The key role of dopamine as the neural correlate of intrinsic motivation and trait plasticity

Sammanfattning: Self-determination theory (SDT), a motivation theory, consists of motivation types: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and amotivation, where the social environment is important. SDT’s motivation orientations are about individual differences in people’s tendencies to orient towards environments. The five factor model (FFM), a personality theory, consists of five factors and can be grouped into two metatraits; plasticity: extraversion and openness; and stability: agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. Studies show that SDT’s motivation orientations and the factors of FFM significantly covary. Intrinsic motivation and trait plasticity have similar features; the desire for exploration, engagement, well-being, and dopamine as neural correlate. The thesis reviews the role of dopamine as the neural correlate of intrinsic motivation and trait plasticity – a relation between motivation and personality. Dopamine and trait plasticity function to attain rewards of uncertainty and explore, but uncertainty is threatening. Salience coding neurons, value coding neurons and a combination of both are related, respectively, to rewards of information, specific rewards and the value of any uncertainty. Intrinsic motivation is related to the value coding neurons, flow via D2 receptors, the salience network, and the seeking system. Conclusions: there are many appealing similarities and rational that relate constructs/mechanisms – motivation is related to personality; can there even be a common construct? However; results based on proposed theories, neuroscientific quality issues, early inconsistent findings of intrinsic motivation mechanisms, and trait stability are speculated to, also, be needed to model intrinsic motivation. Unifying cross-disciplinary work and proposed theories of neural correlates are encouraged.