A Pavlovian account for paradoxical effects of motivation on controlling response vigour

Occupational burnout, flourishing and job satisfaction among HIV/AIDS healthcare workers in Western China: a network analysis

BACKGROUND

Healthcare workers suffered with high prevalence of occupational burnout, which might be related with their job satisfaction and well-being. This study aimed to provide evidence of complex interrelations among occupational burnout, flourishing, and job satisfaction, and identify key variables from the perspective of network structure among healthcare workers.

METHODS

A cross-sectional study was conducted between July and October 2021, and 907 (the response rate was 98.4%) HIV/AIDS healthcare workers completed their sociodemographic characteristics, occupational burnout, flourishing and job satisfaction. Network analysis was conducted to investigate the interrelations of occupational burnout, flourishing, and job satisfaction communities, and identify central variables and bridges connecting different communities with different bridge strength thresholds in the network structure. The Network Comparison Test (NCT) was conducted to examine the gender differences in networks.

RESULTS

In the network, feeling exhausted at work (strength: 1.42) and feeling frustrated at work (1.27) in occupational burnout community, and interested in daily activities (1.32) in flourishing community were central variables. Bridges in the network were job reward satisfaction (bridge strength: 0.31), satisfaction with job itself (0.25), and job environment satisfaction (0.19) in job satisfaction community, as well as interested in daily activities (0.29) and feeling respectable (0.18) in flourishing community, with bridges selected with top 20% bridge strengths. Feeling frustrated at work (0.14) in occupational burnout community and leading a purposeful and meaningful life (0.11) in flourishing community became bridges when using thresholds of top 25% and 30% bridge strengths, respectively. We also observed higher network densities in females (network density: 0.37) than that in males (0.34), and gender differences in the distribution of partial correlation coefficients (M = 0.27, P = 0.017).

CONCLUSIONS

In the network structure of occupational burnout-flourishing-job satisfaction, feeling frustrated at work in occupational burnout community and interested in daily activities in flourishing community were both central variables and bridges, which may be targeted variables to intervene to alleviate the overall level of symptoms in the network and therefore prevent poor health outcomes in healthcare workers.

Conditioned approach behavior of SHR and SD rats during Pavlovian conditioning

Individual differences in reward-related learning are relevant to many behavioral disorders. Sensory cues that predict reward can become incentive stimuli that adaptively support behavior, or alternatively, cause maladaptive behaviors. The spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR) expresses a genetically determined elevated sensitivity to delay of reward, and has been extensively studied as a behavioral model for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We investigated reward-related learning in the SHR, comparing them to Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats as a reference strain. A standard Pavlovian conditioned approach task was used, in which a lever cue was followed by reward. Lever presses could occur while the lever was extended, but had no effect on reward delivery. The behavior of both the SHRs and the SD rats showed that they learnt that the lever cue predicted reward. However, the pattern of behavior differed between the strains. During lever cue presentation, SD rats pressed the lever more often and made fewer magazine entries than SHRs. When lever contacts that did not result in lever presses were analyzed, there was no significant difference between SHRs and SDs. These results suggest that the SHRs attributed less incentive value to the conditioned stimulus than the SD rats. During the presentation of the conditioned cue, cue directed responses are called sign tracking responses, whereas responses directed towards the food magazine are called goal tracking responses. Analysis of behavior using a standard Pavlovian conditioned approach index to quantify sign and goal tracking tendencies showed that both strains had a tendency towards goal tracking in this task. However, the SHRs showed a significantly greater goal tracking tendency than the SD rats. Taken together, these findings suggest that attribution of incentive value to reward predicting cues is attenuated in SHRs, which might explain their elevated sensitivity to delay of reward.

A computational account of why more valuable goals seem to require more effortful actions

To decide whether a course of action is worth pursuing, individuals typically weigh its expected costs and benefits. Optimal decision-making relies upon accurate effort cost anticipation, which is generally assumed to be performed independently from goal valuation. In two experiments (n = 46), we challenged this independence principle of standard decision theory. We presented participants with a series of treadmill routes randomly associated to monetary rewards and collected both 'accept' versus 'decline' decisions and subjective estimates of energetic cost. Behavioural results show that higher monetary prospects led participants to provide higher cost estimates, although reward was independent from effort in our design. Among candidate cognitive explanations, they support a model in which prospective cost assessment is biased by the output of an automatic computation adjusting effort expenditure to goal value. This decision bias might lead people to abandon the pursuit of valuable goals that are in fact not so costly to achieve.

