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.

Social embodiment in directional stepping behavior

“…As evidence of this, Marsh et al (2005) found that participants were faster to push a joystick (''avoidance'') than to pull a joystick (''approach'') in response to angry faces by a difference of 65 ms. Similar effects have been found by Roelofs et al (2009a), Volman et al (2011), (Von Borries et al 2012, Seidel et al (2010), and also-in a group of socially anxious individuals-by Heuer et al (2007). However, conflicting results exist in the literature, as some researchers have found facilitation of approach behaviors toward fearful faces (Marsh et al 2005) and toward angry faces (Adams et al 2006).…”

“…In fact, a number of recent studies have used the approachavoidance methodology to assess automatic influences of task-irrelevant stimulus features on performance. Roelofs et al (2009a) performed a control experiment, whereby they adopted a gender identification task in which subjects had to perform push/pull movements in response to the gender of a face (male/female). Importantly, the faces were either smiling, or they were angry.…”

Affect-biased attention as emotion regulation

“…Some emotional facial expressions are thought to elicit overlearned action tendencies either to act or refrain from acting, or to approach or withdraw [48,49] -forms of reflexive post-stimulus control. In young adults, a region of lateral OFC has been found to be active when a required response (e.g., withdraw) is incongruent with the action tendency signaled by a previously presented face (e.g., smiling).…”

The role of automatic defensive responses in the development of posttraumatic stress symptoms in police recruits: protocol of a prospective study

“…In the second behavioural and psychophysiological session, a probabilistic reversal learning task (Den Ouden et al, 2013) and fear conditioning retention test are administered, to test cognitive flexibility and fear retention from the previous fear-conditioning task, respectively. Finally, during the second fMRI session, (neural) control over emotional actions is investigated with an approach–avoidance task (Roelofs, Minelli, Mars, Van Peer, & Toni, 2009), and resting-state scans are obtained before and after stress induction (Vogel et al, 2015), to assess stress-related alterations in resting-state networks. Saliva samples for endocrinological analyses are collected before the second MRI session, and at several time-points before and after the stress induction to assess stress reactivity.…”

“…To test whether (development of) PTSD symptoms is associated with reduced (neural) control over automatic action tendencies to approach positive (happy) and avoid negative (angry) emotional faces, we administer the approach–avoidance task (AAT) during functional MRI scanning (Roelofs et al, 2009). During affect-congruent trials, participants should approach happy faces and avoid angry faces, by pulling a joystick towards themselves or pushing a joystick away, respectively.…”