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PART I
Basic Concepts and TheoriesCO
PYRIGHTED
MATERIA
L
CHAPTER 1
Motivation and the Goal Theoryof Current Concerns
Eric Klinger
University of Minnesota, Morris
and
W. Miles Cox
Bangor University
Synopsis.—Behavior and experience are organized around the pursuit and enjoyment of goals.Accordingly, this chapter first discusses basic motivational concepts that address the processesinvolved in choosing and pursuing goals, and places goal pursuit within the framework of the theory ofcurrent concerns. It examines how people choose goals and traces the effects of having a goal and ofthe way the goal pursuit ends, in goal attainment or relinquishment. It integrates applicableneuroscientific findings that shed light on these processes. Goal choice depends on the value andcosts assigned by the chooser to each alternative (incentive) and its perceived attainability, subject tosuch complicating factors as forecasting biases and time frame. Commitment to a goal pursuitlaunches a latent, time-binding brain process (a current concern) that sensitizes the individual torespond emotionally and to notice, recall, think about, dream about, and act on cues associated withthe goal pursuit. These processes affect one another and are subject to implicit (nonconscious) as wellas explicit influences. Goal pursuits vary according to whether the goal is an approach or avoidancegoal, the time frame for action, the anticipation of the details and difficulties of the goal pursuit, andthe degree of conflict with other goals. Emotional responses determine incentive values, serve asevaluative feedback during goal pursuits, and accompany consummation of or disengagement fromthe goal. The process of disengagement normally entails a sequence of emotional changes:invigoration, anger, depression, and recovery. Each of these components of goal choice and pursuitcan go awry, leading to a variety of difficulties that become reflected in anxiety, depression, alienation,interpersonal and occupational problems, substance abuse, suicide, and other forms of psychologicaldisturbance. Motivational structure (an individual’s pattern of goal striving) is an importantdeterminant of well-being, the sense that one’s life is meaningful, and self-regulation. The chapterbriefly considers the implications of the findings for counseling interventions for motivationalproblems that deter clients from choosing and pursuing the goals that can potentially bring themhappiness and fulfillment, considerations that are discussed at length in the book’s remainingchapters.
All living organisms must meet life’s challenges of obtaining nutrients, excreting toxic
substances, locating hospitable places, and reproducing themselves. Plants and animals
Handbook of Motivational Counseling: Goal-Based Approaches to Assessment and Intervention with Addictionand Other Problems, Second Edition. Edited by W. Miles Cox and Eric Klinger.� 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
evolved quite different strategies for addressing these challenges. Plants depend on their
immediate environments to supply their needs. In contrast, animals evolved the capacity to
move around and thus gained a degree of freedom from the not-too-tender mercies of their
most immediate environments. However, this freedom from total dependency also carries a
price: the imperative to find, pursue, and consummate the substances and conditions that
satisfy their needs – to pursue and attain goals.
Human goals may be small or large, trivial or important – from a few moments of
amusement or organizing a closet to finding a mate, having and successfully rearing
children, succeeding in a vocation, or achieving spiritual fulfillment. They may be positive
(appetitive), such as those just described, or negative (aversive), such as avoiding disease, a
bully, or a bad reputation. Somemore obviously bear on individual survival than others, and
some may become perverted in ways that jeopardize survival.
In psychology, the processes that drive goal striving are collectively called motivation.
This book and the approaches it contains are built around the notion that, to be effective, any
psychological intervention must address the client’s set of personal goals, whether large or
small, and the ways in which the client relates to those goals. Taken altogether, a client’s
goals and ways of relating to them are what this book refers to as the client’s motivational
structure. The approaches described in the chapters that follow focus on understanding,
assessing, and intervening to modify clients’ motivational structure. First, however, this
chapter introduces some motivational definitions and concepts and maps out some of what
scientific research has established about motivational systems – their nature; their influ-
ences on what people notice, recall, think about, feel, and do; and their implications for
well-being, psychopathology, and treatment.
MOTIVATION FORMALLY DEFINED
Different psychologists define what they mean by motivation somewhat differently.
Ferguson (1994) reflected a long tradition when he defined motivation as “the internal
states of the organism that lead to the instigation, persistence, energy, and direction of
behavior” (p. 429). Thus, Ferguson’s definition includes the effects of drives such as
hunger, emotional states such as anxiety and anger, and many other variations of inner
states. Second, the definition lists themain qualities of behavior that motivation is defined to
influence: its initiation, persistence, vigor, and direction.
Yet this definition leaves out mention of a crucial component, which Chaplin (1968) put
in when he defined motivation as a concept “to account for factors within the organism
which arouse, maintain, and channel behavior toward a goal” (p. 303). That is, motivated
behavior is also goal-directed behavior. One could thus combine the two definitions of
motivation: “the internal states of the organism that lead to the instigation, persistence,
energy, and direction of behavior toward a goal.” It is this combined definition that informs
this chapter and most of the book.
THE CENTRALITY OF MOTIVATION IN BRAIN AND MIND
If animals evolved with a motile strategy to go after the substances and conditions they
need, the most basic requirement for their survival is successful goal striving. It follows that
4 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
all animal evolution, right up to humans, must have centered on natural selection of
whatever facilitated attaining goals. Everything about humans must have evolved in the
service of successful goal striving – including human anatomy, physiology, cognition, and
emotion. These must therefore be understood in terms of their relationship to goal striving
and the motivational systems that make it possible.
In recent decades, neuroscientists have turned up dramatic evidence of the close connec-
tions between virtually all psychological processes and those associated with emotion and
goal striving. Ledoux (e.g., 1995) showed that in the brain sensory pathways bifurcate, some
leading from sense organs to the cerebral cortex, and others from sense organs to the limbic
system, which is heavily implicated in emotion. This suggests that sensory signals begin to
trigger emotional reactions at least as quickly as they trigger cognitiveprocesses that analyze
thesignals soas tomakemoredetailedsenseof them.Therearealsopathways fromthe limbic
system to the cortex and from the cortex to the limbic system, which provides a system by
whichemotional andcognitiveresponses to the signalcanalert, refine,andcorrect eachother.
Thus, brain anatomy indicates that emotional response and closely related motivational
processes are a central part of responding to something.
The centrality of emotional and motivational processes is also apparent in the work of
Antonio and Hanna Damasio and their colleagues. They have, for example, shown that
destruction of specific brain areas, such as the medial prefrontal cortex, leaves people
unable to stay on course toward their goals, substantially crippling their ability to lead
normal, satisfying lives (Damasio, 1994). The ventromedial prefrontal cortex appears to
integrate emotion-related signals from the limbic system with signals from various cortical
areas, including some that are necessary for planning and volition.Without this integration,
people become impulsive, make unrealistic plans, and are easily distracted from their goals.
Along similar lines, a controlled experiment showed that, unlike intact individuals, patients
with ventromedial prefrontal brain damage could not learn to avoid risky or nonoptimal
strategies such as betting in laboratory games (e.g., Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, &
Damasio, 1997; Clark et al., 2008). Thus, the particular brain damage of these patients
interfered with input from their emotional responses and correspondingly compromised
their ability to make appropriate, goal-related decisions.
Mounting evidence such as this confirms the centrality of motivational and emotional
processes in the organization of the brain. Correspondingly, it supports the parallel, older
evidence of their centrality to psychological organization, and it underlines the importance
for counselors and psychotherapists of understanding the interconnections with motiva-
tional processes and integrating applicable methods into treatment procedures.
IMPORTANT DISTINCTIONS REGARDING MOTIVATION
Motivational States versus Motivational Traits
There are also other important distinctions regarding motivation to keep in mind.
The definitions introduced earlier suggest that motivation refers to short-lived internal
states such as hunger or anger, but there is also in psychology a long history of
conceptualizing and measuring motivational factors as relatively enduring dispositions
or traits (e.g., Allport, 1937; Heckhausen, 1967, 1991; Jackson, Ahmed, & Heapy, 1976;
McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1953; Murray, 1938). For example, an individual
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 5
not only may be trying hard to build a strong business, which could reflect achievement
motivation, but also may place high value on and invest much effort into doing many things
better than others and into improving on his or her previous performance. Then this
individual may be described as broadly achievement motivated, which constitutes the
enduring trait of high achievement motivation.
There are purposes for which conceiving motivation in terms of enduring dispositions is
very useful. For example, as many search committees and search firms know, when one is
selecting college professors or corporate executives, it would be helpful to ascertain what
kinds of goals typically interest them, because that knowledgemay shed light on their likely
performance and fitness for the position. However, characterizing someone in terms of
motivational traits can also blind one to the facts that these traits are broad generalizations
about an individual’s goal pursuits but that each goal pursuit represents a decision that is
influenced by a given set of factors, and that these factors, and the decisions they produce,
are subject to change. Especially for counselors and therapists, the possibility of changing
motivation and the methods for producing change are central to their enterprise. Thus,
although motivational dispositions can be useful ways to describe individuals, they are not
fixed quantities, but changeable.
Accordingly, this book is focused more on motivational states and conditions, which
cumulatively may lead to traits, than on the motivational traits themselves. When one can
change people’s decisions about the kinds of goals to pursue, one has by that fact also
changed motivational traits.
Motivation and Volition
Some writers on motivation, especially in the German psychological tradition (e.g.,
Heckhausen, 1991; Kuhl, 2001), restrict the term motivation to the processes and factors
that determinewhich goals an individual will pursue; they then classify as volition (from the
Latin root for thewill) the factors that regulate how the individual carries out the pursuit – its
persistence, vigor, and efficiency. Thus, in this usage, the termmotivation includes only the
initial factors that determine an individual’s choice of goals, leaving the rest to volition. In
contrast, in the American tradition the term motivation includes volition; volitional
processes are simply a subset of motivation. This chapter and most of the other chapters
in this volume abide by the broader American definition of motivation.
What is important here is to keep in mind the importance of volitional processes. They
are part of motivational structure, and they are part of what may need to change in
counseling. For example, when an individual gives up too easily in the face of difficulty or
uses self-defeating coping strategies such as procrastinating or ruminating, addressing
these is part of effective intervention. Thus, a comprehensive approach to motivational
counseling must include both a person’s choices of goals and the volitional means of
pursuing them.
Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation
The field of motivational research distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsicmotivation
(e.g., Ferguson, Hassin, & Bargh, 2008). Motivation is said to be intrinsic when an
6 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
individual pursues a goal that is valued for its own sake. That is, reaching the goal is not
just a step in attaining some further goal. For example, eating an ice cream cone for
pleasure or marrying for love are intrinsically motivated acts. Motivation is said to be
extrinsic when a goal is a stepping stone toward some further goal. For example, eating an
ice cream cone solely to gain weight or marrying solely to improve one’s social position
are extrinsically motivated acts. Acts that are purely extrinsically motivated yield only one
kind of satisfaction: the satisfaction of moving closer to attaining some other source of
satisfaction.
In this sense, extrinsically valued goals are really subgoals or means leading to an
ultimate goal. Consistent with this formulation, the emotions that a person feels toward a
goal are transferred to some extent to the activities and social relationships that lead to
the goal, at least until it has been reached (Fishbach, Shah, & Kruglanski, 2004); and
they are also transferred to other cues that are relevant to the goal (Ferguson &
Bargh, 2004).
