Langeslag Sandra J E, van der Veen Frederik M, Röder Christian H
Erasmus Affective Neuroscience Lab, Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2014 Feb;35(2):503-12. doi: 10.1002/hbm.22197. Epub 2012 Oct 25.
In previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies concerning romantic love, several brain regions including the caudate and putamen have consistently been found to be more responsive to beloved-related than control stimuli. In those studies, infatuated individuals were typically instructed to passively view the stimuli or to think of the viewed person. In the current study, we examined how the instruction to attend to, or ignore the beloved modulates the response of these brain areas. Infatuated individuals performed an oddball task in which pictures of their beloved and friend served as targets and distractors. The dorsal striatum showed greater activation for the beloved than friend, but only when they were targets. The dorsal striatum actually tended to show less activation for the beloved than the friend when they were distractors. The longer the love and relationship duration, the smaller the response of the dorsal striatum to beloved-distractor stimuli was. We interpret our findings in terms of reinforcement learning. By virtue of using a cognitive task with a full factorial design, we show that the dorsal striatum is not activated by beloved-related information per se, but only by beloved-related information that is attended.
在先前有关浪漫爱情的功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究中，包括尾状核和壳核在内的几个脑区一直被发现对与爱人相关的刺激比对对照刺激反应更强烈。在那些研究中，热恋中的个体通常被要求被动观看刺激物或思考所观看的人。在当前的研究中，我们考察了关注或忽略爱人的指令如何调节这些脑区的反应。热恋中的个体执行了一项奇偶数任务，其中他们爱人的照片和朋友的照片分别作为目标刺激物和干扰刺激物。背侧纹状体对爱人的激活比对朋友的激活更强，但仅当他们是目标刺激物时才如此。当爱人的照片是干扰刺激物时，背侧纹状体对其的激活实际上往往比对朋友照片的激活更少。恋爱和关系持续的时间越长，背侧纹状体对爱人-干扰刺激物的反应就越小。我们从强化学习的角度来解释我们的发现。通过使用具有全因子设计的认知任务，我们表明背侧纹状体并非被与爱人相关的信息本身所激活，而是仅被受到关注的与爱人相关的信息所激活。
