title: Neural basis of decision making guided by emotional outcomes.
abstract: Emotional events resulting from a choice influence an individual's subsequent decision making. Although the relationship between emotion and decision making has been widely discussed, previous studies have mainly investigated decision outcomes that can easily be mapped to reward and punishment, including monetary gain/loss, gustatory stimuli, and pain. These studies regard emotion as a modulator of decision making that can be made rationally in the absence of emotions. In our daily lives, however, we often encounter various emotional events that affect decisions by themselves, and mapping the events to a reward or punishment is often not straightforward. In this study, we investigated the neural substrates of how such emotional decision outcomes affect subsequent decision making. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we measured brain activities of humans during a stochastic decision-making task in which various emotional pictures were presented as decision outcomes. We found that pleasant pictures differentially activated the midbrain, fusiform gyrus, and parahippocampal gyrus, whereas unpleasant pictures differentially activated the ventral striatum, compared with neutral pictures. We assumed that the emotional decision outcomes affect the subsequent decision by updating the value of the options, a process modeled by reinforcement learning models, and that the brain regions representing the prediction error that drives the reinforcement learning are involved in guiding subsequent decisions. We found that some regions of the striatum and the insula were separately correlated with the prediction error for either pleasant pictures or unpleasant pictures, whereas the precuneus was correlated with prediction errors for both pleasant and unpleasant pictures.
authors.affiliation: ERATO, Okanoya Emotional Information Project, Japan Science Technology Agency, Wako, Saitama, Japan; Emotional Information Joint Research Laboratory, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, Japan; katahira@lit.nagoya-u.ac.jp.
authors.forename: Kentaro
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Katahira
authors.affiliation: ERATO, Okanoya Emotional Information Project, Japan Science Technology Agency, Wako, Saitama, Japan; Emotional Information Joint Research Laboratory, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, Japan;
authors.forename: Yoshi-Taka
authors.initials: YT
authors.lastname: Matsuda
authors.affiliation: ERATO, Okanoya Emotional Information Project, Japan Science Technology Agency, Wako, Saitama, Japan; Emotional Information Joint Research Laboratory, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, Japan;
authors.forename: Tomomi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Fujimura
authors.affiliation: Support Unit for Functional MRI, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, Japan;
authors.forename: Kenichi
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ueno
authors.affiliation: Support Unit for Functional MRI, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, Japan;
authors.forename: Takeshi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Asamizuya
authors.affiliation: Support Unit for Functional MRI, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, Japan;
authors.forename: Chisato
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Suzuki
authors.affiliation: Support Unit for Functional MRI, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, Japan;
authors.forename: Kang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: ERATO, Okanoya Emotional Information Project, Japan Science Technology Agency, Wako, Saitama, Japan; Emotional Information Joint Research Laboratory, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, Japan; Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan; and.
authors.forename: Kazuo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Okanoya
authors.affiliation: ERATO, Okanoya Emotional Information Project, Japan Science Technology Agency, Wako, Saitama, Japan; Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Chiba, Japan.
authors.forename: Masato
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Okada
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000098:blood supply / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010100:Oxygen / Q000097:blood; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D010100:Oxygen
keywords: emotional pictures; insula; reinforcement learning; striatum; valence