The structure of motivational manifestations as measured in the laboratory rat: An examination of motivational component theory

One hundred and thirty-four participants were run under differing conditions of reward and deprivation for fear, gregariousness, and thirst in 3 separate mazes. Thirty-six dependent variable measures were taken in 2 of the mazes and 39 in the third. The intercorrelations among the variables were factored separately for each of the 3 mazes. Thirteen factors were extracted in each case and congruence coefficients computed. Eight of the 13 factors were consistently and significantly replicable across the 3 analyses. Four of these factors were hypothesized to be ability factors and 4 were hypothesized to be motivational in nature. Second-order factor analyses were conducted separately for the 3 sets of data, with 5 factors extracted in each case. Although all 5 were consistently matched across all 3 analyses, only 2 were characterized by significant congruence coefficients for all 3 pairs of matches. These 2 second-order factors were hypothesized to correspond to the “unintegrated” and “integrated” second-order motivational components which have consistently emerged in human research.