The biology of sacred values.

Frank Rose does a nice piece in the NYTimes, pointing to the work of Gregory Berns and others, on brain correlates of why financial incentives are irrelevant when “sacred values” are at stake. (As in the failure of financial incentives offered by the West in getting Iran to give up its “right” to enrich uranium for “peaceful” uses.) Attempts to offer money to get people to alter strongly held beliefs - with issues like gun control, abortion, Israeli or Palestinian rights to the West Bank of the Jordan - result in moral outrage, feelings of contamination, and a need for moral cleansing. Work by Berns and others suggests we have radically different ways of processing ordinary and sacred beliefs. Berns…

...took M.R.I. images of participants’ brains as he asked them to consider changing their personal beliefs in exchange for money. Would they trade their preference for dogs over cats? What about their belief in God? Would they be willing to kill an innocent person?

When participants were questioned about issues of the dog-or-cat variety, their brain scans showed activity in the parietal cortex — a region that’s thought to be involved in making cost-benefit calculations. But when asked about issues on which they declined to make a trade, entirely different parts of the brain were activated — systems that are associated with telling right from wrong and with storing and retrieving rules. The result, Professor Berns observes, could be a new way to gauge sacred values “that is not solely dependent on self-report.”

Are we going to start running international negotiators through an M.R.I. machine to see where they’re processing the issues? [and determine whether or not someone is faking it when they claim sacred values] Highly unlikely. But results like Professor Berns’s might at least disprove the idea, still held by many, that every belief has its price. Given the intensely negative emotions that financial incentives can trigger, this might be a good lesson to learn.

Here is the abstract from the Berns et al work "The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values" to which the above is referring. It gives a bit more detail on the brain correlates of sacred values:

Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian theory suggests that they are processed based on costs and benefits of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an individual naturally uses is unknown. The study of decisions over sacred values is difficult because outcomes cannot typically be realized in a laboratory, and hence little is known about the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We used an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred values affect behaviour through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.

A drug that alters dopamine receptors and risk-taking behaviors

Interesting observations from Norbury et al. on a drug that activates or enhances action of some dopamine receptors and also increases the probability of taking risky choices. (Maybe a receptor antagonist should be developed for hedge fund managers and investment bankers who keep crashing our economy!).

Trait sensation-seeking, defined as a need for varied, complex, and intense sensations, represents a relatively underexplored hedonic drive in human behavioral neuroscience research. It is related to increased risk for a range of behaviors including substance use, gambling, and risky sexual practice. Individual differences in self-reported sensation-seeking have been linked to brain dopamine function, particularly at D2-like receptors, but so far no causal evidence exists for a role of dopamine in sensation-seeking behavior in humans. Here, we investigated the effects of the selective D2/D3 agonist cabergoline on performance of a probabilistic risky choice task in healthy humans using a sensitive within-subject, placebo-controlled design. Cabergoline significantly influenced the way participants combined different explicit signals regarding probability and loss when choosing between response options associated with uncertain outcomes. Importantly, these effects were strongly dependent on baseline sensation-seeking score. Overall, cabergoline increased sensitivity of choice to information about probability of winning; while decreasing discrimination according to magnitude of potential losses associated with different options. The largest effects of the drug were observed in participants with lower sensation-seeking scores. These findings provide evidence that risk-taking behavior in humans can be directly manipulated by a dopaminergic drug, but that the effectiveness of such a manipulation depends on baseline differences in sensation-seeking trait. This emphasizes the importance of considering individual differences when investigating manipulation of risky decision-making, and may have relevance for the development of pharmacotherapies for disorders involving excessive risk-taking in humans, such as pathological gambling.