Although the objectively same kind of act may be motivated intrinsically, extrinsically,
or in both ways, some kinds of goals are generally more likely to be motivated intrinsically
(e.g., visiting a national park) and others more likely to be motivated extrinsically (e.g.,
becoming rich). The balance of an individual’smotivational structure in this regard – that is,
the extent to which the individual’s goals are more often intrinsically versus extrinsically
valued – is associated with overall feelings of well-being and satisfaction with life and work
(Kasser & Ryan, 2001; Niemiec, Ryan, & Deci, 2009; Ryan, Sheldon, Kasser, & Deci,
1996; Schmuck, 2001).
Nevertheless, it is important to keep inmind that any extrinsically motivated act, which is
a step toward some other goal, is part of a chain of acts and subgoals that ultimately lead to
an intrinsically valued goal. What may very well be more important than whether particular
goals are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated is whether the intrinsically motivated goal
at the end of the chain is appetitive (e.g., having a happy home) or aversive (e.g., avoiding
arguments). People with more aversive goals are generally less satisfied with life and work
than those with fewer aversive goals (Elliot & Sheldon, 1998; Roberson, 1989; Roberson &
Sluss, Chapter 15, this volume). Satisfaction presumably also depends on whether the
ultimate intrinsically motivated goal is worth all the bother of the extrinsically motivated
activity leading up to it.
It is also important not to confuse the intrinsic-versus-extrinsic distinctionwith whether a
goal was self-chosen or assigned by someone else. Similarly, the distinction is not to be
confused with whether another person plays a role in the rewards of attaining a goal. Goals
imposed on one by others, or perhaps even just suggested by others, are likely to be
extrinsically motivated, in that pursuing the goal is likely to have the further purpose of
keeping the person who imposed it happy. Thus, the child carries out the trash when asked
to do so because of a desire to keep the parent’s emotional support. Keeping that support,
however, may be in part intrinsically motivated, in that the child enjoys for its own sake
relating to a supportive parent. Conversely, self-chosen goals may be extrinsically
motivated (e.g., taking a difficult college course so as to upgrade one’s credentials for
future employment).
In summary, it is a mistake to equate – as some current writers appear to do – intrinsic
motivation with desirable motivation and extrinsic with undesirable. Both are important
and necessary. However, the balance between them in an individual’s life and the concrete
forms they take can affect overall happiness.
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 7
Other Motivational Constructs
This chapter is unable to review all of the many other motivational constructs. However,
readers may wonder what happened to the traditional concepts that make up the main focus
of conventional introductory textbooks, constructs such as drive (e.g., hunger, thirst, and
sexual arousal), need or motive (e.g., for achievement or intimacy), and arousal.
Drive
The venerable concept of drive (e.g., Hull, 1953) remains an important source of
motivation as an aroused internal state that both invigorates mental and motor activity
and modulates the value of drive-related incentives. However, even Hull’s (1953) theory
supplemented it with incentive as a determinant of motivation, and subsequent evidence
(e.g., Black, 1965; Black & Cox, 1973; Klinger, 1971; Tomkins, 1962) has supported the
need for factors in addition to drive for predicting everyday human behavior. Drive may
be considered to perform two functions: to activate an organism and to modify the
values of various incentives, even if only temporarily. Thus, both rats and people, when
newly hungry, become more restless and give heightened priority to getting something
to eat.
Needs and Motives
The concept of need (e.g., Heckhausen, 1991; McClelland et al., 1953; Murray, 1938) has
evolved into a construct, which is today more commonly called motive rather than need,
that summarizes the value that an individual typically places on a certain class of incentives
(i.e., on potential goals). For example, an individual who generally places relatively high
intrinsic value on achievement incentives, such as winning races or intellectual contests or
doing well in one’s work, is said to have a high need or motive for achievement. Thus, like
drive, motives predict the values of different incentives for an individual, which is a crucial
component in the individual’s decision making regarding which goals to pursue (see below
and also Alsleben & Kuhl, Chapter 5, this volume; Correia, Murphy, & Butler, Chapter 2,
this volume).
Explicit and Implicit Motives
The two most common ways to assess people’s motives are to ask people about their
motives through questionnaires or to infer the motive strengths from imaginative crea-
tions, such as stories that people make up about pictures. The first, direct method produces
scores that represent explicit (i.e., self-attributed) motives, whereas the inferential method
produces scores that are thought to represent implicit motives – motives that are often
described as operating below the surface of an individual’s consciousness. It is well
established that measures of nominally the same explicit and implicit motives of the
same individuals are very poorly correlated (e.g., King, 1995), a fact that has cast doubts
on their validity. However, research (beginning with McClelland, Koestner, &
8 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
Weinberger, 1989) has shown that both are valid measures of two legitimately different
kinds of motives: those that an individual can articulate and that are responsive to social
and situational demands, and those that are ingrained in an individual’s intuitive
valuations of incentive outcomes.
These two motive types have rather different behavioral implications. People’s explicit,
self-attributed motives are related to the strength of their self-attributed commitments to
their goals, but emotional satisfaction is more likely to arise from attaining goals that are
consistent with implicit motives (i.e., implicit values). Thus, people whose explicit goals
are congruent with their implicit values experience a higher sense of well-being than
individuals with little such congruence (Baumann, Kaschel, & Kuhl, 2005; Brunstein,
Lautenschlager, Nawroth, P€ohlmann, & Schultheiss, 1995; Brunstein, Schultheiss, &
Gr€assman, 1998). Progress toward goals is associated with positive feelings much more
closely if the underlying implicit motives toward those goals are strong than if they are
weak, even when accompanied by strong explicit commitment to these goals (Schultheiss,
Jones, Davis, & Kley, 2008).
Although measures of nominally the same explicit and implicit motives are overall
largely uncorrelated, they are actually well correlated in people who are perceptive of what
is going on inside their bodies and who prefer to be consistent with themselves; they
are uncorrelated for people who lack this perceptiveness or tailor their self-presentation to
suit others (Thrash, Elliot, & Schultheiss, 2007). Interestingly, explicit achievement
motivation is correlated with measures of positive affect and well-being, but only for
people who express strong explicit commitment to their achievement goals (Job, Langens,
& Brandst€atter, 2009). Similarly, unpublished data indicate that positive affect is weakly
(about .20) but statistically significantly correlated with the proportion of a person’s goals
that are self-described as achievement or power goals (Stuchl�ıkov�a & Klinger, 2010).
These findings suggest a further explanation for the varied correspondence between
explicit and implicit measures of motives. It may be that when questionnaires focus on
concrete particulars, such as goals and emotions, people are better able to reveal personal
attributes that remain poorly expressed in the broad self-generalizations requested by most
explicit trait measures of motives. This possibility has important implications for motiva-
tional assessment and provides support for the kinds of measures, such as the Motivational
Structure Questionnaire and Personal Concerns Inventory, discussed in Chapters 7, 8, and 9
of this volume.
Of course, a person’s valuations of incentives, whether explicitly or implicitly valued, are
subject to change. Many incentives, such as a job promotion, a romantic relationship, or a
new house, carry multiple kinds of potential satisfactions. Mentally exploring incentives
that initially hold little implicit appeal for someone may reveal ways in which they may,
after all, satisfy the individual’s implicit values and thereby induce the person to pursue
them as explicit goals (Schultheiss & Brunstein, 1999).
There are clear implications for counseling in these findings. It is important to explore
clients’ implicit values, not just their explicit ones. There are classical picture-story
methods for assessing implicit motives (e.g., McClelland et al., 1953) and many later
variants, such as the Operant Motive Test (Alsleben & Kuhl, Chapter 5, this volume), but
more direct methods also exist. Assessment tools such as the Motivational Structure
Questionnaire and Personal Concerns Inventory (Chapters 7, 8, and 9, this volume) or the
Personal Projects Analysis (Little, Chapter 3, this volume) obtain ratings of individuals’
affective responses to their goals, which are likely to reveal aspects of implicit values.
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 9
GOAL PURSUITS AND THE CONCEPT OF CURRENT CONCERN
Pursuing a goal imposes some complex requirements on an individual. The intent must be
represented somehow in the brain from beginning to end – an example of prospective
memory (Brandimonte, Einstein, & McDaniel, 1996). When the memory is explicit and
conscious, Kuhl (2000, 2001) calls it intention memory. Moreover, goal pursuit requires
more than a passive memory of the pursuit; it requires a continuing state of sensitization to
stimuli relevant to the pursuit and a readiness to act – to seize opportunities for attaining the
goal even while not consciously thinking about it. To pursue goals efficiently, this state of
sensitization requires an implicit, latent process that we have dubbed a current concern –
the state of an individual between two time points, the one of becoming committed to
pursuing a particular goal and the other of either attaining the goal or giving up the pursuit.
As a later section of this chapter shows, there is now ample evidence confirming that goal
pursuits are accompanied by a pervasive biasing of cognitive processing – attention, recall,
and thought content – toward information associated with an individual’s goal pursuits.
It is worth reiterating two other properties of current concerns. First, there is a separate
such process – a separate concern – corresponding to each goal. Second, it is a latent
process, meaning that in and of itself it is not conscious. It certainly affects consciousness,
and individuals are probably conscious of most, if not all, of the goals undergirded by their
current concerns, but the concern construct refers to the underlying process, not just its
conscious representation. It labels the process of having a goal.
The construct of current concern as a latent brain process was first proposed as a scaffold
for further development of the theory (Klinger, 1971, 1975, 1977). That it was labeled a
latent brain process seemed a necessary assumption. Since then, brain-imaging studies of
goal-related phenomena have begun to identify brain regions related to its functions (e.g.,
Berkman & Lieberman, 2009; Kouneiher, Charron, & Koechlin, 2009). Thus, goals
assigned to one by others are probably represented by activity in lateral prefrontal and
lateral parietal cortex, whereas self-chosen goals are probably represented by activity in
medial prefrontal and medial parietal cortex. Short-term intentions, as represented by
preparatory sets for taking action, appear to entail activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
and superior frontal gyrus. Monitoring progress and responding to conflicts and discre-
pancies appear to activate the anterior cingulate cortex (Berkman & Lieberman, 2009).
Little is known about the loci for longer-term intentions or current concerns, but showing
people pictures related to their probable current concerns (in contrast to showing neutral
pictures) activates inferior frontal gyrus and precentral gyrus (Ihssen, Cox, Wiggett,
Fadardi, & Linden, in press).
Before and since the coining of the concept of current concern, other theorists have
offered other, somewhat similar time-binding concepts. The concepts of Einstellung,
Ustanovka, or set (Ach, 1910; Uznadze, 1966); intention (e.g., Alsleben &Kuhl, Chapter 5,
this volume; Gollwitzer, 1990; Heckhausen&Kuhl, 1985; Irwin, 1971; Kuhl, 2001); quasi-
need (Lewin, 1928); force (Lewin, 1938); and personal project (Little, 1983, Chapter 3, this
volume) are all constructs with time-binding properties and have more or less overlap with
the construct of current concern, but with variations in their theoretical properties. This is
not the place for a detailed comparison of these constructs. The important point is that
initiating a goal pursuit instates a persistent psychological process that influences cogni-
tion, action, and emotional response in ways that give it special priority.
The concept of current concern provides a unifying framework for motivational
processes in animal and human behavior and suggests important aspects of animal and
10 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
human behavioral evolution. It has generated empirically verified predictions regarding the
contents of people’s attention, recall, thoughts, dreams, moods, sense of one’s life being
meaningful, and substance use (see subsequent sections of this chapter and Chapter 6, this
volume). It has also stimulated the development of new approaches to motivational
assessment (Chapters 7, 8, and 9, this volume) and psychological intervention (Chapters
11 through 16, this volume).