Preserved Unconscious Processing in Schizophrenia: The Case of Motivation

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS

Motivation deficit is a hallmark of schizophrenia that has a strong impact on their daily life. An alteration of reward processing has been repeatedly highlighted in schizophrenia, but to what extent it involves a deficient amplification of reward representation through conscious processing remains unclear. Indeed, patients with schizophrenia exhibit a disruption of conscious processing, whereas unconscious processing appears to be largely preserved.

STUDY DESIGN

To further explore the nature of motivational deficit in schizophrenia and the implication of consciousness disruption in this symptom, we used a masking paradigm testing motivation both under conscious and unconscious conditions in patients with schizophrenia (n = 31) and healthy controls (n = 32). Participants were exposed to conscious or subliminal coin pictures representing money at stake and were subsequently asked to perform an effort-task by squeezing a handgrip as hard as possible to win this reward.

STUDY RESULTS

We observed a preserved effect of unconscious monetary rewards on force production in both groups, without any significant difference between them. By contrast, in the conscious condition, patients with schizophrenia were less sensitive to rewards than controls. Our results confirm that unconscious incentives have effects on exerted forces in the general population, and demonstrate that patients with schizophrenia exhibit a dissociation between an impaired conscious motivation and a preserved unconscious motivation.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest the existence of several steps in motivational processes that can be differentially affected and might have implication for patient care.

A mosaic of cost-benefit control over cortico-striatal circuitry

Dopamine contributes to cognitive control through well-established effects in both the striatum and cortex. Although earlier work suggests that dopamine affects cognitive control capacity, more recent work suggests that striatal dopamine may also impact on cognitive motivation. We consider the emerging perspective that striatal dopamine boosts control by making people more sensitive to the benefits versus the costs of cognitive effort, and we discuss how this sensitivity shapes competition between controlled and prepotent actions. We propose that dopamine signaling in distinct cortico-striatal subregions mediates different types of cost-benefit tradeoffs, and also discuss mechanisms for the local control of dopamine release, enabling selectivity among cortico-striatal circuits. In so doing, we show how this cost-benefit mosaic can reconcile seemingly conflicting findings about the impact of dopamine signaling on cognitive control.

Neural underpinnings of valence-action interactions triggered by cues and targets in a rewarded approach/avoidance task

Incentive-valence signals have a large impact on our actions in everyday life. While it is intuitive (and most often beneficial) to approach positive and avoid negative stimuli, these prepotent response tendencies can also be maladaptive, as exemplified by clinical conditions such as overeating or pathological gambling. We have recently shown that targets associated with monetary incentives can trigger such valence-action biases (target condition), and that these are absent when valence and action information are provided by advance cues (cue condition). Here, we explored the neural correlates underlying the absence of the behavioral bias in this condition using fMRI. Specifically, we tested in how far valence and action information are integrated at all in the cue condition (where no behavioral biases are observed), assessing activity at the moment of the cue (mainly preparation) and the target (mainly implementation). The cue-locked data was dominated by main effects of valence with increased activity for incentive versus no-incentive cues in a network including anterior insula, premotor cortex, (mostly ventral) striatum (voxel-wise analysis), and across five predefined regions of interest (ROI analysis). Only one region, the anterior cingulate cortex, featured a valence-action interaction, with increased activity for win-approach compared to no-incentive-approach cues. The target-locked data revealed a different interaction pattern with increased activity in loss-approach as compared to win-approach targets in the cerebellum (voxel-wise) and across all ROIs. For comparison, the uncued target condition (target-locked data only) featured valence and action main effects (incentive > no-incentive targets; approach > avoid targets), but no interactions. The results resonate with the common observations that performance benefits after incentive-valence cues are promoted by increased preparatory control. Moreover, the data provide support for the idea that valence and action information are integrated according to an evolutionary benefit (cue-locked), requiring additional neural resources to implement non-intuitive valence-action mappings (target-locked).