Hedonic motivation

Hedonic motivation refers to the influence of a person's pleasure and pain receptors on their willingness to move towards a goal or away from a threat. This is linked to the classic motivational principle that people approach pleasure and avoid pain, and is gained from acting on certain behaviors that resulted from esthetic and emotional feelings such as: love, hate, fear, joy, etc. According to the hedonic principle, our emotional experience can be thought of as a gauge that ranges from bad to good and our primary motivation is to keep the needle on the gauge as close to good as possible. rdf:langString