400 Iv. COGNITI vE AND M OTIvATIONAL P ROCESSES
results looking at job characteristics, see 
Brandstätter, Job, & Schulze, 2016). Put 
differently, progress toward one’s personal 
goals does not generate hedonic well-being 
by itself. It only contributes to well-being 
to the extent that a strong implicit motive 
gets an opportunity to reap pleasure (liking) 
from motive-  specific rewards or avoid the 
displeasure of motive-  specific punishments 
(Brunstein, 2010).
Using experience sampling, McAdams 
and Constantian (1983) observed that indi -
viduals high, compared to those low, in n In -
timacy experienced more positive affect dur -
ing interactions with others in their everyday 
lives (see Craig et al., 1994, for a replica -
tion). Research on n Achievement suggests 
that motives also influence the expectation 
of hedonic reward (i.e., predicted liking) as -
sociated with incentive attainment, another 
critical feature of motivational processes 
(cf. Berridge, 2004). Brunstein and Maier 
(2005) observed that high-  achievement indi -
viduals expect to get more pleasure out of 
mastering a challenging task and less plea -
sure out of mastering an easy task than do 
low- achievement individuals.
Thus, studies using objective measures 
of hedonic responses, such as facial EMG, 
and subjective measures, such as rating one’s 
current happiness or dejection, consistently 
support Atkinson’s (1957) hypothesis that 
implicit motives represent a capacity for 
hedonic responses—  liking and disliking in 
Berridge’s (1996) conceptual framework—  to 
motive-  specific incentives and disincentives. 
This has consequences for the contexts, 
cues, and behaviors that preceded contact 
with the (dis)incentive, issues to which we 
turn next.
Motives Shape Incentive‑Driven 
Learning  Processes
Implicit motives, in interaction with motive- 
specific (dis)incentives, influence the degree 
to which individuals show evidence of (1) 
Pavlovian conditioning in response to in -
centive cues, (2) learning of behavior that 
is instrumental for incentive attainment (in -
cluding inhibition of behavior that precedes 
an encounter with a disincentive), and (3) 
memory for the episodic context in which a (dis)incentive occurs (Schult  heiss & Köllner, 
2014).
Pavlovian conditioning mechanisms have 
been assumed to be at the core of implicit 
motives from the outset. McClelland and 
colleagues (1953) theorized that n Achieve -
ment is aroused by cues that have become 
associated with, and thus predict, a surge of 
positive affect accompanying the mastery of 
challenging tasks, similar to Ivan Pavlov’s 
canine subjects whose appetite was aroused 
by the sound of a metronome that predict -
ed the arrival of pleasant food. In support 
of a role of Pavlovian learning in implicit 
motives, Stanton, Wirth, and Schult  heiss 
(2006) reported that power-  motivated in -
dividuals show attentional avoidance of 
salient abstract cues that have been condi -
tioned to high-  dominance facial expressions 
of emotion (joy, anger), a finding that par -
allels high-power individuals’ attentional 
avoidance of high-  dominance faces (Schult -
heiss & Hale, 2007; see below). Although 
these results support the idea that Pavlovian 
conditioning plays a role in motive-  driven 
learning of (dis)incentive-  predictive cues, 
more research on this fundamental issue is 
long overdue.
There is considerably more evidence for 
a role of instrumental learning in implic -
it motives. Using implicit learning tasks, 
Schult  heiss and colleagues found replicable 
evidence across several experiments that 
high-power individuals show superior per -
formance on visuomotor sequences whose 
execution has become associated with win -
ning a dominance contest, but impaired 
performance on sequences whose execu -
tion was followed by defeat (Schult  heiss 
& Rohde, 2002; Schult  heiss, Wirth, et al., 
2005). In another line of research, Schult -
heiss, Pang, et al. (2005) used facial expres -
sions of emotion as reinforcers and found 
that n Power and n Affiliation influence in -
strumental learning in response to nonver -
bal dominance and affiliation signals. For 
instance, relative to low-power individuals, 
high-power individuals showed enhanced 
learning of a visuomotor sequence whose ex -
ecution was rewarded by the presentation of 
surprise, a low-  dominance signal. Recently, 
Stoeckart et al (2017, 2018) presented ad -
ditional evidence for n Power’s influence on 