Parsing neural mechanisms of social and physical risk identifications

Abstract

Psychometric studies of risk perception have categorized personal risks into social and physical domains. To investigate whether and how the human brain differentiates social and physical risks, we scanned human adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging when they identified potential risks involved in social and physical behaviors. We found that the identification of risky behaviors in both domains induced increased activations in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC, BA9/10)/ventral anterior cingulate (ACC) and posterior cingulate (PCC) relative to identification of safe behaviors. However, social risks induced stronger anterior MPFC activation whereas physical risks were associated with stronger ventral ACC activity. In addition, anterior MPFC activity was negatively correlated with the rating scores of the degree of social risk whereas PCC activity was positively correlated with the rating scores of the degree of physical risk. Relative to an autobiographical control task, the social risk identification task induced stronger sustained activity in the left supplementary motor area/dorsal ACC and increased transient activity in bilateral posterior insula. The physical risk identification task, however, resulted in stronger sustained activity in the right cuneus/precuneus and increased transient activation in bilateral amygdala. Our results indicate the existence of distinct neural mechanisms underlying social and physical risk identifications and provide neural bases for the psychometric categorization of risks into different domains.

Moral Judgments Recruit Domain-General Valuation Mechanisms to Integrate Representations of Probability and Magnitude

“…Also consistent with studies of economic decision making (Knutson et al, 2005;Tom et al, 2007), we found that BOLD signal in regions of central insula, dorsal striatum, and anterior and posterior cingulate cortices was sensitive to the magnitude of the potential loss/gain associated with decision options. Also consistent with previous studies of decision making (particularly ones involving the assessment of risk) (Paulus et al, 2003;Qin and Han, 2009), we found that BOLD signal in the left posterior insula was sensitive to the probability of loss/gain associated with decision options. Among the key limitations of the present paradigm is that valence at encoding cannot be determined based on the task alone.…”

Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying deceptive hazard evaluation: An event-related potentials investigation

“…Furthermore, there is well established literature showing that hazardous/risky information is processed differently from safe information in the brain [ 24 – 31 ]. Hazardous/risky information, in contrast to safe information, has been found to elicit stronger activations in medial prefrontal cortex [ 24 , 25 , 31 ], anterior insula[ 29 , 31 ], ventral anterior cingulate cortex and posterior cingulate cortex[ 24 – 26 , 29 ], etc. Meanwhile, ERPs studies suggested that hazardous/risky information evoke larger P200 and LPP amplitudes than safe information [ 26 – 28 ].…”

Deep Brain Stimulation of Nucleus Accumbens Region in Alcoholism Affects Reward Processing

“…The precuneus has been tightly linked to evidence accumulation in decision making situations [52] , in particular in unpredictable situations [53] . Accordingly, the precuneus is also reported to be active during risky decisions [54] , [55] and the identification of risk [56] . With respect to the present investigation active NAcc-DBS seems to increase activation in cortical areas which are necessary for identifying situations that are (potentially) disadvantageous.…”