Dopamine, rewards, and the brain

The neurotransmitter dopamine is one we all seem to have heard about, claimed to be central to love, gambling, reward, addiction, etc. A recent article by Howe et al. shows a bit more nuance than previously assumed in what dopamine levels are signaling. They ramp up during navigation towards an expected reward. I thought I would pass on a clip from Niv's summary of their findings, followed by the Howe et al. abstract

a, Dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain project to all brain areas, most prominently to the striatum (black arrows). These cells fire at a constant rate of 3–5 spikes per second, with occasional phasic bursts or pauses on the occurrence of positive reward prediction errors (discovering that the local supermarket now supplies your favourite coffee beans, b) or negative reward prediction errors (sipping your coffee and finding that the milk has gone sour, c), respectively. The background (tonic) level of dopamine fluctuates slowly, possibly tracking the average rate of rewards (not shown). d, By measuring dopamine concentrations in the striatum of rats navigating mazes, Howe et al.1 reveal a third mode of dopaminergic signalling: when a prolonged series of actions must be completed to obtain a reward (for instance, all the steps it takes to make a cup of coffee), dopamine concentration ramps up gradually, at each point in time signalling the predicted distance from the goal.

The abstract:

Predictions about future rewarding events have a powerful influence on behaviour. The phasic spike activity of dopamine-containing neurons, and corresponding dopamine transients in the striatum, are thought to underlie these predictions, encoding positive and negative reward prediction errors. However, many behaviours are directed towards distant goals, for which transient signals may fail to provide sustained drive. Here we report an extended mode of reward-predictive dopamine signalling in the striatum that emerged as rats moved towards distant goals. These dopamine signals, which were detected with fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV), gradually increased or—in rare instances—decreased as the animals navigated mazes to reach remote rewards, rather than having phasic or steady tonic profiles. These dopamine increases (ramps) scaled flexibly with both the distance and size of the rewards. During learning, these dopamine signals showed spatial preferences for goals in different locations and readily changed in magnitude to reflect changing values of the distant rewards. Such prolonged dopamine signalling could provide sustained motivational drive, a control mechanism that may be important for normal behaviour and that can be impaired in a range of neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Personal control enhances treatment effectiveness.

An interesting fragment, relating to the powerful vs helplessness theme of a recent post, subjects faced with alternative pain control drugs (both actually placebos) reported better pain relief if they chose the drug rather than having it chosen for them. From Geers et al.:

In modern health care, individuals frequently exercise choice over health treatment alternatives. A growing body of research suggests that when individuals choose between treatment options, treatment effectiveness can increase, although little experimental evidence exists clarifying this effect. Four studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that exercising choice over treatment alternatives enhances outcomes by providing greater personal control. Consistent with this possibility, in Study 1 individuals who chronically desired control reported less pain from a laboratory pain task when they were able to select between placebo analgesic treatments. Study 2 replicated this finding with an auditory discomfort paradigm. In Study 3, the desire for control was experimentally induced, and participants with high desire for control benefited more from a placebo treatment when they were able to choose their treatment. Study 4 revealed that the benefit of choice on treatment efficacy was partially mediated by thoughts of personal control. This research suggests that when individuals desire control, choice over treatment alternatives improves treatment effectiveness by enhancing personal control.

Riding other people's coattails.

Another interesting bit from Psychological Science:

Two laboratory experiments and one dyadic study of ongoing relationships of romantic partners examined how temporary and chronic deficits in self-control affect individuals’ evaluations of other people. We suggest that when individuals lack self-control resources, they value such resources in other people. Our results support this hypothesis: We found that individuals low (but not high) in self-control use information about other people’s self-control abilities when judging them, evaluating other people with high self-control more positively than those with low self-control. In one study, participants whose self-control was depleted preferred people with higher self-control, whereas nondepleted participants did not show this preference. In a second study, we conceptually replicated this effect while using a behavioral measure of trait self-control. Finally, in a third study we found individuals with low (but not high) self-control reported greater dependence on dating partners with high self-control than on those with low self-control. We theorize that individuals with low self-control may use interpersonal relationships to compensate for their lack of personal self-control resources.

Overearning

Here is an interesting study from Hsee et al on our tendency to keeping working to earn more than we need for happiness, at the expense of that happiness.

