| dc.description.abstract | Reward-related events seldom occur in isolation in our everyday lives — a component of emotion processing remains intertwined in many cases. For instance, individuals often work under hostile conditions for higher pay or promotion. In such situations, values associated with both reward and emotion must be integrated for optimal goal-directed behaviour. However, the behavioural and neural evidence underlying reward-emotion integration has been relatively mixed. Moreover, emotion could have a distinct impact depending upon the specific psychological stage of reward processing - anticipation vs. consumption. Our work delved into investigating the neural and behavioural mechanisms underlying the impact of emotion on monetary reward processing. Specifically, we studied the influence of emotion on the two distinct psychological stages of reward processing, especially when their associated values conflict with each other.
In our first functional MRI (fMRI) study (Jaiswal et al., 2024), we examined how appetitive emotion influences monetary loss outcome processing during a choice task. We employed a novel experimental design where the valence (positive or neutral) of an emotional stimulus indicated the type of outcome (loss or no loss). Specifically, we probed two plausible integration patterns while processing conflicting value signals involving positive emotion and monetary losses: interactive vs. additive. Our findings revealed the additive integration pattern of monetary loss and positive emotion outcomes in multiple brain regions, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, striatum, and amygdala, suggesting that the experienced value of the monetary loss was not modulated by the valence of the image signalling those outcomes. Our second fMRI study (Jaiswal et al., 2025) investigated how aversive emotion impacts reward anticipation and shapes subsequent task-related processing and associated behaviour. We employed a variant of the classic monetary incentive delay task where the valence (negative or neutral) of an emotional scene image served as a cue to indicate a reward or no-reward prospect in the subsequent perceptual discrimination task. During the initial Cue stage, we found independent neural signatures of reward (vs. no-reward) anticipation in the ventral striatum (VS) and negative (vs. neutral) emotion in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and amygdala, with a lack of evidence for their interaction. Notably, during the subsequent Task stage, we detected an emotion-by-reward interaction, wherein reward-driven enhancements in task-related processing were attenuated in the case of negative (vs. neutral) cue images. Furthermore, the emotion-by-reward interaction scores and behavioural reaction times were correlated across participants. These findings indicate that negative emotion and reward anticipation, which were largely segregated during the Cue stage, interactively modulated subsequent visual perception, thus potentially influencing behaviour. For our third project, we examined the multivariate pattern representations of the conflicting reward-emotion value signals in the ventral visual cortex. We observed independent representations of reward and emotion-related information across most of these higher-order visual areas except for some evidence of interaction between the two, alluding to the representation of conflicting value signals beyond just the core evaluative regions.
Overall, these studies contribute to our limited understanding of the nature of interactions between conflicting reward-emotion signals in the healthy human brain with potential clinical relevance. | en_US |
