The positive valence system, adaptive behaviour and the origins of reward

Summary & key facts

This paper outlines the structure and function of the "positive valence system," a set of brain and body processes that create positive or rewarding responses. It explains how an ascending arousal system senses bodily changes, activates motivational states, and links those states with sensory inputs to produce Pavlovian learning, emotional responses, pleasure (hedonic) experience, goal values, and habits. The authors present this account as a way to explain how adaptive behaviour and the feeling of reward arise, while noting these are long-standing theoretical issues in motivation research.

Key facts:

• The paper defines the "positive valence system" as the processes that produce positive or rewarding responses and support adaptive behaviour.
• Adaptive behaviour is said to originate in an ascending arousal system that is sensitive to peripheral (bodily) regulatory changes and that activates central motivational states.
• Associations between motivational states and sensory inputs underlie evaluative conditioning and create representations of the 'unconditioned' stimuli used in Pavlovian conditioning.
• Those associations can generate Pavlovian conditioned responses, including conditioned orienting, consummatory (consumption-related) responses, and preparatory responses.
• The paper describes key affective processes in the system as Pavlovian excitation and inhibition, arousal, and reinforcement; it states that reinforcement is used to control the formation of habits.
• Affective processes in the positive valence system can provoke emotional responses and externalize positive valence in hedonic (pleasure) experience, which then help form goal or reward values that guide goal-directed action.

Abstract

Although the hey-day of motivation as an area of study is long past, the issues with which motivational theorists grappled have not grown less important: i.e. the development of deterministic explanations for the particular tuning of the nervous system to specific changes in the internal and external environment and the organisation of adaptive behavioural responses to those changes. Here, we briefly elaborate these issues in describing the structure and function of the 'positive valence system'. We describe the origins of adaptive behaviour in an ascending arousal system, sensitive to peripheral regulatory changes, that modulates and activates various central motivational states. Associations between these motivational states and sensory inputs underlie evaluative conditioning and generate the representation of the 'unconditioned' stimuli fundamental to Pavlovian conditioning. As a consequence, associations with these stimuli can generate Pavlovian conditioned responses through the motivational control of stimulus event associations with sensory and affective components of the valence system to elicit conditioned orienting, consummatory and preparatory responses, particularly the affective responses reflecting Pavlovian excitation and inhibition, arousal and reinforcement, the latter used to control the formation of habits. These affective processes also provoke emotional responses, allowing the externalisation of positive valence in hedonic experience to generate the goal or reward values that mediate goal-directed action. Together these processes form the positive valence system, ensure the maintenance of adaptive behaviour and, through the association of sensory events and emotional responses through consummatory experience, provide the origins of reward.

Topics

Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies Neural dynamics and brain function Neurotransmitter Receptor Influence on Behavior

Categories

Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Life Sciences Neuroscience

Tags

Adaptive behavior Cognition Cognitive psychology Emotional valence Neuroscience Physics Psychology Quantum mechanics Reward system Social psychology Valence (chemistry)