The role of Prefrontal Cortex in a Battle of the Sexes Dilemma involving a Conflict between Tribal and Romantic love

Abstract

The neural basis of dilemmas involving decisions with profound affective impact, such as in romantic life, remains to be understood. The “Battle of the Sexes” is a paradigm from Game Theory that can be used to experimentally address such dilemmas. A form of in-group love, tribal love in football fans, provides the opportunity to study strong affective dilemmas when tribal and romantic love compete for hedonic decision-making. Here, we used for the first time a “Battle of the Sexes” dilemma using fMRI. We investigated, in 44 male football fans, the neural correlates of cooperative behaviour under conflicting choices in the context of romantic versus tribal love. We identified a critical functional segregation of prefrontal regions in affective decision-making. The orbitofrontal cortex signalled emotional appraisal of the dilemma. The medial anterolateral and the ventromedial prefrontal cortices reflected reciprocal cooperation instead of selfish engagement in football-related activities. The lateral portion of anterolateral prefrontal cortex was recruited during ultimate deliberation. In sum, emotional appraisal and rational choice reflected a contiguous functional parcellation in anterolateral prefrontal cortex: appraisal (medial) vs. choice (lateral region).

Ventral Caudate and Anterior Insula Recruitment During Value Estimation of Passionate Rewarding Cues

“…These regions included the medial prefrontal cortex, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. The type of value estimation studied here was quite unique due to involving an ingroup belongingness-related cue that was experimentally established in previous studies (Bortolini et al, 2017;Duarte et al, 2017Duarte et al, , 2018. The estimation of a tradeoff between the expected hedonic value and the monetary cost, reflecting some kind of emotional decision utility, is quite present in the life of the selected participants, who often make similar decisions on a weekly basis.…”

“…The two teams were playing in the Portuguese First League at the time of the acquisitions. The group is the same cohort as in Duarte et al (2017Duarte et al ( , 2018, and as described there, participants completed two assessments: one to assess personal identification with the team [Sport Spectator Identification Scale, SSIS (Wann and Branscombe, 1993;Theodorakis et al, 2010)] and another to assess fanaticism for football [Football Supporter Fanaticism Scale, FSFS (Wachelke et al, 2008)]; both used a 1-5 Likert scale. Note that in a same-day study (Duarte et al, 2017), activity in the ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra, amygdala, putamen, pallidum, and insula showed to be correlated with FSFS for nearly the same cohort of participants (55 participants shared between both studies).…”

“…In the present work, we aim to understand the neural correlates of value estimation in the context of ingroup belongingness. To achieve that goal, we used sports fandom as an ecological context in which to study group belongingness as a motivational factor (Bortolini et al, 2017;Duarte et al, 2018). We asked 57 football fans to rate football match tickets during fMRI.…”

Football brand managers perspectives how to deal with fans emotions

“…The average time of each interview was 90 minutes. These interviews are part of a project that includes fMRI sessions with football fans and football brand managers (Duarte et al, 2017;Duarte, Brito-Costa, Cayolla, & Castelo-Branco, 2018;Duarte et al, 2020).…”

What is the Role of Memory in Consumer–Brand Relationship? Insight from sport industry

“…Neural research has been conducted in several areas (e.g., advertising, marketing and consumer behaviour) (Duarte et al, 2020), and brand love is one important part of consumer brand memories (Bagozzi et al, 2017). Fan identity is a new approach in sport management (Biscaia et al, 2018), and neural studies in sport are limited and being poorly interpreted (Duarte et al, 2018). Therefore, what is the role of memory in consumer–brand relationship?…”