GOALS AND EMOTIONS
Goal pursuits are pervasively intertwined with emotions. Emotions play crucial roles in
choosing goals, monitoring their pursuit, steering cognitive processes within them, and
reacting to their outcomes. Subsequent sections of this chapter explore these propositions.
The purpose of this section is to lay out the terrain and to examine some emotion-related
concepts. (In this chapter, the term emotion includes conscious affect and all of the many
other implicit and physiological processes that are components of emotion.)
Emotions constitute states of organisms that directly or indirectly affect virtually every
process, psychological or biological. Emotional responses constitute changes in organismic
states. They have long been recognized as components of instinctive behavior (e.g.,
Darwin, 1872/1985; McDougall, 1921) and as preparing an individual to act in particular
ways. For example, participants were asked to look at strings of letters on a screen and as
quickly as possible either press a key (an approach response) or take their finger off a key
(a withdrawal response) if the string was a word (Wentura, Rothermund, & Bak, 2000).
Participants whowere asked to press keys did so faster if theword was positively toned than
if it was negatively toned, and thosewhowere asked towithdraw their fingers did so faster if
the word was negatively toned than if it was positively toned. The valences of the words
presumably evoked incipient emotional responses, and these were evidently linked to a
motor disposition to move accordingly – to approach positive things and withdraw from
negative ones – that facilitated or interfered with the corresponding acts of pressing or
releasing a key on a keyboard. (See also Cacioppo, Priester, & Berntson, 1993; Neumann&
Strack, 2000.) Such studies thus demonstrate the connections between emotional response
and physical movement. Extensive evidence has also linked emotions to a wide range of
neurohumoral states and immune function (e.g., Fredrickson, 2009; Lewis, Haviland-
Jones, & Barrett, 2008). Emotions are thus much more than just the subjective feelings or
the bodily sensations that people usually associate with them.
There is a growing consensus among emotion researchers (e.g., Cacioppo, Gardner, &
Berntson, 1999; Kuhl, 2001; Watson, Wiese, Vaidya, & Tellegen, 1999) that the different
emotions people feel can be organizedwithin two dimensions or categories, that is, as either
positive or negative affect. There is good reason to believe that these two dimensions
correspond to separate reaction systems in the brain (Cacioppo et al., 1999) with somewhat
different functions and consequences, such as for accuracy of recall (Kensinger, 2009) and,
certainly, subjective experience. When people experience positive affect, they feel plea-
surably engaged with their environment; when they experience negative affect, they feel
distressed and dissatisfied (Watson & Kendall, 1989).
An affective change is a change in affect from its previous state. The change may be
desirable (an increase in positive affect or a decrease in negative affect) or undesirable
(a decrease in positive affect or an increase in negative affect). Affective change is a central
motivational concept, because it is ultimately the essence of what people are motivated to
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 11
achieve. As noted by innumerable writers from (at latest) Aristotle onward (Stocker, 1996),
people strive for things that will make them feel better by either giving them pleasure or
relieving their discomfort.
Beyond this truism, important as it is, research has uncovered a remarkable range of other
ways in which changing from a positive to a negative affective state or vice versa influences
basic psychological functions. The changes involve peripheral physiology, neurophysiol-
ogy, types of cognitive processing, and even the ability to consult one’s own values and to
learn from experience (e.g., Alsleben & Kuhl, Chapter 5, this volume; Kuhl, 2000, 2001).
The relation between emotion and goal striving has become progressively better docu-
mented.Affect (the conscious experience of emotion) constitutes a person’s basic system for
recognizing the value of something, both of potential goals (or, negatively, of impediments
and threats) and of progress toward goals (Damasio, 1994; Klinger, 1977; Pervin, 1983; see
alsoBaumeister, Vohs, DeWall, &Zhang, 2007).When people are asked to rate the intensity
of the emotions thatwords arouse in themandhowclosely thewords are associatedwith their
goalpursuits, thecorrelations tend tobeabout .60 (e.g.,Bock&Klinger, 1986).Ofcourse, the
affective and broader emotional responses that lead to evaluative judgments are generally
embedded in a more complex process that includes other components. Some emotional
responses are innately hard-wired to certain schematic features of stimuli (e.g., revulsion at a
foul odor) and hence require a perceptual process; others are responses to conditioned
stimuli, which require a learning history; and still others depend on even more complex
inferences about the significance of a stimulus, such as emotional reactions to a government
policy. Nevertheless, the weight of evidence strongly suggests that it is the emotional
response or an anticipated emotional response that determines the value that a person places
on something. The chapter discusses this point at greater length in a later section.
Not everything to which an individual responds emotionally becomes a goal, but it does
constitute a potential goal. To provide a term for this larger class of potential goals, the term
incentive refers to an object or event that a person expects will bring about an affective
change. Corresponding to the two broad kinds of affect, incentives can be either positive or
negative. People would like to acquire positive incentives that would enhance their positive
affect. They would like to avoid, escape, or get rid of negative incentives that would
increase their negative affect.
A goal, then, is a particular incentive that a person decides to attain because of the
expectation that it will cause desirable changes in affect. However, for various reasons,
people do not strive to attain all of the incentives that could potentially bring them the
changes that they would like. For example, they might (a) feel that they do not know how to
go about attaining the goal that they want, (b) imagine that doing so would also bring them
unhappiness, (c) believe that they are unlikely to succeed, or (d) find that time constraints
force a choice among alternatives. Goals, therefore, constitute a limited selection from
among a person’s incentives.
HOW GOAL PURSUITS BEGIN
Commitment
Goal pursuits generally have an identifiable beginning when the individual selects an
incentive and forms an inner commitment to pursuing it as a goal. This commitment instates
12 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
a current concern about the goal and constitutes an irreversible change, in the sense that the
goal cannot be relinquished without a psychological cost, such as disappointment or
depression.
That commitments are discrete events is evident not only in the costs of relinquishment
but also in that commitment to a goal produces several changes. First, it changes the initial
effects of sudden impediments; before commitment to a goal, impediments make pursuing
the incentive as a goal less attractive, but after a commitment impediments initially lead to
invigorated pursuit and deepened commitment (Klinger, 1975). When people are firmly
committed to a goal that they have not attained yet and are then reminded of all that
remains left to do to attain the goal, their motivation toward the goal rises; if their
commitment is weak, this kind of reminder does little to increase motivation (Koo &
Fishbach, 2008). Likewise, making concrete plans regarding when, where, and how to
pursue a goal (implementation intentions) helps people attain their goals only if they also
have a clear commitment to attaining those goals (goal intentions; Sheeran, Webb, &
Gollwitzer, 2005).
Second, commitments also change mind-sets (e.g., Gollwitzer, Heckhausen, & Steller,
1990). Before commitment, while the individual is still weighing alternatives and
reserving the decision as to which incentive to pursue, the individual is in an evaluative
mind-set, characterized by relative objectivity about the alternatives and openness to a
wide range of information. After commitment, the individual enters an implementalmind-
set characterized by partiality toward the chosen goal and a mental focus on the steps
necessary to reach it. Third, as indicated in subsequent sections of this chapter, the current
concerns instated by commitments sensitize the individual to respond to cues associated
with the goal pursuit.
Determinants of Commitment: Expectancy � Value Approaches
In any given circumstance, people are generally faced with choices of which incentives they
will pursue. They face choices of playmates, careers or jobs, partners with whom to spend a
coffee break or a lifetime, items on a restaurant menu, vacation destinations, whether to talk
in class, and so on. Often one alternative is so much more attractive than the others, or so
much less unattractive, that the individual may not feel as if there is a choice, but the choice
is generally there.
If there is a choice, what determines which incentive the individual will choose as a goal?
A long theoretical tradition in psychology and economics, which may loosely be termed
Value�Expectancy formulations (e.g., Feather, 1982; Van Eerde & Thierry, 1996), holds
that two important variables determine this choice: the value that the person attributes to
each alternative incentive and the person’s expectancy (subjective probability) of being
able to attain it. In the simplest form of Value�Expectancy theory (which economists
generally term subjective expected utility theory), one multiplies the value assigned by an
individual to each alternative by the individual’s expectancy (perceived likelihood) of
being able to attain it, and predicts that the individual will choose as a goal the alternative
yielding the highest product.
There are many elaborations, modifications, and qualifications of this approach, but its
general outlines have survived. Although attempts to empirically test the nature of the
relationship between value and expectancy remain inconclusive because of unresolved
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 13
methodological problems (see Kuhl, 1986, pp. 409–410; Rustichini, 2009; Van Eerde &
Thierry, 1996), the approach has proven useful in making concrete predictions of goal
choice.
This section dwells on expected value theory for two principal reasons. First, it forms a
useful framework for thinking about how people choose their goals, and, second, it suggests
important features of goal pursuits, which can be incorporated into tools for assessing goals
and motivational structure (Cox & Klinger, Chapter 7, this volume).
Value and Emotion
The notion that things have a certain amount of value assumes that the desirability of
everything can be compared to that of everything else. But how does one compare an apple
with an orange, a yacht, and a symphony? Economists might answer that everything would
have to bemeasurable by some common currency, such as dollars. However, moneywas not
always the metric for value, and, anyway, before one can decide how much money
something is worth to oneself, one has to have a subjective sense of its value.
There does, in fact, appear to be such a subjective common metric, or common currency,
and research is beginning to identify it both in subjective experience and in the brain (e.g.,
Rustichini, 2009; Winkielman, Knutson, Paulus, & Trujillo, 2007). To begin with the
common currency in subjective experience (see further below for the brain processes),
humans and many other species appear to have evolved an intuitive representation of value,
and the likely code resides in anticipated emotion. That is, the value of each incentive – of
each potential goal object – is the degree of affective change that the person expects to
derive from it (Klinger, 1977; see also Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001;
Mellers, 2000). Insofar as an incentive has positive value, people expect that attaining
it will increase their happiness more than their unhappiness, and they expect to experience
sorrow if they fail to achieve it. In other words, people attribute value to their goal objects on
the basis of the potential emotional payoffs for them.
Putting Value and Expectancy Together in PredictingChoice of Goals
According to the Value�Expectancy view, both value and expectancy (likelihood of
attaining the goal) must be substantial for people to pursue a goal. Even if a person greatly
values a particular incentive, there will be nomotivation to pursue it if it seems unattainable
or attainable only at an unreasonable cost in time, effort, and resources. Likewise, even if
the chances of reaching particular goals are judged to be high, individuals will be
unmotivated to pursue them unless they expect a suitable benefit. In the multiplicative
relationship of Value�Expectancy, if either variable is zero therewill be zeromotivation to
attain the goal, regardless of how high the other might be.
The most important point here is that expected emotional return is probably the prime
determinant of whether a person becomes committed to pursuing a particular goal.
However, there are some important qualifications to this generalization, which are
discussed in subsequent sections.
14 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
Neuroscientific Support for Value � Expectancy Theory
Amid the many criticisms and qualifications of this theory, it may have seemed to be simply
a useful abstraction, but recent studies with both monkeys (single-cell recordings) and
humans (brain imaging) have indicated its concrete biological reality. That is, they have
found either single neurons or brain sites whose activity varies in accordance with the value
or expectancy of a reward.
For example, Tobler, Fiorillo, and Schultz (2005) conditioned macaque monkeys to
associate different stimuli (visual patterns) with differing food values (amounts of juice)
and differing probabilities of obtaining the juice. After the conditioning, particular
individual dopamine neurons (mostly part of the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental
area) showed higher activity levels that accorded with the reward value associated with the
stimuli and also with expectancies of reward.
