Motivational processes reinforcement

Utterances of the client signifying motivation are reinforced. This can be done by empathic repetition of what the client has said. The therapist tries to select and emphasise these statements in which the client expresses motivation in the direction of change. By doing this the therapist stimulates the client to express more of these self motivational statements. The therapist can reflect what the client says at different levels , ranging from a mere literal repetition of the words spoken by the client to a reflection of the client s feelings (underneath the spoken words). The former are mostly used in the beginning of a motivational process (see eliciting phase ), and the... 

McFarland K, Ettenberg A (1995) Haloperidol differentially affects reinforcement and motivational processes in rats running an alley for intravenous heroin. Psychopharmacology 722 346-350. 

Most training is behavioral or learning objective driven. This could be viewed as the major goal in the motivational process. To achieve goals, you need to let workers know clearly what they are expected to do and precisely how you want them to accomplish their tasks. There should be an expected level of attainment, whether it be mastery or just to gain a certain amount of knowledge. To reinforce the expected skills, you should allow workers time to practice what they have learned. 

Salamone, Cousins and Snyder (1997) in fact suggest that the function of DA in the nucleus accumbens should not be described by terms such as motivation, reinforcement and reward. Rather it should be considered to mediate the higher-order motor and sensory processes that are important for the activation of aspects of motivation and responsiveness to conditioned stimuli. 

The study of concrete rewards has produced a wealth of quantitative detail about how reinforcement (the internal mechanism of reward) depends on previous deprivation, rate of delivery, the presence or absence of other sources of reinforcement, etc. However, in a prosperous society, most behaviour is not motivated by literal biological needs. Most of our activity is rewarded by emotional processes that are occasioned by other people s social responses, or by tasks or games which are rewarding in their own right. It would clearly be desirable if these subtle reward factors could be understood in the same framework as visceral ones, but psychology has had difficulty bridging the... 

There remains the question of how nature can inflict pain on an organism that can control its own reinforcement. Modern operant theory has corrected many of the awkward features of older, two-factor theories of punishment (Hermstein 1969) it portrays pain as simple non-reward, to which an organism attends because it contains adaptive information. However, pain cannot be just the absence of reward or. in terms of the model just presented, the absence of effective rationing devices for self-reward. The person in pain is not just bored, as he would be in a stimulus deprivation situation, but feels attacked by a process that prevents him from enjoying food, entertainment or whatever other sources of reward may be available. And yet the person must perform a motivated act, the direction of his attention to the pain, in order for it to have its effect. As we have seen, pain can be and sometimes is deliberately shut out of consciousness. How does nature get people to open their gates to pain ... 

Shippenberg TS, Bals-Kubik R, Herz A (1987) Motivational properties of opioids evidence that an activation of 8-receptors mediate reinforcement processes. Brain Res 436 234-239... 

The wide range of reaction systems, catalysts, and reactors that exhibit oscillatory reaction rates reinforces the motivation for research in this field. Oscillations may be lurking in every heterogeneous catalytic system (one might speculate that every heterogeneously catalyzed reaction might show oscillations under the appropriate conditions), and it is crucial to know about this possibility when engineering a chemical process. 

Mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic neurons subserve cognitive processes (Nieoullon, 2002), motivated behavior (McAllister, 2000), the central stress response (Koob and Le Moal, 1997), and the pleasure produced by natural (i.e., sex, food) or unnatural (i.e., drugs of abuse) reinforcers, or by compulsive activities such as gambling, overeating, and sex dependence (for reviews, see Comings and Blum, 2000 Gardner, 2002). In fact, dopamine is possibly the neurotransmitter more studied as a potential... 

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