A new theory of motivation is described along with its applications to addiction and aversion. The theory assumes that many hedonic, affective, or emotional states are automatically opposed by central nervous system mechanisms which reduce the intensity of hedonic feelings, both pleasant and aversive. The opponent processes for most hedonic states are strengthened by use and are weakened by disuse. These simple assumptions lead to deductions of many known facts about acquired motivation. In addition, the theory suggests several new lines of research on motivation. It argues that the establishment of some types of acquired motivation does not depend on conditioning and is nonassociative in nature. The relationships between conditioning processes and postulated opponent processes are discussed. Finally, it is argued that the data on several types of acquired motivation, arising from either pleasurable or aversive stimulation, can be fruitfully reorganized and understood within the framework provided by the opponent-process model.First, we describe the kind of phenomenon which has caught our attention. Two fictitious examples will suffice. In the first, a woman at work discovers a lump in her breast and immediately is terrified. She sits still, intermittently weeping, or she paces the floor. After a few hours, she slowly regains her composure, stops crying, and begins to work. At this point, she is still tense and disturbed, but no longer terrified and distracted. She manifests the symptoms usually associated with intense anxiety. While in this state she calls her doctor for an appointment. A few hours later she is in his office, still tense, still frightened: She is obviously a very unhappy woman. The doctor makes his examination.1 This research was supported by U. S. Public Health Service Grant MH-04202 to the first author and Grant MH-16608 to the second author. We are grateful to Burton S. Rosner, Francis W. Irwin, and Martin E. P. Seligman for their painstaking and helpful editing of an earlier draft of this paper. Finally, we are indebted to Dorothea Jameson Hurvich and Leo M. Hurvich, whose development of the Hering theory into their coherent, opponent-process color vision theory first suggested to us a new way of thinking about affect and hedonic process.2 Requests for reprints should be sent to Richard

A sense of fairness plays a critical role in supporting human cooperation. Adult norms of fair resource sharing vary widely across societies, suggesting that culture shapes the acquisition of fairness behaviour during childhood. Here we examine how fairness behaviour develops in children from seven diverse societies, testing children from 4 to 15 years of age (n = 866 pairs) in a standardized resource decision task. We measured two key aspects of fairness decisions: disadvantageous inequity aversion (peer receives more than self) and advantageous inequity aversion (self receives more than a peer). We show that disadvantageous inequity aversion emerged across all populations by middle childhood. By contrast, advantageous inequity aversion was more variable, emerging in three populations and only later in development. We discuss these findings in relation to questions about the universality and cultural specificity of human fairness.

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An animal's food intake is related to the stimulus properties, or palatability, of its diet and to its body weight. Both normal and hyperphagic rats were fed different diets (powder, pellets, a high-fat diet, and a mineral and fat diet) and gained weight to different asymptotic levels. Food intake was directly related to the palatability of the diet and inversely related to the animal's body weight. These relationships obtained both in normal and in hypothalamic hyperphagic animals. Hyperphagics were more responsive to palatability than were normal animals, but the two groups apparently did not differ in their response to body weight.

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A series of experiments, using a selective adaptation procedure, investigated some of the properties of the linguistic feature detectors that mediate the perception of the voiced and voiceless stop consonants. The first experiment showed that these detectors are centrally rather than peripherally located, in that monotic presentation of the adapting stimulus and test stimuli to different ears resulted in large and reliable shifts in the locus of the phonetic boundary. The second experiment revealed that the detectors are part of the specialized speech processor, inasmuch as adaptation of a voicing detector (as measured by a shift in the phonetic boundary) occurred only when the voicing information was presented in a speech context. In the third experiment, the detector mediating perception of the voiced stops was shown to be more resistant to adaptation than the detector mediating perception of the voiceless stops.