These reward-sensitive pathways are also linked to positive affect. Furthermore, if the
reward was exactly what the monkey had been led to expect, neural activity in these
pathways remained flat, as if to reflect lack of excitement; if reward was greater than
expected, neural activity rose accordingly; and if reward was below expectation, neural
activity showed suppression, which one might interpret as disappointment. There are
similar findings with regard to expectancy. Thus, the activity of single monkey neurons in
the anterior cingulate corresponded to the probability of reward (Shidara &
Richmond, 2002).
Something as complex as value, preference, or choice is not, of course, localized in one
brain site. Their representations are carried forward in the brain and integrated with other
relevant information so as to foster choice and decision, most likely in various parts of the
prefrontal cortex such as particular neurons in the orbitofrontal area (Padoa-Schioppa &
Assad, 2006, 2008).
Working with humans, Knutson, Taylor, Kaufman, Peterson, and Glover (2005) found
parallel results using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess brain
processes, and money rather than juice as the rewards. A number of brain structures were
active in relation to expectations of winning or losing different amounts of money. Most
clearly, activity in nucleus accumbens reflected the anticipated amount of reward; activity
in medial prefrontal cortex reflected the probability of reward and most likely also
integrated the anticipated amount of the reward (i.e., value) with the probability of
receiving it (i.e., expectancy).
Knutson et al.’s (2005) participants also rated the valence of their emotions (positive or
negative) and levels of emotional arousal, as well as their estimated probability of receiving
a reward. The emotional arousal ratings correlated significantly with activity in nucleus
accumbens. Probability ratings were correlated with activity in medial prefrontal cortex but
not with activity in nucleus accumbens. Presumably, these different strands of information
become integrated in prefrontal cortex, perhaps especially in its medial and orbitofrontal
regions (Clark et al., 2008; Winkielman et al., 2007).
The division of brain loci between initial response to the value of a reward in
dopaminergic pathways, such as ventral striatum, including nucleus accumbens, versus
expectancies (probability of success and calculation of risk) in prefrontal cortical areas
has been found repeatedly in other investigations (e.g., McClure, Ericson, Laibson,
Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2007; Xue et al., 2009). For example, choosing between a smaller
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 15
reward now versus a larger reward in the future activated regions of the lateral prefrontal
cortex (McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2004). Furthermore, the lateral and
medial prefrontal cortex regions are themselves differentiated according to the kind of
processing required of them. More anterior areas may have evolved later in evolution to
handle more complex tasks (Kouneiher et al., 2009), perhaps such as judgments about the
likelihood of success in pursuing an incentive as a goal.
The point here is that neuroscience is establishing a division in the processing of
incentives: evaluating them, on one hand, in dopaminergic areas (which are linked to
positive affect) as if they were immediately available, and, on the other hand, in the lateral
prefrontal cortex, calculating the odds of obtaining them. Of course, the activity in
dopaminergic pathways that are associated with imminent reward also eventually reaches
the prefrontal cortex. Areas of the medial prefrontal cortex recur as a likely site for
integrating these different sources of information to arrive at an individual’s final choices.
Thus, when Haynes et al. (2007) asked people to choose between two tasks and to hold that
intention for a few seconds before acting on it, the investigators were able to “read” which
task these participants were choosing from differential fMRI patterns in the medial
prefrontal cortex. (See also Egner, 2009; Seitz, Franz, & Azari, 2009.) Furthermore, a
person’s decisions about which movement to make can be detected in prefrontal and
parietal regions before the decision becomes conscious, sometimes up to 10 seconds
beforehand (Soon, Brass, Heinz, & Haynes, 2008).
To return to the issue of value as anticipated emotional payoff, these neuroscientific
findings link incentive value with emotional processes, consistent with current-concerns
theory (e.g., Klinger, 1977) and a number of earlier theories, such as such as those of O. H.
Mowrer, S. S. Tomkins, and P. T. Young. The new findings also support expected value
theory, both in supporting the partial dissociation of processing of expectancy from
processing of value and in indicating the integration of expectancy with value at higher
cortical levels. They are also consistent with Epstein’s (e.g., 2003) cognitive-experiential
self-theory.
Complications in Applying the Expectancy � Value Approach
There are a number of complications in applying the Expectancy � Value approach.
Balancing Value Against Costs
In predicting whether a person will choose a goal, one must balance value against costs.
For example, the incentive may be something of relatively low absolute value (e.g., going
to see a particular film), but if the cost of pursuing this incentive is also modest and
attaining it is likely to bring positive emotion, there is a good chance that the individual
will pursue it. On the other hand, a person may place great intrinsic value on an incentive,
such as taking a cruise around the world, and yet not choose this as a goal because of its
likely costs. These costs may include opportunity costs, which are the incentives one
would have to forgo, as when the world cruise might require losing a highly attractive job
opportunity.
16 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
Extrinsic Consequences
The value of an incentive may depend on a variety of extrinsic components – ways in which
it affects one’s ability to reach other goals. For example, becoming a physician may be a
positive incentive for someone because the individual expects it to lead to high social status,
respect, financial returns, and becoming more competitive in the search for a desirable
mate, which are its extrinsic consequences, in addition to the intrinsic pleasure of feeling
needed and making an important contribution to society.
Erroneous Affective Forecasting
People often miscalculate their future emotional reactions to a particular event, which
should theoretically distort their valuations. Thus, one’s present mood state colors
estimates of future emotion – such as estimating greater future joy if currently feeling
good – although often in complex ways (Buehler, McFarland, Spyropoulos, & Lam, 2007),
especially when one is cognitively overloaded or if the timing of the future event is not
specified (Gilbert, Gill, & Wilson, 2002).
Furthermore, people underestimate their future liking for things if they believe that once
they receive them, they will no longer be able to change their choice (Gilbert &
Ebert, 2002). They tend to overestimate the intensity (Wilson, Meyers, & Gilbert, 2001)
and duration (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998; Wilson, Wheatley,
Meyers, Gilbert, & Axsom, 2000) of future emotional reactions to both positive and
negative events. These distortions are reduced by having people consider in greater detail
the context of their activities and lives at and after the time of the future event whose impact
they are forecasting (Gilbert et al., 2002; Wilson et al., 2000), as well as reflecting on their
inner emotional coping skills for reducing negative affect (Gilbert et al., 1998).
Individual and Situational Differences in the Relative Weightingof Value and Expectancy
The extent to which people take probability of success and incentive value into account
varies, both from person to person (e.g., Shah & Higgins, 1997) and from time to time.
Some people are more attracted by the emotional payoff of the likely reward, and others by
the likelihood of succeeding in obtaining it. Moreover, people in general are more likely to
pay attention to the incentive value (i.e., emotional payoff) of incentives that are reachable
only in the distant future than of those in which success or failure is near in time, but are
more likely to pay attention to their chances of obtaining the incentive if it is near in time
rather than far off (Liberman & Trope, 1998). Finally, there may be situations in which
people dispense with probabilistic thinking, such as situations that are very familiar or that
other people partially control (Rottenstreich & Kivetz, 2006).
Delay Discounting
Imagine having to decide between two business propositions. In both instances, you have to
perform a certain service, whether it is shoveling snow off a driveway or providing
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 17
statistical consultation. One proposition will pay you immediately after you perform the
service, and the other will pay you in 30 days. If both offer the same amount of money for
the same service, most people would choose the one offering immediate payment. If the
delayed-payment proposition were to offer an extra 5%, how many people would prefer
waiting for it rather than taking the other offer of immediate payment of slightly less?
Probably not very many. How much more would the proposition for payment in 30 days
have to offer tomake it fully competitivewith the proposition for immediate payment? How
much more for payment in six months? A year?
Research has repeatedly found that in making such intertemporal choices, people and
animals alike discount the effective value of delayed rewards (e.g., Ainslie, 1975; Berns,
Laibson, & Loewenstein, 2007; Loewenstein, 1996). The longer the delay, the greater is the
discount – hence the term delay discounting. The drop-off for humans is much less steep
than it is for other species, for some of whom reward value may drop to zero in a matter of
seconds. For humans, future rewards may retain at least some value for decades, but some
discounting remains in force.
Effective value falls more steeply at first and then ever more gradually, yielding
something like a concave hyperbolic function. Thus, seemingly equal rewards – and
perhaps even equal Value�Expectancy products – exert different degrees of influence on
choices, depending on the anticipated delay for receiving the rewards.
Why should people place greater weight on an imminent reward than on the same
reward offered later? One possibility is the greater risk that something unforeseen could
interfere with actually collecting a farther-off reward, thereby lowering expectancy, but
Loewenstein (1996) has another explanation: that value is determined by “visceral”
influences, such as hunger, joy, and fear, which are stronger when a reward is imminent
than when it is far off in time. In fact, when one remains in the presence of a reward but
has seemingly decided for good reasons to put off enjoying it, one may experience a
preference reversal, in which one changes one’s mind and succumbs to the temptation to
enjoy it now rather than wait for the greater benefit (Ainslie, 1975; Berns et al., 2007;
Loewenstein, 1996).
This process presumably plays an important role in dieters eating their whole dessert
now; recovering alcoholics, at a bar with their friends, succumbing to drinking alcohol;
shoppers making an unplanned impulse purchase; and so on. This is probably a process of
the dopamine systems, especially the ventral striatum, which are activated strongly by
present and imminent incentives, overwhelming the inhibitory processes that emanate from
the prefrontal cortex (as described above).
There are important individual differences in the relative strengths of these brain
systems, which presumably account for some of what makes some people more resistant
than others to temptation. For example, Hariri et al. (2006) found that the strength of an
individual’s activity in the ventral striatum correlated significantly with the amount of that
person’s delay discounting of monetary rewards. (See also Correia, Butler, & Murphy,
Chapter 2, this volume, for further discussion of delay discounting, especially in regard to
individual differences.)
There are also some nonobvious situational influences. For example, after rating the
attractiveness of attractive women’s faces shown in photos, men had a steeper delay
discount for monetary incentives than before the rating task (Wilson &Daly, 2004). That is,
after the ratings, their preference for receiving immediate but smaller amounts of money
instead of later larger amounts increased. This effect was absent if they had been rating
18 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
photos of cars. Most likely, rating the faces stimulated the dopamine system, which
remained strengthened while these men chose their monetary rewards.
There are also some other factors that affect the operation of delay discounting. Berns
et al. (2007) propose two more of these: anticipation and representation.
Anticipation of a reward or punishment constitutes a mental state that may itself have
positive or negative value. For example, the tension of waiting for something may be
experienced as uncomfortable and could lead people to choose to receive it immediately
rather then later. On the other hand, there is the phenomenon of the birthday gift sequence,
in which people often prefer to receive the less valuable gifts first and the most valuable gift
last, presumably because the reverse order would lead to a succession of let-down feelings
as gift values diminish.
Representation – that is, how the delays are framed – also seems to affect the delay
discount rate. For example, drawing special attention to the passage of time in a delay
appears to steepen the discount rate (Berns et al., 2007).
Resource Depletion
Making choices and exercising self-control appear to draw on a common pool of mental
resources, a pool that can be depleted in a way analogous to physical fatigue from
continuous exertion (e.g., Vohs et al., 2008). Thus, having to make many choices in a
short period of time, or having to exercise self-control, weakens the ability to muster the
resources for subsequent choices or self-control, which degrades the quality of decision
making and leaves people vulnerable to succumbing to temptations that are contrary to their
long-term interests.
Satisficing
People are often willing to settle for good enough rather than insisting on getting the very
best alternative. This is called satisficing (Schwartz et al., 2002; Simon, 1956). Neverthe-
less, despite all of these qualifications, expected emotional gain remains the most reliable
determinant of goal choice.
