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Anticipatory anxiety disrupts neural valuation during risky choice.

  • Engelmann JB Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research (SNS-Lab), Department of Economics, University of Zurich, CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland, and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, 6525 HP, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
  • Meyer F Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research (SNS-Lab), Department of Economics, University of Zurich, CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland, and christian.ruff@econ.uzh.ch frimey@gmail.com.
  • Fehr E Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research (SNS-Lab), Department of Economics, University of Zurich, CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland, and.
  • Ruff CC Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research (SNS-Lab), Department of Economics, University of Zurich, CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland, and christian.ruff@econ.uzh.ch frimey@gmail.com.
  • 2015-02-21
Published in:
  • The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience. - 2015
decision making
emotion
fMRI
neuroeconomics
Analysis of Variance
Anxiety
Brain
Brain Mapping
Decision Making
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Motivation
Oxygen
Psychophysics
Reaction Time
Regression Analysis
Reinforcement, Psychology
Risk-Taking
Young Adult
English Incidental negative emotions unrelated to the current task, such as background anxiety, can strongly influence decisions. This is most evident in psychiatric disorders associated with generalized emotional disturbances. However, the neural mechanisms by which incidental emotions may affect choices remain poorly understood. Here we study the effects of incidental anxiety on human risky decision making, focusing on both behavioral preferences and their underlying neural processes. Although observable choices remained stable across affective contexts with high and low incidental anxiety, we found a clear change in neural valuation signals: during high incidental anxiety, activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum showed a marked reduction in (1) neural coding of the expected subjective value (ESV) of risky options, (2) prediction of observed choices, (3) functional coupling with other areas of the valuation system, and (4) baseline activity. At the same time, activity in the anterior insula showed an increase in coding the negative ESV of risky lotteries, and this neural activity predicted whether the risky lotteries would be rejected. This pattern of results suggests that incidental anxiety can shift the focus of neural valuation from possible positive consequences to anticipated negative consequences of choice options. Moreover, our findings show that these changes in neural value coding can occur in the absence of changes in overt behavior. This suggest a possible pathway by which background anxiety may lead to the development of chronic reward desensitization and a maladaptive focus on negative cognitions, as prevalent in affective and anxiety disorders.
Language
  • English
Open access status
bronze
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/236312
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