Their abstract:

High productivity and high earning rates brought about by modern technologies make it possible for people to work less and enjoy more, yet many continue to work assiduously to earn more. Do people overearn—forgo leisure to work and earn beyond their needs? This question is understudied, partly because in real life, determining the right amount of earning and defining overearning are difficult. In this research, we introduced a minimalistic paradigm that allows researchers to study overearning in a controlled laboratory setting. Using this paradigm, we found that individuals do overearn, even at the cost of happiness, and that overearning is a result of mindless accumulation—a tendency to work and earn until feeling tired rather than until having enough. Supporting the mindless-accumulation notion, our results show, first, that individuals work about the same amount regardless of earning rates and hence are more likely to overearn when earning rates are high than when they are low, and second, that prompting individuals to consider the consequences of their earnings or denying them excessive earnings can disrupt mindless accumulation and enhance happiness.

And, their description of the paradigm used:

Participants are tested individually while seated at a table in front of a computer and wearing a headset. The procedure consists of two consecutive phases, each lasting 5 min. In Phase I, the participant can relax and listen to music (mimicking leisure) or press a key to disrupt the music and listen to a noise (mimicking work). For every certain number of times the participant listens to the noise (e.g., 20 times), he or she earns 1 chocolate; the computer keeps track and shows how many chocolates the participant has earned. The participant can only earn (not eat) the chocolates in Phase I and can only eat (and not earn more of) the chocolates in Phase II. The participant does not need to eat all of the earned chocolates in Phase II, but if any remain, they must be left on the table at the end of the study. Participants learn about these provisions in advance and are informed that they can decide how many chocolates to earn in Phase I and how many to eat in Phase II, and that their only objective is to make themselves as happy as possible during the experiment.

Our paradigm simulates a microcosmic life with a fixed life span; in the first half, one chooses between leisure and labor (earning), and in the second half, one consumes one’s earnings and may not bequeath them to others. In designing the paradigm, our priority was minimalism and controllability rather than realism and external validity. The paradigm was inspired by social scientists’ approaches to investigating complex real-world issues, such as unselfish motives, using minimalistic simulations, such as the ultimatum game. These simulations involve contrived features—for example, players cannot learn each other’s identities and need not worry about reputations—but such features are important because they allow researchers to control for normative reasons for unselfish behaviors and test for pure, unselfish motives. Likewise, our paradigm also involves contrived features—for example, rewards are chocolates rather than money, and participants cannot take their rewards from the lab—but these features are crucial for us to control for normative reasons for overearning effects and test for pure overearning tendencies.

Brain regions that predict and regulate risk-taking.

Two recent pieces of work raise the prospect of being able to predict and even regulate a person's risk-taking behavior, by first observing activity of the anterior cingulate cortex and then dialing it up or down.

First, Rudorf et al. show that behavioral risk preferences are reflected in the passive evaluation of risky situations:

"Individual risk preferences have a large influence on decisions, such as financial investments, career and health choices, or gambling. Decision making under risk has been studied both behaviorally and on a neural level. It remains unclear, however, how risk attitudes are encoded and integrated with choice. Here, we investigate how risk preferences are reflected in neural regions known to process risk. We collected functional magnetic resonance images of 56 human subjects during a gambling task (Preuschoff et al., 2006). Subjects were grouped into risk averters and risk seekers according to the risk preferences they revealed in a separate lottery task. We found that during the anticipation of high-risk gambles, risk averters show stronger responses in ventral striatum and anterior insula compared to risk seekers. In addition, risk prediction error signals in anterior insula, inferior frontal gyrus, and anterior cingulate indicate that risk averters do not dissociate properly between gambles that are more or less risky than expected. We suggest this may result in a general overestimation of prospective risk and lead to risk avoidance behavior. This is the first study to show that behavioral risk preferences are reflected in the passive evaluation of risky situations. The results have implications on public policies in the financial and health domain."

Figure: Anticipation risk coding. Neural activation in bilateral ventral striatum (vStr; top) and anterior insula (aIns; bottom) during anticipation of the second card that correlates with anticipation risk, i.e., expected outcome variance.