Implications of the Value � Expectancy Framework for MotivationalCounseling
TheValue� Expectancy framework has a number of implications for motivational counsel-
ing. For example, a depressed or substance-abusing client may be forgoing potentially
satisfying nonsubstance incentives because of pessimism about being able to attain them.
Depression lowers incentive values (see Klinger, 1993, for a review), which makes most
incentives less attractive; and conflicts among goals (Michalak, Heidenreich, & Hoyer,
Chapter 4, this volume) reduce their attractiveness, which further discourages people
from pursuing them. Substance use competes with nonsubstance incentives and may be
chosen if thenonsubstance incentives are sufficiently unattractive (Cox&Klinger,Chapter 7,
this volume; Correia, Chapter 2, this volume; Glasner, Chapter 13, this volume). Sufficient
lack of interest in earthly satisfactions may dispose people toward suicide (e.g., King
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 19
et al., 2001; Klinger, 1977; Snyder, 1994; Williams, 1997). Here, motivational interven-
tions to revalue incentives and instill reality-based optimism can change the balance of
motivational structure and hence clients’ behavior (Cox & Klinger, Chapter 11, this
volume; de Jong-Meyer, Chapter 14, this volume; Jones & Young, Chapter 20, this
volume; McMurran, Sellen, & Campbell, Chapter 10, this volume; Roberson & Sluss,
Chapter 15, this volume; Schroer, Fuhrmann, & de Jong-Meyer, Chapter 12, this volume;
Snyder, 1994;Willutzki&Koban, Chapter 18, this volume). The various factors described
above that distort choices and other decisions, such as erroneous affective forecasting,
delay discounting, and resource depletion, provide important considerations for
counselors’ analyses of clients’ decisions and self-ratings.
Hereditary, Environmental, and Developmental Influenceson Goal Choices
There are, of course, many influences on the goals that people choose to pursue – influences
on what people come to value and expect. Learning experiences through exposure to
various incentives codetermine the emotional payoff expected of them. Self-perceptions of
physical and mental abilities, social status, and social support, as well as perceptions of
opportunities and social norms, codetermine expectancies. Some of these factors are
influenced by genetic endowment, and many of them change in the course of individual life
span development.
Systematic research on these questions is still relatively new. Working with a Finnish
sample of older female pairs of twin who listed their goals with the Personal Projects
Analysis (Little, 1983; see also Chapter 3 this volume), Salmela-Aro et al. (2009) reported
significant and substantial hereditary (additive genetic) effects – 44% to 53% of the
variance – on goals grouped as “health and functioning,” “independent living-related,” and
“close relationships.” Environmental influences predominated for goals grouped as
“physical activity-related,” “care of others,” and “cultural activities.”
There are also clear-cut developmental influences on choices of goals. For example, in a
10-year longitudinal study, during which people who were initially Finnish university
students characterized their goals on five occasions using the Personal Projects Analysis,
Salmela-Aro, Aunola, and Nurmi (2007) reported changes in patterns of goal striving as the
sample moved from emerging adulthood to young and middle adulthood, from being
students to employment, marriage, and parenthood. As one might expect, there were
declines in goals related to education, friendship, and travel, and increases in goals related
to work, family, and health.
HOW GOAL PURSUITS UNFOLD
The course of a goal pursuit can be thought of in control theory terms (Carver &
Scheier, 1998, 2009). There is a feedforward component, in that the goal sets up criteria
for the priority the individual will place on processing various future stimuli, as well as
some specifications as to how the individual will respond. Having decided to pursue a
particular goal, a person becomes sensitized to respond to stimuli associated with that goal
pursuit (Klinger, 1971, 1975, 1977, 1996). The stimuli – cues –may be external (e.g., words
or pictures related to the goal pursuit) or internal (e.g., thoughts or mental images related to
20 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
the goal pursuit). Sensitization means that encountering one of these cues increases the
likelihood of responding to them – with goal-directed actions if that seems appropriate or,
more often, withmental activity such as the thoughts andmental images of mindwandering.
People are more likely to recall such cues and to think about them than they are to recall and
think about other cues. Response is often extremely fast, making it clear that goal-related
cues receive high priority in cognitive processing.
There is also a feedback component to goal pursuits (e.g., Carver & Scheier, 1998, 2009;
Klinger, 1977). People continuously monitor the extent to which their thoughts and actions
are advancing them toward their goals. If the feedback is favorable, they proceed according
to plan; if the feedback is unfavorable, indicating that what they are doing is not helping as
much as planned, they may adjust their actions to obtain better results. An important part of
this feedback process – its evaluative component – is emotional. Positive emotions in
reaction to events signal that the goal pursuit is on course; negative emotions – especially
fear and depression – signal imminent or actual failures. This emotional component may
occur before or without the person consciously recognizing it (e.g., Winkielman &
Berridge, 2004; Winkielman, Berridge, & Wilbarger, 2005).
Effects on Attention, Memory, Recall, Dreams, and Action
The evidence for the effects of current concerns – of having a goal – on cognition is by now
very strong. Initial investigations of this model asked participants to listen to series of two
different but similar, simultaneous, 15-minute narratives on audiotape, one narrative to
each ear. At particular time points, they heard passages in one ear that were associated with
their own concerns and, simultaneously, passages going to the other ear that were related to
another’s concerns. Participants spent significantly more time listening to passages
associated with their own concerns than to passages associated with others’ concerns,
recalled those passages related to their own concerns much more often, and had thought
content that (by ratings of judges who were blind to anything else about these participants)
was much more often related to the passages associated with their own concerns than to the
other passages (Klinger, 1978). Hearing words associated with one’s current concerns
evokes electrodermal orienting responses (skin conductance changes in the palm of the
hand that indicate attentional shifts), and spontaneous electrodermal activity is dispropor-
tionately accompanied by current-concern-related thoughts (Nikula, Klinger, & Larson-
Gutman, 1993). For example, visual stimuli (human faces) that experimenters paired with
different sizes of monetary rewards led to greater attention to the heavily rewarded faces
(Raymond & O’Brien, 2009). Recent research using fMRI has shown much greater
activation of certain brain regions when people were exposed to pictures related to
common current concerns than when exposed to neutral pictures (see Figure 1.1; Ihssen,
Cox, Wiggett, Fadardi, & Linden, in press). Further evidence is described in subsequent
sections. These findings support the inference that having a goal, with its underlying current
concern, sensitizes people to respond with special attention to cues, whether to externally
encountered faces or words spoken, or to internal thoughts and images.
A side effect of focusing attention on goal-related cues is to narrow it at the expense of
missing other cues. For example, associating large monetary rewards with particular
nonsense-shaped stimuli, which presumably associates them with a goal of earning money,
bent subsequent attention toward them and away from poorly rewarded shapes for days
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 21
afterward (Della Libera & Chelazzi, 2009). Being in a positive mood associated with a
desire for something may also narrow attention in a more general way. For example,
showing people pictures of attractive desserts led them to focus more on the details of
subsequent stimuli (Navon letters) than showing them more neutral pictures (Harmon-
Jones & Gable, 2009).
Automaticity of the Effects
Subsequent studies of both waking and sleeping participants has indicated that the effects of
current concerns on cognitive processes are apparently nonconscious and automatic rather
than attributable to a conscious process, such as deliberately focusing on goal-related
stimuli. In fact, goal-related stimuli seem to impose an extra cognitive-processing load even
when they are peripheral and participants are consciously ignoring them; when asked to
judge as quickly as possible whether a string of letters on a screen constitutes a word, goal-
related distractor stimuli, even though supposedly irrelevant and unattended, slow the
lexical decisions about the target words (Young, 1987).
Similar effects have been shown in yet another cognitive process, Stroop and quasi-
Stroop procedures. In these procedures, people are presented with words on a screen and
instructed to name the font color of the words as quickly as possible. Participants in these
experiments name font colors more slowly when the words are related to one of their own
concerns than when they are not. This reaction time difference between own-concern-
related stimuli and neutral stimuli in naming font color is a measure of attentional bias
toward the concern-related stimuli.
The Stroop studies varied widely in cues and populations. Some presented cues for
concerns tailored to individual participants versus neutral material (Riemann, Amir, &
Louro, 1995; Riemann & McNally, 1995; Williams, Mathews, & McLeod, 1996). Others
Concern Pictures
Be
ta
Inferior
Frontal Gyrus
Precentral
Gyrus
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
Neutral Pictures
Figure 1.1 Mean beta values for goal-related and neutral pictures in the inferior frontal gyrusand precentral gyrus (after Ihssen, Cox, Wiggett, Fadardi, & Linden, in press. Reprinted withpermission ofOxfordUniversity Press, Inc (www.oup.com)). Beta values represent the degree ofactivation of a brain region when exposed to a picture, where activation is assessed throughfMRI measures of blood oxygenation levels in the region. Participants were adults whosealcohol consumption was light (21 units of alcohol per week or fewer for men, and 14 units perweek or fewer for women).
22 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
presented alcohol or other substance cues (versus neutral or general concern cues) to
participant groups that differed in their substance consumption patterns (Bauer &
Cox, 1998; Cox, Blount, & Rozak, 2000; Cox, Brown, & Rowlands, 2003; Cox, Fadardi,
& Pothos, 2006; Cox, Hogan, Kristian, & Race, 2002; Cox, Yeates, & Regan, 1999;
Fadardi, Ziaee, & Shamloo, 2009; Johnsen, Laberg, Cox, Vaksdal, & Hugdahl, 1994;
Sharma, Albery, & Cook, 2001; Stetter, Ackermann, Bizer, & Straube, 1995; Stormark,
Laberg, Nordby, & Hugdahl, 2000). One (Moskowitz, 2002) experimentally activated
common goals (and replicated the effect using a non-Stroop method), and at least one
presented food-related and neutral stimuli to obese or dieting individuals versus normal-
weight or underweight people (Fadardi, Moghadaszadeh, & Rezazadeh, 2009).
In the visual probe method, participants are shown successive, briefly presented pairs of
pictures, such as a picture of an alcoholic beverage on the left and another picture unrelated
to alcohol on the right. On each trial, after the pictures vanish, there is a screen with a dot (or
other, similar probe) in place of one of the pictures. The participant’s task is as quickly as
possible to press one of two response buttons to indicate whether the probe was on the right
or the left. Heavy drinkers, unlike light drinkers, pressed more quickly when the probe
replaced an alcohol-related picture than when it replaced an alternative picture (e.g.,
Schoenmakers et al., in press; Townshend & Duka, 2001), indicating perceptual preference
for the alcohol-related location. Opiate addicts displayed a similar probe bias toward
the drug location; in contrast, successfully treated addicts displayed a negative bias
(Constantinou et al., 2010).
Thus, results have been consistent in finding attentional biases toward concern-related
content (or substance-related content in the case of heavy users). The slower color naming
for concern-related Stroop stimuli than for neutral stimuli suggests that the brain gives
processing priority to the concern-related features of the stimuli and processes other
features such as color later.
Even when people are asleep, concern-related stimuli influence dream content much
more reliably than do other stimuli (Hoelscher, Klinger, & Barta, 1981; Nikles, Brecht,
Klinger, & Bursell, 1998). Taken together, these results confirm that the effects of concern-
related cues on cognitive processing are substantially automatic and probably inexorable.
