scholarly journals Characterizing Different Strategies for Resolving Approach-Avoidance Conflict

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hector Bravo-Rivera ◽  
Patricia Rubio Arzola ◽  
Albit Caban-Murillo ◽  
Adriana N. Vélez-Avilés ◽  
Shantée N. Ayala-Rosario ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Ventral Striatum ◽  
Behavioral Flexibility ◽  
Simple Approach ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Early Gene ◽  
Conflict Task ◽  
Midline Thalamus ◽  
Approach Avoidance ◽  
Increased Activity

The ability of animals to maximize benefits and minimize costs during approach-avoidance conflicts is an important evolutionary tool, but little is known about the emergence of specific strategies for conflict resolution. Accordingly, we developed a simple approach-avoidance conflict task in rats that pits the motivation to press a lever for sucrose against the motivation to step onto a distant platform to avoid a footshock delivered at the end of a 30 s tone (sucrose is available only during the tone). Rats received conflict training for 16 days to give them a chance to optimize their strategy by learning to properly time the expression of both behaviors across the tone. Rats unexpectedly separated into three distinct subgroups: those pressing early in the tone and avoiding later (Timers, 49%); those avoiding throughout the tone (Avoidance-preferring, 32%); and those pressing throughout the tone (Approach-preferring, 19%). The immediate early gene cFos revealed that Timers showed increased activity in the ventral striatum and midline thalamus relative to the other two subgroups, Avoidance-preferring rats showed increased activity in the amygdala, and Approach-preferring rats showed decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. This pattern is consistent with low fear and high behavioral flexibility in Timers, suggesting the potential of this task to reveal the neural mechanisms of conflict resolution.

scholarly journals Neural correlates of beauty retouching to enhance attractiveness of self-depictions in women

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chisa Ota ◽  
Tamami Nakano
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Facial Attractiveness ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Resonance Imaging ◽  
Amygdala Activity ◽  
Increased Activity

AbstractBeauty filters, while often employed for retouching photos to appear more attractive on social media, when used in excess cause images to give a distorted impression. The neural mechanisms underlying this change in facial attractiveness according to beauty retouching level remain unknown. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging in women as they viewed photos of their own face or unknown faces that had been retouched at three levels: no, mild, and extreme. The activity in the nucleus accumbens (NA) exhibited a positive correlation with facial attractiveness, whereas amygdala activity showed a negative correlation with attractiveness. Even though the participants rated others’ faces as more attractive than their own, the NA showed increased activity only for their mildly retouched own face and the amygdala exhibited greater activation in the others’ faces condition than the own face condition. Moreover, amygdala activity was greater for extremely retouched faces than for unretouched or mildly retouched faces for both conditions. Frontotemporal and cortical midline areas showed greater activation for one’s own than others’ faces, but such self-related activation was absent when extremely retouched. These results suggest that neural activity dynamically switches between the NA and amygdala according to perceived attractiveness of one’s face.

scholarly journals Finding Positive Meaning in Negative Experiences Engages Ventral Striatal and Ventromedial Prefrontal Regions Associated with Reward Valuation

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce P. Doré ◽  
Chelsea Boccagno ◽  
Daisy Burr ◽  
Alexa Hubbard ◽  
Kan Long ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Ventral Striatum ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Positive Reappraisal ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Negative Experiences ◽  
Positive Meaning ◽  
And Control ◽  
Reward Valuation ◽  
Increased Activity

Neuroimaging research has identified systems that facilitate minimizing negative emotion, but how the brain is able to transform the valence of an emotional response from negative to positive is unclear. Behavioral and psychophysiological studies suggest a distinction between minimizing reappraisal, which entails diminishing the arousal elicited by negative stimuli, and positive reappraisal, which instead changes the emotional valence of arousal from negative to positive. Here we show that successful minimizing reappraisal tracked with decreased activity in the amygdala, but successful positive reappraisal tracked with increased activity in regions involved in computing reward value, including the ventral striatum and ventromedial pFC (vmPFC). Moreover, positive reappraisal enhanced positive connectivity between vmPFC and amygdala, and individual differences in positive connectivity between vmPFC and amygdala, ventral striatum, dorsomedial pFC, and dorsolateral pFC predicted greater positive reappraisal success. These data broaden models of emotion regulation as quantitative dampening of negative emotion and identify activity in a network of brain valuation, arousal, and control regions as a neural basis for the ability to create positive meaning from negative experiences.

scholarly journals Shared striatal activity in decisions to satisfy curiosity and hunger at the risk of electric shocks

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnny King L Lau ◽  
Hiroki Ozono ◽  
Kei Kuratomi ◽  
Asuka Komiya ◽  
Kou Murayama
Keyword(s):  
Ventral Striatum ◽  
Dorsal Striatum ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Instrumental Value ◽  
Motivational Effect ◽  
Enhanced Activity ◽  
Electric Shocks ◽  
Desirable Feature

AbstractCuriosity is often portrayed as a desirable feature of human faculty. However, curiosity may come at a cost that sometimes puts people in a harmful situation. Here, with a set of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments using stimuli that strongly trigger curiosity (e.g., magic tricks), we examined the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the motivational effect of curiosity. We consistently demonstrated that across different samples, people were indeed willing to gamble, subjecting themselves to physical risks (i.e. electric shocks) in order to satisfy their curiosity for trivial knowledge that carries no apparent instrumental value. Also, this influence of curiosity shares common neural mechanisms with that of extrinsic incentives (i.e. hunger for food). In particular, we showed that acceptance (compared to rejection) of curiosity/incentive-driven gambles was accompanied by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum (when curiosity was elicited), which extended into the dorsal striatum (when participants made a decision).