Second, Ishii et al. show (in mice) that inactivating anterior insular cortex suppresses risk-taking behavior:

"We often have to make risky decisions between alternatives with outcomes that can be better or worse than the outcomes of safer alternatives. Although previous studies have implicated various brain regions in risky decision making, it remains unknown which regions are crucial for balancing whether to take a risk or play it safe. Here, we focused on the anterior insular cortex (AIC), the causal involvement of which in risky decision making is still unclear, although human imaging studies have reported AIC activation in various gambling tasks. We investigated the effects of temporarily inactivating the AIC on rats' risk preference in two types of gambling tasks, one in which risk arose in reward amount and one in which it arose in reward delay. As a control within the same subjects, we inactivated the adjacent orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is well known to affect risk preference. In both gambling tasks, AIC inactivation decreased risk preference whereas OFC inactivation increased it. In risk-free control situations, AIC and OFC inactivations did not affect decision making. These results suggest that the AIC is causally involved in risky decision making and promotes risk taking. The AIC and OFC may be crucial for the opposing motives of whether to take a risk or avoid it."

Unpredictable love.

There's a nice pieces in the "Gray Matter" series in the New York Times by Richard Friedman that argues that it is our evolved motivational machinery (that drives us to seek unpredictable rewards - i.e., transient reinforcement) more strenuously than predictable ones, that underlies the fickleness of love.

Shakespeare warned women that “men were deceivers ever; one foot in sea and one on shore, to one thing constant never.”

...how commonly people complain that they love someone who always disappoints them...This kind of amorous attachment is like gambling — except that the currency is affection and sex. The key is that the reward is unanticipated, which makes it particularly powerful and alluring to our brains.

Many experiments have shown, in both animals and humans, that intermittent rewards cause more activation and dopamine release in the brain's reward circuits than predictable rewards.

The brain’s reward circuit has evolved over millions of years to enable us to recognize and extract various rewards from our environment that are critical to our survival, like food and a suitable sexual mate. Unlike predictable stimuli, unanticipated stimuli can tell us things about the world that we don’t yet know. And because they serve as a signal that a big reward might be close by, it is advantageous that novel stimuli command our attention.

The article centers on the work of psychiatrist Gregory Berns:

One of the curious things that Professor Berns found was that most of his subjects couldn’t tell the difference between the predictable or unpredictable condition in which the reward was given...Since unpredictable rewards cause more dopamine release than predictable ones and more dopamine means more pleasure, one implication of this study is that people experience more pleasure with unpredictable rewards than with predictable ones — but they may not be consciously aware of this fact...Not just that, but there was essentially no relationship between the subjects’ stated preferences and the observed activity in their reward circuit. This suggests that our reward pathways may not only be activated without our recognition, but perhaps even in ways that are contrary to what we think we prefer...These data might explain, in part, the paradox of people who complain constantly about their unreliable lovers, but keep coming back to them, time and again.

Young children and adults: intrinsically motivated to see others helped

This interesting piece from Tomasello and collaborators:

Young children help other people, but it is not clear why. In the current study, we found that 2-year-old children’s sympathetic arousal, as measured by relative changes in pupil dilation, is similar when they themselves help a person and when they see that person being helped by a third party (and sympathetic arousal in both cases is different from that when the person is not being helped at all). These results demonstrate that the intrinsic motivation for young children’s helping behavior does not require that they perform the behavior themselves and thus “get credit” for it, but rather requires only that the other person be helped. Thus, from an early age, humans seem to have genuine concern for the welfare of others.

And, Rand et al. use economic games with adult subjects to demonstrate that cooperation is intuitive, because cooperative heuristics are developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. This data adds to Kahneman's recent summary of evidence that much of human decision-making is governed by fast and automatic intuitions, rather than by slow, effortful thinking (see Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Allen Lane, 2011). The Rand et al. abstract

Cooperation is central to human social behaviour. However, choosing to cooperate requires individuals to incur a personal cost to benefit others. Here we explore the cognitive basis of cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual-process framework. We ask whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring ‘rational’ self-interest. To investigate this issue, we perform ten studies using economic games. We find that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions. Finally, an induction that primes subjects to trust their intuitions increases contributions compared with an induction that promotes greater reflection. To explain these results, we propose that cooperation is intuitive because cooperative heuristics are developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. We then validate predictions generated by this proposed mechanism. Our results provide convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, and that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.

