title: On the neural control of social emotional behavior.
abstract: It is known that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is crucially involved in emotion regulation. However, the specific role of the OFC in controlling the behavior evoked by these emotions, such as approach-avoidance (AA) responses, remains largely unexplored. We measured behavioral and neural responses (using fMRI) during the performance of a social task, a reaction time (RT) task where subjects approached or avoided visually presented emotional faces by pulling or pushing a joystick, respectively. RTs were longer for affect-incongruent responses (approach angry faces and avoid happy faces) as compared to affect-congruent responses (approach-happy; avoid-angry). Moreover, affect-incongruent responses recruited increased activity in the left lateral OFC. These behavioral and neural effects emerged only when the subjects responded explicitly to the emotional value of the faces (AA-task) and largely disappeared when subjects responded to an affectively irrelevant feature of the faces during a control (gender evaluation: GE) task. Most crucially, the size of the OFC-effect correlated positively with the size of the behavioral costs of approaching angry faces. These findings qualify the role of the lateral OFC in the voluntary control of social-motivational behavior, emphasizing the relevance of this region for selecting rule-driven stimulus-response associations, while overriding automatic (affect-congruent) stimulus-response mappings.
authors.affiliation: Leiden University Institute for Psychological Research, Clinical, Health and Neuropsychology Unit, Leiden University, The Netherlands. roelofs@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
authors.forename: Karin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Roelofs
authors.forename: Alessandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Minelli
authors.forename: Rogier B
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: Mars
authors.forename: Jacobien
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: van Peer
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Toni
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D006854:Hydrocortisone / Q000097:blood; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012919:Social Behavior; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000097:blood / Q000523:psychology; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D006854:Hydrocortisone