Paul Katharina, Pourtois Gilles
Cognitive and Affective Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 May 1;12(5):765-774. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx010.
Positive mood broadens attention and builds additional mental resources. However, its effect on performance monitoring and reward prediction errors remain unclear. To examine this issue, we used a standard mood induction procedure (based on guided imagery) and asked 45 participants to complete a gambling task suited to study reward prediction errors by means of the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and mid-frontal theta band power. Results showed a larger FRN for negative feedback as well as a lack of reward expectation modulation for positive feedback at the theta level with positive mood, relative to a neutral mood condition. A control analysis showed that this latter result could not be explained by the mere superposition of the event-related brain potential component on the theta oscillations. Moreover, these neurophysiological effects were evidenced in the absence of impairments at the behavioral level or increase in autonomic arousal with positive mood, suggesting that this mood state reliably altered brain mechanisms of reward prediction errors during performance monitoring. We interpret these new results as reflecting a genuine mood congruency effect, whereby reward is anticipated as the default outcome with positive mood and therefore processed as unsurprising (even when it is unlikely), while negative feedback is perceived as unexpected.
积极情绪会拓宽注意力并构建额外的心理资源。然而，其对绩效监测和奖励预测误差的影响仍不明确。为了研究这个问题，我们采用了一种标准的情绪诱导程序（基于引导式想象），并让45名参与者完成一项赌博任务，该任务适合通过反馈相关负波（FRN）和额中θ频段功率来研究奖励预测误差。结果显示，与中性情绪状态相比，在积极情绪下，负反馈的FRN更大，且在θ水平上对积极反馈缺乏奖励预期调制。一项对照分析表明，后一个结果不能仅仅用事件相关脑电成分在θ振荡上的叠加来解释。此外，这些神经生理效应在行为水平没有受损或积极情绪下自主唤醒没有增加的情况下得到了证实，这表明这种情绪状态在绩效监测期间可靠地改变了奖励预测误差的脑机制。我们将这些新结果解释为反映了一种真正的情绪一致性效应，即积极情绪下奖励被预期为默认结果，因此被视为不出人意料（即使不太可能），而负面反馈则被视为意外。
