Motivational Processes Underlying Implicit Cognition in Addiction

Some Terminological and Theoretical Issues

As used here,implicit cognitions are those thought processes that fall beyond one's conscious awareness but nevertheless influence a wide variety of everyday behaviors in automatized ways, including addictive behaviors (see Bruce & Jones, chapter 10). The motivational processes that underlie implicit cognition in addiction are best understood in light of some basic principles of motivation in general. We definemotivation as “the internal states of the organism that lead to the instigation, persistence, energy, and direction [Page 254]of behavior towards a goal” (Klinger & Cox, 2004, pp. 4–5).

How does goal-directed behavior come about? In our view, people are motivated to get (and hence they want) things when they anticipate that having them will bring a positive emotional payoff, and they are motivated to get rid of or avoid things when they anticipate that having these things will bring a negative emotional payoff. We call the things that people wantpositive incentives and the things that they want to get rid of or avoidnegative incentives. That is, positive incentives are those things (objects or events) that people expect will make them feel good or better. Negative incentives are those that people expect will make them feel bad or worse. Thus, an incentive is defined as any object or event that a person expects will change his or heraffect, ana its value depends on the valence and magnitude of that emotional payoff.Affective change, therefore, is a central motivational concept, because it is the essence of what people are motivated to achieve.

People are not, of course, motivated to get or get rid of all of the incentives that could potentially bring about desirable affective changes. There are a number of variables in addition to expected affective change—that is, in addition to incentivevalue—that determine whether or not an incentive will become the object of a person's goal-directed behavior, and, if it does, the intensity of the motivation. One of the most important of these variables, according toValue X Expectancy formulations (e.g., Feather, 1982; Van Eerde & Thierry, 1996), is the person's expectedchance of success (i.e.,expectancy) of being able to acquire the desired incentive or to get rid of the unwanted one. If people expect both (1) that particular incentives will bring about strong, desirable affective changes (i.e., if they place great value on them)and (2) that they have a strong likelihood of getting what they want or getting rid of what they do not want, they likely will be motivated to do so. That is, their goal-directed behavior will be instigated, and it might become persistent and energetic—depending, in part, on the value of other motivational variables that we introduce later.

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