Smiling faces and cash bonuses: Exploring common affective coding across positive and negative emotional and motivational stimuli using fMRI

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 u...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive, affective, & behavioral neuroscience affective, & behavioral neuroscience, 2018-06, Vol.18 (3), p.550-563
Main Authors: Park, Haeme R. P., Kostandyan, Mariam, Boehler, C. Nico, Krebs, Ruth M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Behavior
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Brain - physiology
Brain Mapping
Brain research
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognition - physiology
Cognitive Psychology
Cortex (frontal)
Dopamine
Emotions
Emotions - physiology
Female
Frontal gyrus
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Humans
Incentives
Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods
Male
Motivation
Motivation - physiology
Neuroimaging
Neurosciences
Prefrontal cortex
Psychology
Reinforcement
Reward
Smiling - physiology
Young Adult
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1530-7026
1531-135X
DOI:10.3758/s13415-018-0587-3