Motives, mechanisms, and emotions

Sloman, Aaron

doi:10.1080/02699938708408049

Cited by 230 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…When faced with such situations, individuals can award an alternative compensatory goal a higher priority than was previously the case (Sloman, 1987). For this priority to be given, the alternate program of action should reflect the same abstract goal as the "failed" activity but with a greater likelihood of success (Carver & Scheier, 1998).…”

Section: Emotion Regulation and Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Great expectations: Different high-risk activities satisfy different motives.

Barlow¹,

Woodman²,

Hardy³

2013

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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Research on people's motives for engaging in high-risk activities has typically been viewed through the single-focused lens of sensation seeking. We provide evidence that comprehensively challenges that view. First, we develop and confirm the structure of a 3-factor measure of motives: the Sensation Seeking, Emotion Regulation, and Agency Scale (SEAS; Study 1). We then use the SEAS to provide evidence of differential motives for 2 high-risk activities: skydiving and mountaineering. The motive for skydiving is strongly associated with sensation seeking; the motive for mountaineering is strongly associated with emotion regulation and agency but not with sensation seeking (Study 2). We also show that these conclusions cannot be drawn from existing measures of personality and sensation seeking (Study 3). Finally, individuals who are motivated by emotion regulation and agency needs also have greater expectations regarding their emotion regulation and agency. It is these greater expectations that most successfully discriminate mountaineers from skydivers and control participants (Study 4). It is concluded that researchers should no longer consider risk takers as a homogenous sensation-seeking group and that they should consider risk taking as a potential model of human endeavor. The SEAS can be used as a measure of motives for behavior whenever sensation seeking, agency, or emotion regulation is thought to be at the core of such motives, and the results are discussed in the context of encouraging personality researchers to consider the specific spontaneous behaviors that motivate different people.

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Section: Emotion Regulation and Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Great expectations: Different high-risk activities satisfy different motives.

Barlow¹,

Woodman²,

Hardy³

2013

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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“…Survival is particularly important since it is the fact that the agent keeps working that allows the result of its efforts to be exploited, passed along to its user, etc. Several years ago Sloman [30] proposed to characterise goals with three features: urgency, intensity and persistence. These are also candidates to be usually present as values when tackling a choice situation.…”

Section: Ontology Of Valuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redesigning the Agents’ Decision Machinery

Antunes

Coelho

2000

Affective Interactions

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Abstract. In a multi-agent system, agents must decide what to do and by what order. Autonomy is a key notion in such a system, since it is mainly the autonomy of the agents that makes the environment unpredictable and complex. From a user standpoint, autonomy is equally important as an ingredient that has to be used with parsimony: too much leads to agents fulfilling their own goals instead of those of the user, too little renders agents that are too dependent upon user commands and choices for their execution. Autonomy has a role in deciding which are the new goals of the agent, and it has another in choosing which of the agent's goals are going to be addressed next. We have proposed the BVG (Beliefs, Values, Goals) architecture with the idea of making decisions using multiple evaluations of a situation, taking the notion of value as central in the motivational mechanisms in the agent's mind. The agent will consider the several evaluations and decide in accordance with its goals in a rational fashion. In this paper we extend this architecture in three different directions: we consider the source of agent's goals, we enhance the decisional mechanisms to consider a wider range of situations, and we introduce emotion as a meta-level control mechanism of the decision processes.

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“…Simon [25] takes motivation to be "that which controls attention at any given time," and explores the relation of motivation to information-processing behaviour, but from a cognitive perspective. Sloman [27,26] has elaborated on Simon's work, showing how motivations are relevant to emotions and the development of a computational theory of mind.…”

Section: What and Why Motivation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A motivation can thus be represented by a triple, Ñ Ú known as an m-triple where Ñ is the kind of motivation, Ú is a real number, the strength (or intensity [26]) value associated with that motivation, and is a boolean variable taking the value True when the strength value, Ú, is fixed, and False when it is variable. An autonomous agent can be regarded as embodying a set of Ò motivations, Å, which comprises the m-triples, Ñ ½ Ú Ñ Ò Ú .…”

Section: Motivated Behaviour In Autonomous Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motivated Behaviour for Goal Adoption

Lück

d’Inverno

1998

Multi-Agent Systems. Theories, Languages and Applications

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Abstract. Social behaviour arises as a result of individual agents cooperating with each other so as to exploit the resources available in a rich and dynamic multi-agent domain. If agents are to make use of others to help them in their tasks, such social behaviour is critical. Underlying this cooperation is the transfer or adoption of goals from one agent to another, a subtle and complex process that depends on the nature of the agents involved. In this paper we analyse this process by building upon a hierarchy previously constructed to define objects, agents and autonomous agents. We describe the motivated self-generation of goals that defines agent autonomy and the adoption of goals between agents that enables social behaviour. Then we consider three classes of goal adoption by objects, agents and autonomous agents. The first of these is merely a question of instantiation, the second requires an understanding of the relationship of the agent to others that are engaging it, and the third amounts to a question of negotiation or persuasion.

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Motives, mechanisms, and emotions

Cited by 230 publications

References 3 publications

Great expectations: Different high-risk activities satisfy different motives.

Great expectations: Different high-risk activities satisfy different motives.

Redesigning the Agents’ Decision Machinery

Motivated Behaviour for Goal Adoption

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