Farrell Anne M, Goh Joshua O S, White Brian J
Department of Accountancy, Farmer School of Business, Miami University, Oxford, OH, United States.
Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2018 Feb 13;12:58. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00058. eCollection 2018.
Emotional and economic incentives often conflict in decision environments. To make economically desirable decisions then, deliberative neural processes must be engaged to regulate automatic emotional reactions. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we evaluated how fixed wage (FW) incentives and performance-based (PB) financial incentives, in which pay is proportional to outcome, differentially regulate positive and negative emotional reactions to hypothetical colleagues that conflicted with the economics of available alternatives. Neural activity from FW to PB incentive contexts decreased for positive emotional stimuli but increased for negative stimuli in middle temporal, insula, and medial prefrontal regions. In addition, PB incentives further induced greater responses to negative than positive emotional decisions in the frontal and anterior cingulate regions involved in emotion regulation. Greater response to positive than negative emotional features in these regions also correlated with lower frequencies of economically desirable choices. Our findings suggest that whereas positive emotion regulation involves a reduction of responses in valence representation regions, negative emotion regulation additionally engages brain regions for deliberative processing and signaling of incongruous events.
在决策环境中，情感和经济激励常常相互冲突。因此，为了做出符合经济利益的决策，必须启动深思熟虑的神经过程来调节自动的情感反应。在这项功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究中，我们评估了固定工资（FW）激励和绩效工资（PB）激励（即薪酬与结果成正比）如何不同地调节对与现有替代方案的经济性相冲突的假设同事的积极和消极情感反应。从中颞叶、脑岛和内侧前额叶区域来看，从FW激励情境到PB激励情境，对积极情感刺激的神经活动减少，但对消极刺激的神经活动增加。此外，在涉及情绪调节的额叶和前扣带区域，PB激励进一步导致对消极情绪决策的反应比对积极情绪决策的反应更大。在这些区域中，对积极情绪特征的反应大于对消极情绪特征的反应，这也与符合经济利益的选择频率较低相关。我们的研究结果表明，积极情绪调节涉及价态表征区域反应的减少，而消极情绪调节还需要大脑区域进行深思熟虑的处理以及对不一致事件发出信号。
