The final, common pathway to alcohol use is motivational. A person decides consciously or unconsciously to consume or not to consume any particular drink of alcohol according to whether or not he or she expects that the positive affective consequences of drinking will outweigh those of not drinking. Various factors (e.g., past experiences with drinking, current life situation) help to form expectations of affective change from drinking, these factors always modulated by a person's neurochemical reactivity to alcohol. Such major influences include the person's current nonchemical incentives and the prospect of acquiring new positive incentives and removing current negative incentives. Our motivational counseling technique uses nonchemical goals and incentives to help the alcoholic develop a satisfying life without the necessity of alcohol. The technique first assesses the alcoholic's motivational structure and then seeks to modify it through a multicomponent counseling procedure. The counseling technique is one example of the heuristic value of the motivational model. This article presents a motivational formulation of alcohol use. The formulation is intended to incorporate advances made in understanding the inheritable constitutional factors (e.g., Goodwin, in press; Schuckit, Li, Cloninger, & Deitrich, 1985) and the appetitive systems (T. B. Baker, Morse, & Sherman, 1987) in alcohol-related behavior, and also the array of other motivational factors that are increasingly recognized to play decisive roles in understanding and treating addictive behavior patterns (e.g., Klinger, 1977;Marlatt & Gordon, 1985;Miller, 1985). The particular benefit of this formulation is to place alcoholic behavior in the context of contemporary theory of motivation and emotion, as they relate both to alcohol use in the narrow sense and to the life context in which the alcoholic continually makes choices between drinking and alternative actions. The formulation thereby suggests additional contributory factors, treatment strategies, and conceptual approaches.Despite the fact that there are multiple factors that influence drinking, the final common pathway to alcohol use is, in our view, motivational. The net motivation to drink, moreover, is closely tied to people's incentives in other life areas and to the affective changes that they derive from their incentives. We begin, therefore, by defining incentive motivation and affective change and showing how these two concepts are related to people's use of alcohol. Incentive MotivationThe term incentive motivation was introduced by Clark L.Hull (1951, 1952) as a theoretical construct to account for the vigor and intensity of behavior. Previously, Hull (1943) had assumed that organisms can perform a learned response to the Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to W. Miles Cox, Psychology Service (116B), VA Medical Center, 1481 West 10th Street, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202. extent that they have acquired habit strength (the learned association between a stimulus and the ...

Behavior and experience are organized around the enjoyment and pursuit of incentives. During the time that an incentive is behaviorally salient, an organism is especially responsive to incentive-related cues. This sustained sensitivity requires postulating a continuing state (denoted by a construct, current concern) with a definite onset (commitment) and offset (consummation or disengagement).Disengagement follows frustration, accompanies the behavioral process of extinction, and involves an incentivedisengagement cycle of invigoration, aggression, depression, and recovery. Depression is thus a normal part of disengagement that may be either adaptive or maladaptive for the individual but is probably adaptive for the species. The theory offers implications for motivation; etiology, symptomatology, and treatment of depression; drug use; and other social problem areas.

A few empirically supported principles can account for much of the thematic content of waking thought, including rumination, and dreams. (1) An individual’s commitments to particular goals sensitize the individual to respond to cues associated with those goals. The cues may be external or internal in the person’s own mental activity. The responses may take the form of noticing the cues, storing them in memory, having thoughts or dream segments related to them, and/or taking action. Noticing may be conscious or not. Goals may be any desired endpoint of a behavioral sequence, including finding out more about something, i.e., exploring possible goals, such as job possibilities or personal relationships. (2) Such responses are accompanied and perhaps preceded by protoemotional activity or full emotional arousal, the amplitude of which determines the likelihood of response and is related to the value placed on the goal. (3) When the individual is in a situation conducive to making progress toward attaining the goal, the response to goal cues takes the form of actions or operant mental acts that advance the goal pursuit. (4) When circumstances are unfavorable for goal-directed operant behavior, the response remains purely mental, as in mind-wandering and dreaming, but still reflects the content of the goal pursuit or associated content. (5) Respondent responses such as mind-wandering are more likely when the individual is mentally unoccupied with ongoing tasks and less likely the more that is at stake in the ongoing task. The probability of respondent thought is highest during relaxed periods, when the brain’s default-mode network dominates, or during sleep. The article briefly summarizes neurocognitive findings that relate to mind-wandering and evidence regarding adverse effects of mind-wandering on task performance as well as evidence suggesting adaptive functions in regard to creative problem-solving, planning, resisting delay discounting, and memory consolidation.

To what extent are three criteria of daydreaming–as thought that is fanciful, stimulus-independent, or undirected–equivalent? How are these properties of thought flow distributed during everyday activity? Students ( N = 29) carrying a beeper described properties of their consciousness on a total of 1425 occasions by means of a Thought-Sampling Questionnaire, anxiety and depression measures, and activity report forms. Intrasubject analyses of thought variables identified eight orthogonal factors, including Visual Modality, Auditory Modality, Operantness (directedness), Attentiveness to External Stimulation, Controllability, Strangeness (fancifulness/bizarreness), Past Time Orientation, and Future Time Orientation. Most thought samples contained some interior monologue, largely independent of other variables. Thought properties were uncorrelated with affective variables, frustration of goals, and impulses to drink alcohol. Factors for individual differences differed sharply from the intrasubject results, with a single undifferentiated Vividness factor and controllability no longer a separate factor. The visual modality predominates for most individuals, about a third of thought is on the average predominantly undirected, an uncorrelated third is stimulus-independent, and about a quarter of thoughts contain at least traces of dream-like elements.

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