The final, common pathway to alcohol use is motivational. A person decides consciously or unconsciously to consume or not to consume any particular drink of alcohol according to whether or not he or she expects that the positive affective consequences of drinking will outweigh those of not drinking. Various factors (e.g., past experiences with drinking, current life situation) help to form expectations of affective change from drinking, these factors always modulated by a person's neurochemical reactivity to alcohol. Such major influences include the person's current nonchemical incentives and the prospect of acquiring new positive incentives and removing current negative incentives. Our motivational counseling technique uses nonchemical goals and incentives to help the alcoholic develop a satisfying life without the necessity of alcohol. The technique first assesses the alcoholic's motivational structure and then seeks to modify it through a multicomponent counseling procedure. The counseling technique is one example of the heuristic value of the motivational model. This article presents a motivational formulation of alcohol use. The formulation is intended to incorporate advances made in understanding the inheritable constitutional factors (e.g., Goodwin, in press; Schuckit, Li, Cloninger, & Deitrich, 1985) and the appetitive systems (T. B. Baker, Morse, & Sherman, 1987) in alcohol-related behavior, and also the array of other motivational factors that are increasingly recognized to play decisive roles in understanding and treating addictive behavior patterns (e.g., Klinger, 1977;Marlatt & Gordon, 1985;Miller, 1985). The particular benefit of this formulation is to place alcoholic behavior in the context of contemporary theory of motivation and emotion, as they relate both to alcohol use in the narrow sense and to the life context in which the alcoholic continually makes choices between drinking and alternative actions. The formulation thereby suggests additional contributory factors, treatment strategies, and conceptual approaches.Despite the fact that there are multiple factors that influence drinking, the final common pathway to alcohol use is, in our view, motivational. The net motivation to drink, moreover, is closely tied to people's incentives in other life areas and to the affective changes that they derive from their incentives. We begin, therefore, by defining incentive motivation and affective change and showing how these two concepts are related to people's use of alcohol.
Incentive MotivationThe term incentive motivation was introduced by Clark L.Hull (1951, 1952) as a theoretical construct to account for the vigor and intensity of behavior. Previously, Hull (1943) had assumed that organisms can perform a learned response to the Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to W. Miles Cox, Psychology Service (116B), VA Medical Center, 1481 West 10th Street, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202. extent that they have acquired habit strength (the learned association between a stimulus and the ...