Anticipating the good and the bad: A study on the neural correlates of bivalent emotion anticipation and their malleability via attentional deployment

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Johann D KruschwitzHenrik Walter

Abstract

In everyday life, we often deliberate about affective outcomes of decisions which can be described as ambivalent; i.e. positive and negative at the same time. For example, when looking forward to meet a dear friend at her/his favorite concert although one dislikes the music that is being performed. Thus, anticipation of bivalent emotions and their volitional regulation is an important ingredient of everyday choices. However, previous studies investigating neural substrates involved in anticipating emotional events mostly focused on anticipating either negative emotions (punishment) or positive emotions (reward) in isolation, thus inducing either of them separately. Furthermore, these studies rather focused on the effortful down-regulation of affect (i.e. reducing negative or positive affect), whereas such conflict situations may also require us to deploy attention on and thereby upregulate anticipated emotions in order to resolve a decision conflict (e.g., by focusing on positive consequences while orienting away from negative consequences of that same situation). To address this gap, we performed a series of three fMRI-experiments using simple visual and auditory stimuli in order to (i) determine the neural correlates involved...Continue Reading

Citations

Aug 29, 2020·Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science·Vera U LudwigJudson A Brewer

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