Motives and Laterality: Exploring the Links

Abstract

Objectives We explored associations between the needs for power, achievement, and affiliation and functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs), guided by three established hypotheses about the nature of these associations. Methods One-hundred-and-seven participants completed picture-story measures of dispositional motives and activity inhibition (AI), a frequent moderator of motive-behavior associations, tasks measuring FCAs (line bisection, chimeric emotional face judgments, turning bias, perceptual and response asymmetries on the Poffenberger task), self-reported laterality preferences (handedness, footedness, ear and eye preference), and interhemispheric interaction (crossed-uncrossed difference). They also completed an experiment manipulating hand contractions (left, right, both, neither) while they worked on a second picture-story motive measure. Results Dispositional power motivation was associated with stronger rightward asymmetry and less interhemispheric transfer in high-AI and stronger leftward asymmetry and more interhemispheric transfer in low-AI individuals. For the affiliation motive, findings were fewer and in the opposite direction of those for the power motive. These findings emerged for men, but not for women. Left- or right-hand contractions led to increases in power and achievement motivation, but not affiliation motivation. Only left-hand contractions led to decreased AI. Conclusions We discuss these findings in the context of sex-dimorphic organizing and activating effects of steroids on motives and laterality.

Psychometric Analysis of a Postulated Set of Evolved Human Motives

“…Having established the existence of these motives, we next examined their inter-relationships, showing that, in terms of instigating behavior, a number of motives appear to be mutually reinforcing (e.g., Status and Attractiveness; Play and Curiosity), while others are generally antagonistic (e.g., Status and Affiliation). Future work should investigate motives' relationships with other sorts of evidence, following the example of recent work in this area linking motive aspects (such as approach/avoid tendencies) and brain area activation (Schultheiss et al, 2021 ) or examining the perceived real-world importance of different types of motives (Ko et al, 2020 ). We also validated a more manageable scale (a reduced list of the three highest loading items for each of the 14 identified motives, shown in bold in Table 6 ), showing that it had similar psychometric qualities to the full questionnaire.…”