Automatic Linkages of Goals to Action
When a goal-related cue activates the goal pursuit, it also activates the course of action
habitually associated with it. For example, after a reminder for attending a lecture, students
who used bicycles to travel to lectures responded faster to bicycling-related cues than when
not reminded of this goal (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000). Chapter 6 (this volume) discusses
some of the implications of the link between goals and actions (or cognitions about actions)
for alcohol consumption in habitual drinkers.
Furthermore, just encountering something that is at odds with a goal potentiates ideas of
acts to rectify the discrepancy. For example, if a person has the goal of looking neat, reading
“The shoes you put on look dirty” makes the concept of “polish” much likelier to come to
mind than does reading a similar sentence (“The shoes you put on have laces”) that is
consistent with the goal (Custers & Aarts, 2007, p. 626). Evidence adduced in the next
paragraph suggests that potentiating the cognitive representation of action also makes the
action itself more likely to occur.
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 23
Implicit Effects on Goal Striving
Goal-related cues, even implicit, nonconscious ones, also appear to exert automatic effects
on goal-directed actions. A series of investigations (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barn-
dollar, & Tr€otschel, 2001; Chartrand & Bargh, 1996, 2002; Pessiglione et al., 2007) has
shown that exposing participants to priming cues related to a particular goal influences how
they perform on subsequent laboratory tasks. For example, when participants performed a
first task that exposed them to unobtrusively embedded words related to achievement
(versus receiving achievement-unrelated words), they performed better on a different
second task, persisted longer, and were more likely to resume it if interrupted (Bargh
et al., 2001). This was true even though no participant knew the true connection between the
first and second tasks, meaning that the effect was probably nonconscious and in this sense
automatic. Furthermore, the priming effect was even greater if acting on it was delayed for 5
minutes, which suggests that the effect was truly motivational rather than just associative
(Bargh et al., 2001; Laran, 2010, Study 5). Priming cues related to cooperation had a similar
effect on participants’ cooperative behavior (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996). Thus, noncon-
scious cues can affect performance in ways similar to the established effects of setting
conscious performance goals for oneself (e.g., Locke, 1968, 2001).
Such implicit cues affect not only the probability of acting on a goal but also the amount
of effort exerted on it. Pessiglione et al. (2007) exposed people to cues related to the amount
of money they would receive for squeezing hard on a handgrip. As expected, priming larger
rewards led to harder squeezes than priming smaller rewards, even when the reward
information was subliminal. Using fMRI, these investigators found the brain’s ventral
pallidum involved in motivating the force of the squeeze.
These kinds of effects appear to operate even when adoption of the goal was not entirely
conscious (Ferguson et al., 2008 and Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010, recently reviewed the
relationship of goal striving to consciousness). In fact, in the short term, goals can be
created or enhanced by pairing an activity that was previously not a goal for a person, such
as solving puzzles or squeezing a handgrip, with a stimulus that carries positive valence.
Ordinarily, to prime a goal successfully requires that an appetitive (positive) goal already
have an association with positive affect, but the associative pairing described by Aarts and
colleagues (Aarts, Custers, & Holland, 2007; Aarts, Custers, & Marien, 2008; Aarts,
Custers, & Veltkamp, 2008) instates a similar motivational tendency, at least until it is
disrupted by some later mental activity. For example, pairing subliminally presented words
related to “doing puzzles” with positively evaluated words leads people subsequently to
overestimate the size of a picture of a puzzle (Aarts, Custers, & Veltkamp, 2008), which is
one indication that the puzzle has just acquired enhanced value.When people are instructed
to squeeze a handgrip after having been exposed to subliminal “force” stimuli, they squeeze
harder if the stimuli are followed by supraliminal, positively evaluated words than if the
subsequent words were neutral (Aarts, Custers, & Marien, 2008). Furthermore, motivation
toward an already positively valued goal can be reduced by a similar pairing with a
negatively valued stimulus (Aarts et al., 2007).
For purposes of motivational counseling (see also Chapter 11, this volume), these clear
effects of a person’s context on goal pursuit have a number of implications. Changing a
person’s motivation – the kinds of goals the person chooses and the person’s manner of
pursuing them – requires the counselor’s attention to the kinds of communications to which
24 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
the person is exposed. This could involve family, friendship, school, religious, and work
settings and other social contexts, including recreational contexts such as sports settings
and bars.
Emotions and Attentional Processing
A number of indications from these and other data (e.g., Klinger, Barta, &Maxeiner, 1980)
suggest that a critical property of current concerns is to dispose individuals to respond
emotionally to cues that are associated with corresponding goal pursuits. The emotional
response then induces cognitive processing at a number of levels, sometimes ending with
conscious thought. Because this hypothesis is hard to test with naturally occurring thought
flow, it was tested with effects on attention, recall, and physiological variables.
In a reaction time experiment (Schneider, 1987), emotionally evocative cues (which
participants had been instructed to ignore) slowed choice reaction time similarly to
Young’s (1987) current-concern-related words. Furthermore, emotionally arousing dis-
tractors slowed Schneider’s high scorers on the Affective Intensity Measure (Larsen &
Diener, 1987) significantly more than other participants.
Emotions and Recall
Words rated by participants as either relatively emotionally arousing or concern-related
were later recalled significantly more often than other words (Bock & Klinger, 1986).
Words’ concern relatedness and emotional arousal value were strongly intercorrelated.
Partialing emotionality and concern relatedness of words out of each other suggested that
much of the effect of current concerns on recall is mediated by concern-potentiated
emotional responses. This interpretation is consistent with other findings that people
experience more emotion in relation to those autobiographical memories that are most
closely associated with current goal pursuits and longer-term personal strivings (Singer &
Salovey, 1993). Chemically impairing the ability to respond emotionally reduces recall of
emotionally toned stimuli (Cahill, Prins, Weber, & McGaugh, 1994).
These findings help to make sense of some other results in the literature, in which
emotionally arousing stimuli speed performance when they are central to a task and slow it
down when they are distractors (see Klinger, 1996, for a review). Close examination of
procedures used in such studies suggests that people respond to cues as emotionally
arousing insofar as the cues are related to current concerns. Thus, patients suffering from
social phobias attend differentially more to socially threatening stimuli than to physically
threatening ones, whereas people fearful of physical harm attend to the latter more than the
former (Mogg, Mathews, & Eysenck, 1992; Williams et al., 1996).
Conclusion
Having a goal sensitizes a person to respond to goal-related cues, thus drawing the
individual’s perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, and actions back to the goal pursuit.
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 25
Furthermore, the person’s emotional reactions, whether of joy, fear, anger, or sadness,
depend substantially on what is happening to the individual’s goal pursuits.
Taken together, these effects mold people’s inner worlds around their individual sets of
goals. If one placed two individuals into an identical objective world but with different sets
of current concerns, they would experience quite different subjective worlds. What they
would notice, recall, and think would be quite different; they would react with different
emotions; and they would correspondingly act quite differently, which in turn would result
in creating for them different objective circumstances.
These connections between goals, on the one hand, and perception, cognition, emotion,
and action, on the other, are important points to remember in providing counseling. Apart
from organic disorders, such as psychosis and brain damage, troublesome cognitions,
emotions, and actions are tied to troubled goal pursuits.Whether the problem is rumination,
boredom, depression, anxiety, or substance abuse, effective intervention requires examin-
ing and intervening in the related goal pursuits and in the cognitive and emotional
phenomena they engender.
Reciprocal Effects of Attention and Mindwandering on Goal Pursuits
The influences operating between goals and cognitions are a two-way street. Goal-related
cognitions feed back into the self-regulation of goal pursuits. Noticing, remembering, and
thinking about one’s goals act both as a reminder of one’s agenda and as a continuing
inducement to pursue them. When one’s goals are ambivalent, as in trying to give up
smoking or alcohol use even as these continue to be attractive, goal-related cognitions can
get in the way of changing behavior.
Retraining Attention
New research is demonstrating that retraining attention can reduce these effects and thereby
facilitate reducing substance use and social phobia. Alcohol misuse is an example of having
a positive, appetitive goal, albeit a destructive one, and social phobia is an example of an
avoidance or escape goal, albeit an exaggerated, unnecessary one. Both kinds of goals
foster corresponding attentional biases, and retraining attention to reduce those biases feeds
back into action to reduce or eliminate those goal pursuits. Thus, simple laboratory
exercises based on the alcohol Stroop procedure in the Alcohol Attention-Control Training
Program help heavy drinkers to disattend from alcohol cues, with both reduced attentional
bias toward alcohol cues and reduced alcohol use over a 3-month follow-up (Fadardi &
Cox, 2009; Fadardi, Shamloo, and Cox, Chapter 16, this volume).
Adaptations of the visual probe (also called a dot probe) method have shown similar
effects. Retraining consists of challenging participants to reduce their reaction time to
probes following nonalcohol stimuli, thus breaking the bias toward alcohol stimuli. Using
this method, heavy-drinking inpatients reduced their attention to alcohol-related stimuli
and remained sober longer than other patients (Schoenmakers, et al., in press). In another
retraining adaptation of the visual probe method, people who suffered from social phobia
came to disattend from threatening faces and reduced their clinical symptoms of social
phobia over a 4-month follow-up (Amir et al., 2009).
26 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
Functions of Mindwandering
Research has repeatedly shown that people’s spontaneous thoughts, as in mindwandering,
are associated with their goals and current concerns (Klinger, 1978; Klinger et al., 1980).
Mindwandering is a virtually universal phenomenon that is very hard to suppress
completely. Along with other forms of daydreaming, it also appears to consume nearly
half of an average person’s waking hours (Klinger & Cox, 1987–1988).
Such time-intensive activity must serve important functions because otherwise, in the
course of evolution, natural selection would have selected against it. Now there is strong
evidence that mindwandering is associated with activity in specific brain regions that had
earlier been identified and labeled as the brain’s default network (Christoff, Gordon,
Smallwood, Smith, & Schooler, 2009; Mason et al., 2007) – that is, the baseline state to
which the brain returns when not engaged in work or other operant activity (Klinger, 1971).
The association of this baseline, default state with mindwandering strongly suggests that
the brain has evolved to spontaneously fill spare capacity with thoughts that are associated
with goals, even when the person is not at the moment working toward them. Because the
content of these thoughts tends to rotate among a person’s goals, this system can keep
people’s larger agendas fresh in their minds. It can remind them of future things they may
need to do about their goals, scrutinize past episodes, and rehearse future episodes related to
these goals – a spontaneous reminder and a learning and discovery process to optimize and
organize goal pursuits.
Other Influences on Goal Pursuits
A number of variables besides those already described also affect the level and quality of
the motivation to pursue a goal. These and other aspects of motivated behavior are taken
into account in the techniques for assessing motivation presented in Chapter 8.
Approach versus Avoidance Goals
One such variable is the valence of the desired goal object – whether it is positive or
negative (Elliot, 2008). Positive and negative goals involve different neural systems for,
respectively, approach and avoidance (e.g., Cacioppo et al., 1999; Carver & Scheier, 1998;
Watson et al., 1999). These different systems are associated with different effects on
emotion, motivation, and health. Thus, people striving to achieve positive (approach)
goals such as gaining a job promotion or better health are more likely to do so for the
intrinsic value of the goal (Elliot & Harackiewicz, 1996) and less likely to experience
negative feelings, poor health, or a negative outlook on themselves than people who are
motivated more by a desire to avoid negative consequences (avoidance goals), as in
striving not to be fired, not to become ill, or to rid oneself of negative incentives by which
one feels burdened, such as a poor marriage or loud neighbors (Elliot & Church, 2002;
Elliot & Sheldon, 1998).
