Beyond craving: Appetitive desire as a motivational antecedent of goal‐directed action intentions

This study examined if beliefs about emotion change across emotional contexts in daily life, and investigated whether people with prominent features of borderline personality pathology experience greater shifts in emotion beliefs during emotional states compared to people without borderline features. Undergraduate participants with (n = 49) and without borderline features (n = 50) completed a one week ecological momentary assessment study where 7x/day they provided ratings of affect, nine different beliefs about emotion and indicators of momentary self-efficacy. Results indicated a significant between-person element to emotion beliefs, supporting the notion of beliefs as relatively schematic. In addition, people with borderline features generally experienced greater instability of beliefs over time compared to people without borderline features. In addition, most of the beliefs about emotion shifted with either positive or negative affect. For many of the emotion beliefs, the relationships between affect and belief were moderated by borderline group. Finally, momentary beliefs about emotion also predicted momentary self-efficacy for tolerating distress and exerting willpower. Taken together, results confirm that beliefs about emotion can fluctuate in daily life and that there are implications for emotion beliefs for people who struggle with emotion regulation and impulsivity (i.e., people with features of borderline personality) as well as for self-efficacy in tolerating emotion and engaging in goal-directed action.

Download Full-text

Clinical Efficiency of Nutriceutics with the Epigenom-directed Action at the Metabolic Syndrome

Российский иммунологический журнал ◽

10.31857/s102872210002657-7 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 736-738 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

I. Savkin ◽

I. Goldina

Keyword(s):

Metabolic Syndrome ◽

Clinical Efficiency ◽

The Metabolic Syndrome ◽

Directed Action

Download Full-text

The evolution of hierarchical structure building capacity for language and music: a bottom-up perspective

Primates ◽

10.1007/s10329-021-00905-x ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Rie Asano

Keyword(s):

Hierarchical Structure ◽

Hierarchical Control ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Building Capacity ◽

Cognitive Domains ◽

Structure Building ◽

Language And Music ◽

Directed Action ◽

Brain Architecture ◽

The Brain

AbstractA central property of human language is its hierarchical structure. Humans can flexibly combine elements to build a hierarchical structure expressing rich semantics. A hierarchical structure is also considered as playing a key role in many other human cognitive domains. In music, auditory-motor events are combined into hierarchical pitch and/or rhythm structure expressing affect. How did such a hierarchical structure building capacity evolve? This paper investigates this question from a bottom-up perspective based on a set of action-related components as a shared basis underlying cognitive capacities of nonhuman primates and humans. Especially, I argue that the evolution of hierarchical structure building capacity for language and music is tractable for comparative evolutionary study once we focus on the gradual elaboration of shared brain architecture: the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits for hierarchical control of goal-directed action and the dorsal pathways for hierarchical internal models. I suggest that this gradual elaboration of the action-related brain architecture in the context of vocal control and tool-making went hand in hand with amplification of working memory, and made the brain ready for hierarchical structure building in language and music.

Download Full-text

The influence of associative reward learning on motor inhibition

Psychological Research ◽

10.1007/s00426-021-01485-7 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Janina Rebecca Marchner ◽

Claudia Preuschhof

Keyword(s):