Perspective-taking influences autonomic attunement between partners during discussion of conflict

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin W. Nelson ◽  
Sean M. Laurent ◽  
Rosemary Bernstein ◽  
Heidemarie K. Laurent
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Romantic Partners ◽  
Autonomic Nervous System Activity ◽  
Conflict Task ◽  
Female Partners ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Nervous System Activity ◽  
Secondary Analyses

This study investigated the effects of dispositional and experimentally induced perspective-taking (PT) on physiological attunement between romantic partners during a conflict resolution task. Young adult couples ( N = 103 dyads) rated their trait PT 1 week prior to participating in a conflict resolution session with their romantic partner. Immediately before the conflict task, participants were given one of the following three instructions: to take their partner’s perspective (PT condition), to approach the conflict mindfully (mindfulness condition), or to focus on their own perspective regarding the conflict (control condition). Participants provided four saliva samples over the course of the laboratory session, and the samples were assayed for alpha-amylase to measure autonomic nervous system activity. Multilevel modeling results revealed that couples in the PT condition displayed greater autonomic attunement over the course of the conflict session compared to those in the other conditions. In addition, female partners’ dispositional PT enhanced the effect of the PT induction on couples’ attunement. Furthermore, secondary analyses provided support for the beneficial role of autonomic attunement. Specifically, attunement was decreased by negative conflict behaviors and predicted increased post-conflict negative affect in females. Implications for dyadic functioning and intervention are discussed.

scholarly journals Characterization of decision commitment rule alterations during an auditory change detection task

2017 ◽  
Vol 118 (5) ◽  
pp. 2526-2536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridgette Johnson ◽  
Rebeka Verma ◽  
Manying Sun ◽  
Timothy D. Hanks
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Change Detection ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Behavioral Flexibility ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Stopping Rules ◽  
Change Detection Task ◽  
Decision Strategy ◽  
Auditory Change Detection

A critical component of decision making is determining when to commit to a choice. This involves stopping rules that specify the requirements for decision commitment. Flexibility of decision stopping rules provides an important means of control over decision-making processes. In many situations, these stopping rules establish a balance between premature decisions and late decisions. In this study we use a novel change detection paradigm to examine how subjects control this balance when invoking different decision stopping rules. The task design allows us to estimate the temporal weighting of sensory information for the decisions, and we find that different stopping rules did not result in systematic differences in that weighting. We also find bidirectional post-error alterations of decision strategy that depend on the type of error and effectively reduce the probability of making consecutive mistakes of the same type. This is a generalization to change detection tasks of the widespread observation of unidirectional post-error slowing in forced-choice tasks. On the basis of these results, we suggest change detection tasks as a promising paradigm to study the neural mechanisms that support flexible control of decision rules. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Flexible decision stopping rules confer control over decision processes. Using an auditory change detection task, we found that alterations of decision stopping rules did not result in systematic changes in the temporal weighting of sensory information. We also found that post-error alterations of decision stopping rules depended on the type of mistake subjects make. These results provide guidance for understanding the neural mechanisms that control decision stopping rules, one of the critical components of decision making and behavioral flexibility.

Memory Repression: Brain Mechanisms underlying Dissociative Amnesia

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 602-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hirokazu Kikuchi ◽  
Toshikatsu Fujii ◽  
Nobuhito Abe ◽  
Maki Suzuki ◽  
Masahito Takagi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Memory Retrieval ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Stressful Event ◽  
Memory Impairments ◽  
Dissociative Amnesia ◽  
And Control ◽  
Increased Activity ◽  
With Memory

Dissociative amnesia usually follows a stressful event and cannot be attributable to explicit brain damage. It is thought to reflect a reversible deficit in memory retrieval probably due to memory repression. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this condition are not clear. We used fMRI to investigate neural activity associated with memory retrieval in two patients with dissociative amnesia. For each patient, three categories of face photographs and three categories of people's names corresponding to the photographs were prepared: those of “recognizable” high school friends who were acquainted with and recognizable to the patients, those of “unrecognizable” colleagues who were actually acquainted with but unrecognizable to the patients due to their memory impairments, and “control” distracters who were unacquainted with the patients. During fMRI, the patients were visually presented with these stimuli and asked to indicate whether they were personally acquainted with them. In the comparison of the unrecognizable condition with the recognizable condition, we found increased activity in the pFC and decreased activity in the hippocampus in both patients. After treatment for retrograde amnesia, the altered pattern of brain activation disappeared in one patient whose retrograde memories were recovered, whereas it remained unchanged in the other patient whose retrograde memories were not recovered. Our findings provide direct evidence that memory repression in dissociative amnesia is associated with an altered pattern of neural activity, and they suggest the possibility that the pFC has an important role in inhibiting the activity of the hippocampus in memory repression.

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