About this Research Topic

Background

Motivation is a strong driver in the dynamics of animal and human behaviors. It relies on complex brain processes built and developing over time throughout life and involving different brain regions. It has solid evolutionary and ecological grounds related to the species' survival, including care behaviors, learning behaviors, social interactions, etc.

Although representing one of the most tackled topics of behavioral research, many questions remain unanswered and need further discussion to provide a comprehensive understanding of its roots. For instance:


1. Is motivation a strong innate or acquired feeling?

2. Is it a key element of learning or social integration?

3. Is it a lever in performance? If so, to which degree?


Understanding motivation is a real challenge at all scales of the alive in many disciplinary fields, such as neurosciences, biology, psychology, education, and social sciences. For example, human psychology and neuroscience research conducted on individuals or groups of individuals, links to more than 115 theories on motivation presented in the literature so far, strengthening the idea of motivation’s pivotal role in life and society.

The concept of motivation is nevertheless not obvious to handle and a consensual definition of motivation is hard not only to share between several specialized scientists but also, to explain to people in their daily life that the motivation they use to learn at school or to work comes from evolutionary and/or ancestral mechanisms consolidated at a time when our recent social organizations did not exist.

This Research Topic aims to offer a rare interdisciplinary opportunity for scientists working on motivation to cross their views in the description, the understanding, and/or the intervention of motivated behaviors in life.

All aspects of the use/misuse and causes of motivation/amotivation (avolition) in laboratory, ecological, and naturalistic settings to study normal behavior or pathological conditions affecting behavior can be considered, providing a transdisciplinary emphasis and addressing the main biological question from different angles.

Our goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of this fundamental question with a cutting-edge transdisciplinary analysis of motivation.

We aim to provide the grounds for highlighting new theoretical concepts and/or applied tracks, at the crossroads of the following disciplines: neurosciences, psychology, developmental biology, evolutionary biology and medicine, psychiatry, neurochemistry, genetics and epigenetics, educational sciences, philosophy, ethology, sociology, paleontology, paleo neurobiology among other viewpoints.

We welcome all types of articles on motivation, a-motivation, or self-motivation to:

- define or redefine the concept of motivation and its related facets,

- confront direct or indirect viewpoints, explore integrative theories as well as empirical approaches,

- report novel data based on laboratory model organisms, other animals in their natural settings, or human studies. Measure tools can either derive from a transdisciplinary approach or be re-adapted from other research fields (e.g., in psychiatry, the use of questionnaires initially designed to study behavior adaptation in evolutionary biology; bridges between genetics studies and psychotherapy, medicine, and history; philosophical or metacognitive approaches used in the animal kingdom to understand the self-awareness and/or the lack of self-knowledge in humans, etc.)

- open to yet unexplored perspectives based on previously reported data in a transdisciplinary discussion.

Contributions can also be state-of-the-art of one’s own discipline explained to specialists from another field and current applications of tools that can be potentially re-adopted in different fields.

To favor crossed looks, dialogs between two specialists from two different motivation-studying disciplines or an example of studies designed to fill the gap between disciplines or scaffold new interventional paradigms will be encouraged.

All contexts of motivation studies, in animal models or humans, will be considered, such as learning, food intake, care, mental health and mental illness, education, metacognition, curiosity, resilience, and post-traumatic growth, provided that it offers transdisciplinary potential and/or an explicit interdisciplinary view of the factors that could foster individual and collective growth and commitment to change for instance.

Keywords: Motivation, emotion, innate, learning, social integration, model organisms, amotivation, avolition, motivated behavior, self-motivation, transdisciplinary, integrative analysis

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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