However, these deleterious effects of avoidance goals may apply more to individuals
with an independent outlook (which, on average, includes Americans and otherWesterners)
than to people with an interdependent outlook, such as, on average, traditional residents of
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 27
Asian countries (Elliot, Chirkov, Kim, & Sheldon, 2001). This cultural difference aside, it
may be beneficial for motivational counselors to help clients reframe their avoidance goals
into approach terms. For example, avoiding illness can be reframed as maintaining health;
avoiding arguments with one’s spouse can be reframed as improving one’s marital
relationship (see also Cox & Klinger, Chapter 11, this volume; Elliot & Church, 2002;
Willutzki & Koban, Chapter 18, this volume).
Higgins (1997, 2009) labels approach goals as promotion or ideal goals and avoidance
goals as prevention or ought (obligatory) goals. The person’s state is labeled respectively as
having a promotion focus or a prevention focus. These concepts have led to an extensive line
of research that has associated different emotions with the two orientations; striving for
promotion goals is associated with eagerness and cheerfulness or, in the event of setbacks,
dejection, whereas striving for ought goals is associated with quiescence and vigilance or,
in the event of setbacks, agitation or anxiety (e.g., Higgins, Shah, & Friedman, 1997). The
same objective goal may be the subject of either focus, depending on the individual’s
momentary orientation; a person is likely to orient differently with different goals, and
people differ with regard to their typical orientation.
Having one or the other of these foci – promotion or prevention – has numerous
implications, such as which kind of persuasion will work best with an individual, which
manner of goal striving will prove most efficient, or the value placed on a given
incentive. Persuasion, performance, and valuation will be higher when the nature of the
persuasive message, method used to perform a task, or incentive fits the individual’s
momentary regulatory focus on promotion or prevention. Higgins (2009) calls this
regulatory fit.
There are important individual differences in the strength of the two hypothetical
approach and avoidance systems. Some individuals respond more readily to approach
goals, are more likely to experience positive emotions, and in these senses are said to be
more reward dependent (e.g., Cloninger, Svrakic, & Przybeck, 1993) or reward sensitive, a
characteristic that may be part of the essence of extraversion (Lucas, Diener, Grob, Suh, &
Shao, 2000). This difference among individuals is reflected in the different values they
place on the same objective incentives and hence in their different choices of goals and
other decisions.
“Fundamental Motives” Underlying Goal Pursuits
The kinds of goal-related cognitions and actions that cues associated with goals
elicit depend on which “fundamental motives” underlie the goal pursuit – motives such
as affiliation, self-protection, social status, or acquiring a mate (Kenrick, Neuberg,
Griskevicius, Becker, & Schaller, 2010). Consistent with evolutionary theories of behavior,
these different motives engender attention to different kinds of cues, and the thoughts and
actions that follow are also different. Thus, for example, when harboring a mating motive
(and, presumably, having a mating goal), men are likelier than otherwise to overinterpret
the sexual arousal conveyed by attractive female faces (Maner et al., 2005). Similarly,
people with implicit power motives attend more to faces that signal low power, but those
with implicit affiliation motives attend more to faces that signal rejection or acceptance
(Schultheiss & Hale, 2007).
28 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
Time Frame
The time course of the goal pursuit is another important consideration. People are more
strongly motivated when pursuing goals (or subgoals) that are achievable in the relatively
near future, rather than having to wait far into the future to gain a sense of accomplishment
(Miller, 1944). Breaking long-term goal pursuits into a tangible series of attainable nearer-
term subgoal pursuits may improve motivation for staying on course, especially when the
overall goal also stays in focus (Fishbach, Dhar, & Zhang, 2006; Roberson & Sluss,
Chapter 15, this volume).
Breaking longer-term goals into subgoals may help maintain motivation because of the
phenomenon of delay discounting, described in the “Delay Discounting” section of this
chapter. That is, the farther away an incentive is in the future, the less it is likely to be
preferred. Put another way, given a choice between a near-term goal and a distant one, the
value placed on the distant goal must be greater than the value placed on the near-term goal
in order for the distant goal to be preferred (e.g., Ainslie, 1975; Loewenstein, 1996).
Because subgoals are by definition nearer in time, they are likely to be valued more highly
(other things equal) than a distant outcome.
Goal Conflicts and Shielding
Yet another consideration is the impact that pursuing one goal will have on one’s other goals
(see also Michalak, Heidenreich, & Hoyer, Chapter 4, this volume). A person’s goals may
facilitate or may conflict with one another. One can think of goal conflicts on at least two
levels: conflict in a given situation and conflict in the purposes themselves.
When a person is physically in the act of pursuing one goal, it would obviously be
disruptive to try at the same time to reach another goal with actions that are incompatible
with the first goal. That is why hungry students or employees who are deeply involved in a
class or a project ignore their hunger until they come to a logical stopping point rather than
racing in the direction of food at the first hunger pang. Indeed, at particular moments in
time, pursuing a goal inhibits responsivity to memories and cues related to other goals that
might conflict with the pursuit (e.g., Laran & Janiszewski, 2009; McCulloch, Aarts, Fujita,
& Bargh, 2008; Shah, Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2002) and reduces the perceived value of a
competing reward, tempting though it might be, as in a serious student’s choice of an
academic textbook rather than a leisure DVD (Fishbach & Zhang, 2008). These ways of
resolving short-term conflicts are normal, healthy, and automatic ways of protecting the
coherence of goal-directed actions. In effect, having a goal instates a tendency to shield it
from competing pursuits that might interfere with it. Once the goal has been attained, the
inhibition of other goal pursuits ends (Laran, 2010).
Furthermore, facing a temptation (such as partying) that conflicts with a higher priority
goal (such as doing well in one’s studies) activates the higher priority goal (Fishbach,
Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2003) and strengthens avoiding the temptation (Fishbach &
Shah, 2006). A number of attributes of goals and persons influence the extent to which one
goal inhibits responsivity to another (Shah et al., 2002). This inhibition is greater insofar as
the person is committed to the inhibiting goal, is generally tenacious in pursuing goals, is in
an agitated but nondepressed state, and has a high need for closure. Inhibition is also greater
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 29
when the competing goal is a reasonable substitute for the inhibiting goal (but less when the
competing goal facilitates attaining the inhibiting goal), and inhibition is greater when the
inhibiting goals are viewed, in Higgins’s (1997, 2009) sense, as obligatory (preventive)
rather than simply ideal (promotional).
The more wrenching kind of conflict arises when attaining one important, longer-term
goal inherently interferes with the achievement of another one. For example, finding one’s
best job opportunity in one community when a romantic partner is tied to a different, distant
one is bound to produce distress. The resulting conflict may dampen the motivation to
achieve either goal. Thus, conflicts between family and work goals are associated with
reduced work satisfaction (Wiese & Salmela-Aro, 2008). Peoplewith more than an average
number of such conflicts experience more negative affect and poorer health (Emmons &
King, 1988). Such goal conflicts are necessarily an important target of counseling
interventions.
Specificity of Intentions
People vary in regard to how concretely they imagine their goal pursuits. Sometimes they
focus mainly on the end result – what it will be like and how it will feel to achieve the goal.
Musing about the consummation of a romantic relationship or of a business deal can both be
pleasant experiences. However, people are more likely to carry out their intended goal
pursuits if they also imagine the steps necessary to reach their goals (e.g., Brandst€atter,Lengfelder, & Gollwitzer, 2001; Gollwitzer, 1999; Snyder, 1994) and take into account the
difficulties before them (Oettingen, Pak, & Schnetter, 2001), especially if the goals also fit
well with the individual’s core values (Koestner, Lekes, Powers, & Chicoine, 2002).
Counseling interventions can be targeted toward helping clients to form adequate con-
ceptions of their goal pursuits so as to improve the quality of their tactics for attaining their
goals (Cox & Klinger, Chapter 11, this volume).
HOW GOAL PURSUITS END
All goal pursuits must end, whether by reaching the goal or by relinquishing it. Attaining a
goal, especially an important goal that has many ramifications for one’s future life,
generally evokes some combination of joy, gratification, contentment, and pride. One
marries, obtains a college degree, gets a desired job, buys a lovely house, or finds spiritual
fulfillment. Attaining the goal ends the pursuit and deactivates the current concern. It is
clearly the nice way for goal pursuits to end.
Unfortunately, life is rarely so kind as to spare people at least some failures. The
relationship ends or the partner dies, the job goes to someone else, or the stock market
collapses and takes one’s savings with it. Obstacles to goal pursuits unleash a regular
sequence of events, an incentive–disengagement cycle (Klinger, 1975, 1977). When the
obstacle first arises, the effect is to invigorate goal-directed action. One tries harder,
rethinks, tries alternatives, and seeks help. If these tactics fail, invigoration turns to anger
and possibly aggression. If this also fails to avert the obstacle, the individual experiences a
souring of mood that can range from disappointment to depression. Depression is regularly
associated with blocked goal pursuits (Klinger, 1975, 1977; e.g., Nurmi, Salmela-Aro, &
30 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
Aunola, 2009). There is often a reduced interest in other pursuits (Klinger, 1993), lassitude,
and fatigue. The normal attentional bias toward cues related to one’s goals weakens
(Fadardi &Bagherinejad, 2010). In major depression, people have trouble reducing activity
in their brains’ default network (Sheline et al., 2009), which is associated with mind-
wandering and self-referential content. This failure to regulate the default network would
be expected to hinder focusing one’s attention on work; reduced ability to concentrate is a
frequently reported attribute of depression.
Eventually, the individual recovers from the failure or loss and returns to baseline levels
of mood and activity. This may take fromminutes to years, depending on the individual and
the scale and ramifications of the failure.
Although there are wide variations in the strength of these effects, they appear nearly
universal, even when there is no apparent point to them. Thus, when someone learns that a
loved one has unexpectedly died, the first reaction is often disbelief, checking on the
accuracy of the report and ascertaining that nothing can be done. This is often followed by
anger and blame toward the departed, caretakers, medical personnel, relatives, or oneself.
Then come the grieving and eventually, normally, the recovery.
Before that recovery, the depth of the depression depends in part on the individual’s
implicit valuation of the goal (Schultheiss et al., 2008), and the relative prominence of the
various symptoms of depression depends on what gave rise to them (Keller &Nesse, 2006).
Thus, failed efforts to attain a goal gave rise most prominently to guilt, rumination, fatigue,
and pessimism, whereas social losses gave rise most prominently to crying, sadness, and a
desire for social support.
When the cycle has run its course, the person is largely freed to go on to other things. The
failed goal ceases to be a goal. However, its representation in the brain remains.
Disengagement is almost certainly not a process of forgetting or deleting the goal but
rather one of inhibiting responses to all but the most central cues associated with it. The
failure or loss lives on, even though deeply suppressed. Thus, groups of parents who have
lost children continue to report effects of the loss at follow–ups of 4 to more than 18 years
(Lehman,Wortman, &Williams, 1987;Murphy, Johnson, Chung, &Beaton, 2003; Rogers,
Floyd, Seltzer, Greenberg, & Hong, 2008).
Very likely, the reaction to failure or loss is a form of extinction, which results from
withholding reward that the animal had previously regularly experienced, and also leads
to a cycle of invigoration and depressed activity followed by recovery (e.g., Klinger,
Barta, & Kemble, 1974; Lewis, Sullivan, Ramsay, & Alessandri, 1992). Furthermore, the
goal striving is rapidly reinstated when the reward is again made available (e.g.,
Nakajima, Tanaka, Urushihara, & Imada, 2000; Toyomitsu, Nishijo, Uwano, Kuratsu,
& Ono, 2002), suggesting that the previous extinction of response was by inhibition rather
than deletion.
