Fudan Institute on Ageing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
Department of Mental Health Education for College students, College of Marxism, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, China.
Behav Brain Res. 2023 Jan 5;436:114075. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2022.114075. Epub 2022 Aug 25.
Regret is a common negative emotion in daily life, and long-term immersion in regret affects mental health. Therefore, to regulate and reduce regret is of wide concern. The current fMRI study aimed to investigate whether outcome anticipation before decision-making could reduce regret and its neural correlates. In the task, participants were asked to anticipate the possible poor outcomes of subsequent decisions, such as missing rewards and meeting punishment, and then made sequential risk-taking decisions. Behavioral results showed that outcome anticipation before decision-making could decrease the intensity of regret, that is, participants felt less regret when they anticipated the outcome before decision-making (anticipation condition, Ant), compared to making sequential risk-taking decisions without any anticipation of the outcome in advance (non-anticipation condition, NAnt). Consistently, at the neural level, stronger activities of ventral striatum (VS) and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), and greater VS-dmPFC functional connectivity were observed in Ant relative to NAnt. Moreover, the activity of dmPFC was negatively correlated with the intensity of regret in Ant. The current study highlighted that outcome anticipation before decision-making could regulate regret effectively, and dmPFC played a vital role in this process.
后悔是日常生活中常见的消极情绪，长期沉浸在后悔中会影响心理健康。因此，调节和减少后悔受到了广泛关注。本 fMRI 研究旨在探讨决策前对结果的预期是否可以减少后悔及其神经关联。在任务中，要求参与者预期随后决策的可能不良结果，例如错过奖励和遇到惩罚，然后进行连续的冒险决策。行为结果表明，决策前对结果的预期可以降低后悔的强度，即与在没有预先预期结果的情况下进行连续冒险决策（非预期条件，NAnt）相比，参与者在预期结果之前做出决策（预期条件，Ant）时感到的后悔程度较低。一致地，在神经水平上，与 NAnt 相比，Ant 中腹侧纹状体（VS）和背内侧前额叶皮层（dmPFC）的活动更强，VS-dmPFC 的功能连接更强。此外，dmPFC 的活动与 Ant 中后悔的强度呈负相关。本研究强调，决策前对结果的预期可以有效地调节后悔，而 dmPFC 在这个过程中起着至关重要的作用。
