussing biological evidence only when it is necessary for addressing some functional question. Approach-Avoidance Theories of Motivation and Their Relation to Personality The most important classes of motivational stimuli can be grouped into ‘rewards’ and ‘punishments’. Animals can be seen as cybernetic systems with attractors and repulsors (positive and negative goals) that have evolved to promote survival and reproduction (Carver & Scheier, 1998; DeYoung, 2010d). Without a tendency to approach beneficial stimuli (e.g., food, drink, and sexual mates) and to avoid aversive stimuli (e.g., predators and poisons) a species would not survive. ‘Reward’ and ‘punishment’ may seem straightforward concepts, but they hide some nonobvious complexities. For the classical behaviorist, rewards increase the frequency of the behavior leading to them, whereas punishments decrease the frequency of behavior leading to them. That is, a ‘reward’ is something a person will work to obtain; and a ‘punishment’ is something a person will work to avoid. But the behaviorist definition of ‘reward’ also includes a different class of stimuli, namely the termination or omission of expected punishment. The effect on behavior and emotion of the ‘hope’ of achieving a reward is similar to that of anticipated ‘relief’ through avoiding a punishment. Similarly, although a ‘punishment’ can be described as something people will work to avoid or escape from (or which they will attack defensively), the omission of an expected reward is experienced as punishing; an effect known as frustrative nonreward. Thus, ‘fear’ has important similarities with ‘frustration’. (For further discussion of this literature, see Corr & McNaughton, 2012.) These complexities can be understood straightforwardly from the cybernetic perspective, in which rewards are any stimuli that indicate progress toward or attainment of a goal, whereas punishments are any stimuli that disrupt progress toward a goal. However, in any experimental situation, it is necessary to confirm that the subject perceives stimuli as actually rewarding and punishing, as there are likely to be significant individual differences in how people react to the same stimuli (for further discussion of this point, see Corr, forthcoming). Motivation and Personality 159 a 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7/3 (2013): 158–175, 10.1111/spc3.12016 Current approach-avoidance theories trace their origins to early researchers who posited that two motivation ⁄emotion processes underlie behavior (e.g., Konorski, 1967; Mowrer, 1960; Schneirla, 1959), one related to reward (approach behavior and positive emotions), and the other to punishment (avoidance behavior and negative emotions). Neuroscience measures, including pharmacological manipulation, assessment of neural activity, and neuroanatomical studies, have been used to investigate the neuropsychological systems that underlie reactions to these classes of stimuli, providing confirmation of the hypothesis that distinct systems underlie rewardand punishment-related motivation (Gray & McNaughton, 2000). This animal-based work migrated into personality psychology in the 1970s via Jeffrey A. Gray (e.g., 1970, 1972a,b, 1975, 1977), whose Reinforcement Sensitivity theory (RST) argued that the major traits of personality reflect long-term stabilities in systems that mediate reactions to different classes of reinforcing stimuli, generating emotion and shaping (‘motivating’) approach and avoidance behavior. The leap from understanding motivational systems to understanding personality traits requires the postulate that relatively stable individual differences exist in the operations of these brain-behavioral systems. A personality trait can be defined as a probabilistic constant in equations that predict the frequency and intensity with which individuals exhibit various motivational states, as well as the behavioral, emotional, and cognitive states that accompany these motivational states (DeYoung, 2010c; Fleeson, 2001; Fleeson & Gallagher, 2009). Note that this assumes exposure of the population to a normal range of situations. If situations are limited to prevent exposure to some trait-relevant class of situations, then individual differences in that trait may not be manifest. A neuropsychological approach to personality aims to understand both the biological systems that are responsible for the states associated with any given trait and the parameters of those systems that cause them to differ across individuals. The systems themselves will be present in every intact human brain, but the values of their parameters will vary from person to person. Thus, for example, all people have brain systems that respond to punishing stimuli, but in different individuals these systems respond differently to a given stimulus. It is the typical level of response of such a system in any given individual, averaged across different situations, that is associated with that individual’s score on the personality trait in question. This is not to imply that an individual wil