Quantifying Abnormal Motivated Behavior

Every day, we make countless decisions that balance potential benefits and risks. These choices are shaped by two fundamental motivations: approach, our innate desire to pursue things we want or need, and avoidance, our core instinct to steer clear of potential danger. 

Often, these motivations conflict, as we may want things that could also entail some negative outcomes.

In many psychiatric conditions, these motivational processes are imbalanced, resulting in symptoms such ash excessive avoidance, reduced goal-directed behavior, or an abnormal disregard for potential risk, particularly when approach and avoidance motivations come into conflict. 

For example, individuals with anxiety disorders often exhibit chronic active avoidance (immediate withdrawal from perceived threats) as well as passive avoidance (diminished pursuit of rewards due to fear of potential risk). Passive avoidance is particularly hard to treat and challenging to capture in laboratory settings. Conversely, in depression, we often observe diminished approach motivation, where individuals show lower-than-normal engagement in appetitive behaviors, mirroring real-world symptoms such as reduced pleasure (anhedonia), while in substance use disorders, we see excessive approach behavior despite of negative consequences.

To study these motivational dynamics, and thus inform treatment, our lab developed a novel experimental paradigm designed to quantify how individuals resolve motivational conflicts. 

By measuring decision-making and behavioral selection as well as real-time physiological responses—such as heart rate and skin conductance—we can capture the psychobiological underpinnings of our basic motivations and conflict resolution, and explore how various patterns in decision-making correlate with psychological symptoms. 

Identifying the processes which promote maladaptive decision-making may help refine interventions targeting passive avoidance in anxiety, motivational deficits in depression, and broader impairments in decision-making across psychopathology.