Motivation and reinforcement

Abstract

Pavlov (1954) considered the significance of various manifestations of the higher nervous system as a necessary preliminary condition of brain mechanisms. He wrote, “First of all it is important to comprehend psychologically and then translate into physiological language.” Unfortunately, there are no conventional definitions of such notions as need, motivation, emotion, reinforcement, consciousness, will, etc. I. M. Sechenov (1952) wrote, more than a century ago, “... try to speak about one and the same subject with psychologists of different schools—each school has a new opinion; and if you start, by comparison, a conversation about sound, light, electricity with a physicist of any country—you’ll receive, essentially, the same responses from all of them.” There is a need to create such theoretic conceptions which would be initially of an interdisciplinary character and would be useful not only in one, but in a number of special fields of science, such as psychology, physiology, and sociology. In this article the author suggests a brief dictionary of terms, based on the need-informational approach to the study of the psyche and behavior. These were created over the last 25 years (Simonov 1986).