Approach motivation in humans has been extensively studied in self-report and and factor analyses of self-reported reasons for drinking which reliably yield a multidimensional, four-factor structure (Cooper, 1994): (1) social motives (e.g., “to be sociable”), (2) enhancement motives (e.g., “to get high,” “because it’s fun”), (3) coping motives (e.g., “to forget your worries,” “because it helps when you feel depressed or nervous”), and (4) conformity motives (e.g., “to fit in”). Notably, enhancement and coping motives are strongly associated with drinking, heavy drinking, and drinking problems in both adolescents and adults (Cooper, 1994; Cooper, Frone, Russell & Mudar, 1995), with conformity and social drinking motives somewhat less strongly correlated with consumption levels. A growing body of literature indicates that the temperamental traits of extraversion and sensation-seeking tend to correlate with enhancement motivation and that neuroticism/negative affectivity tends to correlate with coping motivation (Kuntsche, Knibbe, Gmel & Engels, 2006). These findings point to specific motivational pathways arising from individual differences that are temperamentally based and can help guide the selection of environmental variables and appropriate animal models. For example, to study the
