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Neural correlates of dueling affective reactions to win-win choices.

ABSTRACT: Win-win choices cause anxiety, often more so than decisions lacking the opportunity for a highly desired outcome. These anxious feelings can paradoxically co-occur with positive feelings, raising important implications for individual decision styles and general well-being. Across three studies, people chose between products that varied in personal value. Participants reported feeling most positive and most anxious when choosing between similarly high-valued products. Behavioral and neural results suggested that this paradoxical experience resulted from parallel evaluations of the expected outcome (inducing positive affect) versus the cost of choosing a response (inducing anxiety). Positive feelings were reduced when there was no high-value option, and anxiety was reduced when only one option was highly valued. Dissociable regions within the striatum and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) tracked these dueling affective reactions during choice. Ventral regions, associated with stimulus valuation, tracked positive feelings and the value of the best item. Dorsal regions, associated with response valuation, tracked anxiety. In addition to tracking anxiety, the dorsal mPFC was associated with conflict during the current choice, and activity levels across individual items predicted whether that choice would later be reversed during an unexpected reevaluation phase. By revealing how win-win decisions elicit responses in dissociable brain systems, these results help resolve the paradox of win-win choices. They also provide insight into behaviors that are associated with these two forms of affect, such as why we are pulled toward good options but may still decide to delay or avoid choosing among them.

SUBMITTER: Shenhav A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4121780 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Neural correlates of dueling affective reactions to win-win choices.

Shenhav Amitai A Buckner Randy L RL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20140714 30

Win-win choices cause anxiety, often more so than decisions lacking the opportunity for a highly desired outcome. These anxious feelings can paradoxically co-occur with positive feelings, raising important implications for individual decision styles and general well-being. Across three studies, people chose between products that varied in personal value. Participants reported feeling most positive and most anxious when choosing between similarly high-valued products. Behavioral and neural result ...[more]

PMID: 25024178

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Project description:Appropriate social behavior in aggressive-provocative interactions is a prerequisite for a peaceful life. In previous research, the dysfunctions of the control of aggression were suggested to be modulated by enhanced bottom-up (sub-cortically driven) and reduced top-down (iso-cortical frontal) processing capability. In the present study, two groups of individuals with enhanced (EG) and normal (NG) experiences of violent acts during their socialization made binary behavioral decisions in quasi-realistic social interactions. These interactions were presented in short video clips taken from a first-person perspective. The video clips showed social interaction scenarios oriented on realistic everyday life situations. The behavioral data supported the distinct affective qualities of three categories of social interactions. These categories were labeled as aggressive-provocative, social-positive, and neutral-social interactions. Functional neuroimaging data showed extended activation patterns and higher signal intensity for the NG compared to the EG in the lateral inferior frontal brain regions for the aggressive provocative interactions. Furthermore, the peri-aqueductal gray (PAG) produced enhanced activations for the affective interaction scenarios (i.e., aggressive-provocative and social-positive) in both groups and as a trend with the medium effect size for the neutral interactions in the EG. As the individuals in the EG did not show open aggression during the functional MRIA (fMRI) investigation, we concluded that they applied individual self-control strategies to regulate their aggressive impulses immediately. These strategies appeared to be top-down regulated through the dorsal frontal brain areas. The predominant recruitment of the heteromodal cortices during the neural processing of complex social interactions pointed to the important role of the learning history of individuals and their socialization with differing levels of violent experiences as crucial modulators in convicts. Our data suggest that building or strengthening the association between prototypical social contexts (e.g., aggressive-provocative interactions) and appropriate behaviors as a response to it provides a promising approach to successfully re-socialize people with a delinquent history.

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Neural correlates of dueling affective reactions to win-win choices.

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Neural correlates of dueling affective reactions to win-win choices.

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