the FIT solution process and improving their performance level. Results
showed the predicted statistically significant difference, which took place
against the subjects’ own claim (made in a final questionnaire) that the 60
Hertz tone was annoying–distracting them.
OTHER DYNAMIC ORGANISMIC INTERACTIONS
RELATED TO WILL AND SELF-MOTIVATION
There are interesting dynamic interactions between affective–emotive proc-
esses and modes of cognitive processing (cf. Beck, 1996; Damasio, 1994,
2001; Greenberg, 2002; Kuhl, 2000), possibly related to constraints already
built into the brain’s processes (Fox et al., 2001; Kagan, 1998, 2002). Particu-
larly central for motivation are the constraints and dynamic interactions that
relate the right-hemisphere versus left-hemisphere modes of cognitive proc-
essing to various dialectically complementary dimensions of processual de-
scription: negative versus positive affects; the two sorts of situations, facilitat-
ing versus misleading, previously mentioned; and the two sorts of volition,
implicit or unconscious (i.e., primaryconation) versus the explicitly conscious
Will(these are the main functional utilities for intrinsic motivation and self-
motivation respectively).^6
In the field of motivational psychology, Kuhl and associates (Kuhl, 2000;
Kuhl & Fuhrmann, 1998) proposed that positive affects versus negative af-
fects, on the one hand, and intuitive–holistic processing versus analytic–serial
processing, on the other, are interdependent; and we wish to add: They form
part of a perhaps prewiredaffective-cognitive regulatory(dialectical)system.
This interdependence shows in that positive affects and emotions do bias the
organism towards the use of intuitive–holistic (right hemisphere—RH) men-
tal strategies, whereas negative affects and emotions promote the use of ana-
lytic–serial (left hemisphere—LH) mental strategies. Kuhl called this dialecti-
cal system of built-in biases the “affect-cognition modulation hypothesis,”
and attempted to use it as first foundation for a theory of volitional proc-
esses. Related views were put forward by Fredrickson (2001) from a different
perspective, that of the adaptive value of positive emotions and positive psy-
chology. She emphasizes, and illustrates with experiments, that positive emo-
tions “including joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love—although phe-
224 PASCUAL-LEONE AND JOHNSON
6 6 Notice that in the recent psychological literature (e.g., Corno et al., 2002) the term conation
has been used as an umbrella term to encompass the organismic determinants of any sort of mo-
tivation, whether unconscious or volitional. Thus we must distinguish betweenprimaryconation
(i.e., unconscious impulses of the organismic flesh) andsecondaryor willful conation (i.e., the
Will in the sense of organismic mechanisms causing volitional processes). The contrast we make
between primary conation and Will should be understood in this manner.