Motivation and Emotion, VoL 11, No. 1, 1987 The Relationship of Affiliative Arousal to Dopamine Release I David C. McClelland, 2 Vandana Patel, Deborah Stier, and Don Brown Harvard University Higher levels of affiliation motivation after exposure to affiliative films are significantly related to higher dopamine concentrations in saliva in one study of 61 college students of both sexes, and in plasma in another study of 47 adults of both sexes. Individuals high in dispositional n Affiliation, if they also reported high life stress, showed high gains in dopamine concentration in plasma after exposure to an affiliative film significantly more often than other individuals. Since aroused affiliation motivation was not associated with higher concentrations of norepinephrine, epinephrine, or cortisol in either study, it appears likely that dopamine is especially associated with arousal of affiliation motivation, just as norepinephrine has been found to be associated with arousal of power motivation. Thus, different motives may be subserved by different hormones, making it unlikely that all motives lead to the same state of physiological arousal For some time, it was believed that motivational arousal involved a very general type of physiological arousal that was similar for different motives. The idea was supported by Selye's conclusion (1956) that stress of all types produced the same state of physiological arousal, which he called the general adaptation syndrome. The idea was also supported by an influential experi- ment reported by Schachter and Singer (1962) in which it appeared as if sub- jects attributed different motivational characteristics to the same state of physiological arousal, depending on how they interpreted what was happen- ing to them. Thus, Cofer (1972, p. 152) concluded that "arousal is likely to ~This research was carried out when all the authors were connected with the Department of Psychology and Social Relations at Harvard University. We acknowledge with thanks the sup- port of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through a grant to the senior author. 2Address all correspondence to David C. McClelland, Center for Applied Social Science, Boston University, 195 Bay State Road, Boston, Massachusetts 02215. 51 0146-7239/87/0300-0051505.00/0 © 1987 Plenum Publishing Corporation