AUTHORS: Murray R. J., Kutlikova H. H., Brosch T., Sander D.

Motivation Science, 9(2): 95–106, 11 May 2023

ABSTRACT

Based on an affective neuroscience approach to appraisal theories of emotion, the present study tested the hypothesis that the amygdala is involved in the processing of concern-relevance. Thirty-five students with varying intrinsic academic motivation performed three target-detection tasks using affectively neutral letter stimuli as targets. In one task, participants were given a cover story that their task performance was indicative of future academic success. This intrinsic motivation condition was controlled with two other conditions: an extrinsic motivation condition allowing participants to earn money for themselves based on their task performance, and a baseline condition where participants were simply requested to perform the task while they were told that we were calibrating the scanner. Participants reported their intrinsic academic motivation using a standardized academic motivation scale. Results illustrated an interaction effect both at the whole-brain and region of interest levels. When accounting for all three conditions, only during the intrinsic motivation condition did bilateral amygdala activation significantly increase with increasing academic motivation scores when responding to targets (vs. nontargets). Findings suggest that intrinsic academic motivation modulates amygdala response to otherwise neutral stimuli when they are relevant to academic success, consistent with the proposal that the amygdala is sensitive to the degree to which stimuli are relevant to the individual’s concerns. This stresses the need for more personalized analyses of brain responses to stimuli and tasks that are typically considered “neutral” and hold important implications for psychiatric populations suffering from deficiencies in affective processing, particularly anxiety disorders.

BibTex

https://doi.org/10.1037/mot0000293

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