Park Haeme R P, Kostandyan Mariam, Boehler C Nico, Krebs Ruth M
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2018 Jun;18(3):550-563. doi: 10.3758/s13415-018-0587-3.
Although it is clear that emotional and motivational manipulations yield a strong influence on cognition and behaviour, these domains have mostly been investigated in independent research lines. Therefore, it remains poorly understood how far these affective manipulations overlap in terms of their underlying neural activations, especially in light of previous findings that suggest a shared valence mechanism across multiple affective processing domains (e.g., monetary incentives, primary rewards, emotional events). This is particularly interesting considering the commonality between emotional and motivational constructs in terms of their basic affective nature (positive vs. negative), but dissociations in terms of instrumentality, in that only reward-related stimuli are typically associated with performance-contingent outcomes. Here, we aimed to examine potential common neural processes triggered by emotional and motivational stimuli in matched tasks within participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Across tasks, we found shared valence effects in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus (part of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), with increased activity for positive and negative stimuli, respectively. Despite this commonality, emotion and reward tasks featured differential behavioural patterns in that negative valence effects (performance costs) were exclusive to emotional stimuli, while positive valence effects (performance benefits) were only observed for reward-related stimuli. Overall, our data suggest a common affective coding mechanism across different task domains and support the idea that monetary incentives entail signed basic valence signals, above and beyond the instruction to perform both gain and loss trials as accurately as possible to maximise the outcome.
尽管情绪和动机操纵对认知和行为有显著影响，但这些领域大多是在独立的研究路线中进行调查的。因此，人们对这些情感操纵在潜在神经激活方面的重叠程度仍知之甚少，特别是鉴于先前的研究结果表明，多个情感加工领域（如金钱激励、主要奖励、情感事件）存在共享的效价机制。考虑到情绪和动机结构在基本情感性质（积极与消极）方面的共性，但在工具性方面存在分离，即只有与奖励相关的刺激通常与绩效相关的结果相关联，这一点尤其有趣。在这里，我们旨在使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）检查参与者在匹配任务中由情绪和动机刺激触发的潜在共同神经过程。在各项任务中，我们在前额叶腹内侧皮质和左额下回（背外侧前额叶皮质的一部分）发现了共享的效价效应，分别对积极和消极刺激的活动增加。尽管存在这种共性，但情绪和奖励任务具有不同的行为模式，即负效价效应（绩效成本）仅见于情绪刺激，而正效价效应（绩效收益）仅在与奖励相关的刺激中观察到。总体而言，我们的数据表明不同任务领域存在共同的情感编码机制，并支持这样一种观点，即金钱激励包含有正负基本效价信号，这超出了尽可能准确地执行收益和损失试验以最大化结果的指令。