Experimental Design ◽

Action Control ◽

Reward Learning ◽

Behavioural Activation ◽

Motor Inhibition ◽

A Value ◽

Directed Action ◽

History Of ◽

Pavlovian Learning ◽

Subsequent Task

AbstractStimuli that predict a rewarding outcome can cause difficulties to inhibit unfavourable behaviour. Research suggests that this is also the case for stimuli with a history of reward extending these effects on action control to situations, where reward is no longer accessible. We expand this line of research by investigating if previously reward-predictive stimuli promote behavioural activation and impair motor inhibition in a second unrelated task. In two experiments participants were trained to associate colours with a monetary reward or neutral feedback. Afterwards participants performed a cued go/no-go task, where cues appeared in the colours previously associated with feedback during training. In both experiments training resulted in faster responses in rewarded trials providing evidence of a value-driven response bias as long as reward was accessible. However, stimuli with a history of reward did not interfere with goal-directed action and inhibition in a subsequent task after removal of the reward incentives. While the first experiment was not conclusive regarding an impact of reward-associated cues on response inhibition, the second experiment, validated by Bayesian statistics, clearly questioned an effect of reward history on inhibitory control. This stands in contrast to earlier findings suggesting that the effect of reward history on subsequent action control is not as consistent as previously assumed. Our results show that participants are able to overcome influences from Pavlovian learning in a simple inhibition task. We discuss our findings with respect to features of the experimental design which may help or complicate overcoming behavioural biases induced by reward history.

Download Full-text

Disrupting the Flow of Perception-Action through Design

Adaptive Behavior ◽

10.1177/1059712321989099 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 105971232198909

Author(s):

Harry Heft

Keyword(s):

Cultural History ◽

Health Effects ◽

Sense Of Place ◽

Attentional Focus ◽

Good Design ◽

Adverse Health Effects ◽

Adverse Health ◽

Directed Action ◽

Perception Action

It is usually a mark of good design when technologies and tools that mediate goal-directed action are such that the user’s attentional focus is maintained on the intended ends of action rather than on the technologies and tools themselves. When the mediators become the focus, the continuity of goal-directed action is disrupted, and the flow of action can be re-directed. What then is the purpose of the projects designed by the RAAAF studio, as described by Rietveld, which seem to be intended to do both? Disruption of the continuity of goal-directed perception-action may prompt reflection about the circumstances at work, and in so doing provoke a transformation in habitual patterns of action and of thought. The project “The End of Sitting” is intended to remediate the adverse health effects of standard chair-dominated offices through an unconventional office landscape that prompts intermittent postural readjustments, boosting the levels of activity common in such settings. The project “Bunker 599” demonstrates that seemingly unremarkable features of the landscape can sometimes conceal aspects of culture’s history, and that design can function to draw attention to a hidden and even vanishing history. Design can enrich an individual’s sense of place in a stream of cultural history.

Download Full-text

Do 8-Month-Old Infants Consider Situational Constraints When Interpreting Others’ Gaze as Goal-Directed Action?

Infancy ◽

10.1111/j.1532-7078.2009.00019.x ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 15 (4) ◽

pp. 392-419 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Yuyan Luo

Keyword(s):

Directed Action ◽

Situational Constraints

Download Full-text

Semiosis between Action and Passion

Chinese Semiotic Studies ◽

10.1515/css-2014-0055 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

Author(s):

Eliseo Fernández

Keyword(s):

Biological Evolution ◽

Cell Physiology ◽

Concomitant Increase ◽

Afferent Pathways ◽

Surrounding Environment ◽

Directed Action ◽

Similarities And Differences ◽

And Control ◽

Self Organizing

AbstractAll organisms are autonomous, self-organizing wholes separated by semi-permeable boundaries from a surrounding environment. Across these boundaries conveyances of action and passion are channeled through efferent and afferent pathways. I analyze this scheme in terms of two fundamental processes: semiosis and control. I propose a unified account of the functioning of semiosis and of controlling and controlled actions by viewing organisms as systems that separate their responses (actions) from the actions their environment exerts upon them (passions). Semiosis and goal-directed action are seen as complementary forms of causation. Examples from cell physiology and the functioning of efferent and afferent pathways in plants and animals illustrate and expand these ideas.Based on this interpretation of the relations between semiosis and control I reach a generalized conception of purposeful action, linking the expansion of semiotic capacities throughout biological evolution to a concomitant increase in an organism’s powers for intervention in its environment.The fruitfulness of these ideas is substantiated through examples showing how they make intelligible phenomena previously deemed disparate. Examples include similarities and differences between signs and instruments, and analogies in the evolution of organisms and artifacts.

Download Full-text