Faced with intractable problems affecting one’s health and finances, one can resort to
three major kinds of approaches to improve one’s sense of well-being: persisting in
pursuing one’s goals, reappraising what the problems mean to one, and lowering one’s
aspirations (Wrosch, Heckhausen, & Lachman, 2000). These are differentially successful
depending on one’s circumstances. Persistence works best on average for improving well-
being in young adulthood but less in old age, positive reappraisal works better in middle
and old age, and lowering aspirations is associated with reduced well-being in all three
age groups (Wrosch et al., 2000), as one would expect from incentive–disengagement
theory.
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 31
Incentive–disengagement theory also predicted that failure to let go of failed goals can
protract the depressed phase of the disengagement cycle (Klinger, 1975, 1977), a
hypothesis that is now supported by empirical evidence in regard to childbearing. German
women who had passed the biological deadline for bearing children and had disengaged
from that goal (as measured by recall of relevant sentences) scored higher on measures
of well-being than women who had disengaged less well (Heckhausen, Wrosch, &
Fleeson, 2001). Finnish women who received unsuccessful fertility treatments suffered
more depression than did those who received successful treatments. Six months after the
last treatment, those unsuccessfully treated women who continued to place importance on
having a child remained depressed longer than those who let go of this goal (Salmela-Aro
& Suikkari, 2008). Failure to disengage from unattainable goals exacerbates perceived
stress and continuing intrusive thoughts related to the lost goal (Wrosch, Scheier, Miller,
Schulz, & Carver, 2003). It is also associated with self-reported depression, reduced life
satisfaction, and poorer physical health, but reengaging with alternative goals counters
these effects on common-cold symptoms and life satisfaction (Wrosch, Miller, Scheier,
Schulz, & Carver, 2007). For older adults, moreover, reaping the emotional benefits of
successful disengagement may depend on their reengaging with other goals (Wrosch
et al., 2003).
Reengaging with alternative goals may thus be even more important in promoting well-
being than disengaging from lost goals. Young adults with a high ability to reengage
reported fewer intrusive thoughts, less stress, and a greater sense of mastery and purpose in
life (Wrosch et al., 2003). Similarly, older adults’ health problems were associated with
depression unless these individuals were pursuing goals to overcome them (Wrosch,
Schulz, Miller, Lupien, & Dunne, 2007).
Similarly, in another study of childless women, long-held, intensewishes for a child were
associated with intense feelings of longing for a child, a longing that often persisted past the
point at which the person expected to be able to attain it (Kotter-Gr€uhn, Scheibe,
Blanchard-Fields, & Baltes, 2009). Such disappointed longings affect personal well-being,
but in this study the longing for a child was no longer related to the well-being of those
women who had successfully disengaged from the childbearing goal and reengaged with
other goals.
These concepts of incentive–disengagement and extinction are important considerations
in counseling depressed clients. Within limits, depression is a normal reaction to failure and
loss. Individuals characterized by strong emotional responsiveness and by a weak ability to
downregulate negative affect are particularly more likely to experience psychopathological
depression (Kuhl, 2000, 2001; see also Alsleben & Kuhl, Chapter 5, this volume).
Nevertheless, in treating depression it would appear to remain crucial for counselors and
psychotherapists to work with the client’s motivational structure, along with applying other
cognitive and interpersonal approaches (e.g., Beck, Rush, & Emery, 1979; Fadardi &
Bagherinejad, 2010; Teasdale et al., 2000). Chapters 11 to 25 of this volume describe the
various motivational-counseling techniques.
MOTIVATIONAL STRUCTURE
Motivational structure refers to the individual’s pattern of goal striving. For example,
given a choice between a little money now or much more money much later, substance
32 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
abusers are likely to pick the smaller amount now (Bickel & Marsch, 2001). However,
there are also many other dimensions of motivational structure that grew out of current-
concerns theory and are assessed using variants of the Motivational Structure Question-
naire (MSQ) or the Personal Concerns Inventory (PCI). These are described more fully,
including their factor structure, reliability, and validity, in Chapters 7 and 8 of this
volume.
In brief, respondents first list their current goals and then rate each goal on a series of
rating scales. The pattern of content and ratings reflects important elements of the
individual’s motivational structure. The scales include such things as how a person frames
each goal (e.g., positive/appetitive or negative/aversive), the person’s level of commitment
to pursuing it, the emotional payoff anticipated from reaching it or failing to reach it,
optimism about reaching it, and time frame. The latter variables correspond to value and
expectancy dimensions plus time frame.
Some of these motivational patterns are presumably more adaptive than others, permit-
ting people to attain their valued goals and to stay out of trouble. Factor analyses of MSQ
and PCI scores have repeatedly arrived at a factor that one might call adaptive motivation.
The scales that load on it are typically Commitment, Joy Anticipated at Success, Sorrow
Anticipated at Failure, and optimism about succeeding. Putting this another way, this factor
reflects the richness and attainability of the individual’s set of goals, a pattern associated
with relatively high well-being and the sense that one’s life is meaningful (Klinger, in press;
Chapter 8, this volume) and with pursuing specific goals of achievement and power
(Stuchl�ıkov�a & Klinger, 2010).
Evidence is accumulating that adaptive motivational structure relates to important
behavioral patterns. Not only is it inversely related to alcohol and substance use, but also
it fully mediates their relationship to resilience (Fadardi, Azad, & Nemati, in press), sense
of control, and intrinsic motivation (Shamloo & Cox, 2010). However, its relation to such
use is not necessarily across the board. For example (Cox, Schippers, et al., 2002), adaptive
motivation of people who had encountered few problems as a result of drinking alcohol was
unrelated to the amount of alcohol that they habitually consumed. People who have
encountered few problems as a result of drinking have no reason to modify their drinking
patterns – drinking doesn’t matter. However, for the others, the more such problems they
encountered, such as with their work, their families, and the police, the more strongly
adaptive motivational structure was associated with reduced drinking (see also Chapter 8,
this volume).
Thus, successful self-regulation depends on motivational structure, but only insofar as
what one is regulatingmatters. Healthymotivational structuremeans that a person has a rich
assortment of other life goals – rewarding goals – besides, for example, drinking alcohol.
INCENTIVES, GOALS, WELL-BEING, AND THE SENSETHAT ONE’S LIFE IS MEANINGFUL
Perhaps the broadest measure of an individual’s subjective success in life is the person’s
global sense of well-being (Diener, 1984; Diener, Scollon, Oishi, Dzokoto, & Suh, 2009).
Another, closely correlated measure (Wong, in press, Chapter 19, this volume) is the sense
that one’s life is meaningful. Both are closely related to having a range of satisfying
personal goals and making reasonable progress toward attaining them (Brunstein, 1993;
MOTIVATION AND THE THEORY OF CURRENT CONCERNS 33
Diener & Fujita, 1995; Klinger, 1977, in press) – goals such as finding and maintaining
close relationships (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Myers, 1999) and satisfaction with one’s
work (Roberson, 1989; Roberson&Sluss, Chapter 15, this volume;Warr, 1999). Having a
sense of interpersonal support in one’s goal pursuits enhances well-being; a sense of
others hindering one’s goal pursuits detracts from well-being (Palys & Little, 1983).
When people must disengage from an unattainable goal, their well-being and sense of
having purpose depend to a large degree on their ability to reengage with other goals
(Wrosch et al., 2003).
Similarly, a long-term longitudinal study (Halisch & Geppert, 2001) found that life
satisfaction and well-being depend on having goals that are attainable, and this is especially
true for people highly committed to them. Mood was lower in the absence of affiliative
activity and, for men, of power-related activity. Thrash, Elliot, Maruskin, and Cassidy
(2010, Study 4) found morning experiences of inspiration to have a substantial relationship
with levels of well-being later that day, but this was partly mediated by feeling a sense of
purpose on that day – that is, meaningfulness, which arises from engagement with
attainable goals, determined the contribution of inspiration to well-being. By contrast,
objective indices of personal resources and circumstances, such as income, education, and
marital status, are correlated rather modestly with subjective well-being (Diener &
Fujita, 1995).
However, not all personal goals carry equal weight in well-being. For example, progress
on goals imposed by others or suggested by social pressures boost subjective well-being
less than goals that correspond to one’s individual core values (Baumann, Kaschel,
et al., 2005; Brunstein et al., 1998; Sheldon & Elliot, 1999). This suggests a point of
departure for psychological intervention: assessing the self-concordance of a client’s goals
and modifying or eliminating those at variance with the client’s core values.
There are also other important factors that moderate the relation of goal pursuits to
subjective well-being. For example, some individuals (state-oriented) have more difficulty
than other people in distinguishing self-chosen goals from goals suggested by others (Kuhl
& Kaz�en, 1994; see also Alsleben & Kuhl, Chapter 5, this volume). Under pressure, they
may be less able to discern their own values and interests in a situation and hence strive for
less fulfilling goals. Activation of people’s more analytic left cerebral hemisphere
apparently exacerbates this kind of confusion, whereas activation of the more holistic
right hemisphere reduces it (Baumann, Kuhl, & Kaz�en, 2005). It also crops up more after
induced stress and elevated levels of cortisol, a hormonal response to stress (Quirin, Koole,
Bauman, Kaz�en, & Kuhl, 2009). Insofar as pursuing the assigned goals is less satisfying
than pursuing genuinely self-chosen goals, this kind of confusion can be expected to reduce
overall well-being.
Thus, situational and individual differences in emotional response dispositions, partially
described in this chapter, can determine the extent to which people pursue goals and the
extent to which they derive satisfaction from them. These findings, too, suggest possible
foci for psychological intervention.
A substantial proportion of the variance in subjectivewell-being can be accounted for by
genetics (Lykken, 1999;Lykken&Tellegen, 1996). The genetic factors may, however, exert
some of their effect through their influence on an individual’s readiness to commit to
positive goals and to reap the emotional gain from attaining them. Thus, it would be
mistaken to conclude that heritability prevents intervention from improving an individual’s
motivational structure and, with it, subjective well-being. Genes provide an input whose
34 HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELING
ultimate results depend on their interaction with the environment. Intervention can be part
of that environment.
A substantial literature relates subjective well-being and the sense that one’s life is
meaningful to psychopathology and substance use (Baumeister, 1991;Cox&Klinger, 1988,
Chapter 6, this volume; Glasner, Chapter 13, this volume; Klinger, 1977, in press; Wong, in
press, Chapter 19, this volume). For example, a substantial student sample produced a
correlation of �.46 between a rating of their lives’ meaningfulness and depression scores
(Klinger, 1977). In two samples of adolescents and young adults, Newcomb and Har-
low (1986) found low-order but significant relationships between substance use and lacking
direction, plans, or solutions. In a comparison of Czech students and demographically rather
similarnonstudentalcoholicpatients (Man,Stuchl�ıkov�a,&Klinger,1998), theclinicalgroup
listed 40% fewer goals, responded as if they needed richer incentives to form strong
commitments to goal striving, displayedmarginally less average commitment to their goals,
and, after other variables had been partialed out, expressed less ability to influence the course
of goal attainment. These correlational findings cannot establish cause and effect, but, when
they are combined with experimental studies of extinction, loss, and failure, it seems likely
that goal pursuits affect moods and at least some forms of psychopathology.
Accordingly, efforts tomodify clients’ motivational structure form a promising avenue to
clinical effectiveness with a variety of disorders and discontents. These methods form the
focus of Parts III and IV of this volume.
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