THE STRUCTURE OF MOTIVATIONAL MANIFESTATIONS AS MEASURED IN THE LABORATORY RAT: AN EXAMINATION OF MOTIVATIONAL COMPONENT THEORY

Abstract

One hundred and thirty-four subjects were run under differing conditions of reward and deprivation for fear, gregariousness, and thirst in three separate mazes. Thirty-six dependent variable measures were taken in two of the mazes and twenty-nine in the third. The intercorrelations among the variables were factored separately for each of the three mazes. Thirteen factors were extracted in each case and congruence coefficients computed. Eight of the thirteen factors were consistently and significantly replicable across the three analyses. Four of these factors were hypothesized to be ability factors and four were hypothesized to be motivational in nature. Second-order factor analyses were conducted separately for the three sets of data, with five factors extracted in each case. Although all five were consistently matched across all three analyses, only two were characterized by significant congruence coefficients for all three pairs of matches. These two second-order factors were hypothesized to correspond to the “Unintegrated” and “Integrated” second-order motivational components which have consistently emerged in human research.