Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on November 30, 2008
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2009 4(1):50-58; doi:10.1093/scan/nsn036
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On the neural control of social emotional behavior
1Leiden University Institute for Psychological Research, Clinical, Health and Neuropsychology Unit, 2Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC), Leiden University, The Netherlands, 3Genetics Unit, IRCCS ‘Centro S. Giovanni di Dio’, Brescia, Italy, 4Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 5F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, and 6Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
It is known that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is crucially involved in emotion regulation. However, the specific role of the OFC in controlling the behavior evoked by these emotions, such as approach–avoidance (AA) responses, remains largely unexplored. We measured behavioral and neural responses (using fMRI) during the performance of a social task, a reaction time (RT) task where subjects approached or avoided visually presented emotional faces by pulling or pushing a joystick, respectively. RTs were longer for affect-incongruent responses (approach angry faces and avoid happy faces) as compared to affect-congruent responses (approach–happy; avoid–angry). Moreover, affect-incongruent responses recruited increased activity in the left lateral OFC. These behavioral and neural effects emerged only when the subjects responded explicitly to the emotional value of the faces (AA-task) and largely disappeared when subjects responded to an affectively irrelevant feature of the faces during a control (gender evaluation: GE) task. Most crucially, the size of the OFC-effect correlated positively with the size of the behavioral costs of approaching angry faces. These findings qualify the role of the lateral OFC in the voluntary control of social–motivational behavior, emphasizing the relevance of this region for selecting rule-driven stimulus–response associations, while overriding automatic (affect-congruent) stimulus–response mappings.
Keywords: orbitofrontal cortex; approach–avoidance; motivational behavior; angry facial expression; social–emotional behavior
Correspondence should be addressed to K. Roelofs, PO Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands. E-mail: roelofs{at}fsw.leidenuniv.nl
Received May 19, 2008. Accepted September 17, 2008.