Regulators of prosocial and empathetic behavior.

Two pieces in the September issue of Psychological Science deal with empathetic or prosocial behavior. Grant and Dutton make observations showing that prosocial behavior is boosted more by reflecting on giving than on receiving; and Lewis et al.'s experiments give a example of how stereotypes enhance empathetic accuracy.

Grant and Dutton:

Research shows that reflecting on benefits received can make people happier, but it is unclear whether or not such reflection makes them more helpful. Receiving benefits can promote prosocial behavior through reciprocity and positive affect, but these effects are often relationship-specific, short-lived, and complicated by ambivalent reactions. We propose that prosocial behavior is more likely when people reflect on being a benefactor to others, rather than a beneficiary. The experience of giving benefits may encourage prosocial behavior by increasing the salience and strength of one’s identity as a capable, caring contributor. In field and laboratory experiments, we found that participants who reflected about giving benefits voluntarily contributed more time to their university, and were more likely to donate money to natural-disaster victims, than were participants who reflected about receiving benefits. When it comes to reflection, giving may be more powerful than receiving as a driver of prosocial behavior.

Lewis et al.:

An ideal empathizer may attend to another person’s behavior in order to understand that person, but it is also possible that accurately understanding other people involves top-down strategies. We hypothesized that perceivers draw on stereotypes to infer other people’s thoughts and that stereotype use increases perceivers’ accuracy. In this study, perceivers (N = 161) inferred the thoughts of multiple targets. Inferences consistent with stereotypes for the targets’ group (new mothers) more accurately captured targets’ thoughts, particularly when actual thought content was also stereotypic. We also decomposed variance in empathic accuracy into thought, target, and perceiver variance. Although past research has frequently focused on variance between perceivers or targets (which assumes individual differences in the ability to understand other people or be understood, respectively), the current study showed that the most substantial variance was found within targets because of differences among thoughts.

Interpersonal closeness and brain social reward processing

I'm passing on a graphic from Vrticka's comments on recent work by Farei et al., who have observed brain activation patterns associated with sharing positive outcomes with a friends, that are also mirrored in high subjective ratings of excitement and high skin conductance responses during the same condition, reflecting increased biological arousal.

Illustration of the dynamic “push–pull” between social approach and aversion in the affective processing module of human social interaction. According to the phylogenetic perspective of social engagement and attachment proposed by Porges, human social functioning is determined by two opposite emotional brain systems representing positive (social approach; purple) versus negative (social aversion; blue) information. Whereas the social approach module mainly includes dopaminergic pathways (ventral tegmental area, striatum, ventral medial orbitofrontal cortex), as well as the pituitary/hypothalamus as the main site of oxytocin synthesis, the social aversion module operates through brain areas involved in fear/threat (amygdala), stress (hippocampus), disgust/empathy for pain/social rejection (insula and anterior cingulate cortex), and sadness (anterior temporal pole).

Here is the Farei et al. abstract:

Everyday goals and experiences are often shared with others who may hold different places within our social networks. We investigated whether the experience of sharing a reward differs with respect to social network. Twenty human participants played a card guessing game for shared monetary outcomes with three partners: a computer, a confederate (out of network), and a friend (in network). Participants subjectively rated the experience of sharing a reward more positively with their friends than the other partners. Neuroimaging results support participants' subjective reports, as ventral striatal BOLD responses were more robust when sharing monetary gains with a friend as compared to the confederate or computer, suggesting a higher value for sharing with an in-network partner. Interestingly, ratings of social closeness covaried with this activity, resulting in a significant partner × closeness interaction; exploratory analysis showed that only participants reporting higher levels of closeness demonstrated partner-related differences in striatal BOLD response. These results suggest that reward valuation in social contexts is sensitive to distinctions of social network, such that sharing positive experiences with in-network others may carry higher value.

Motivation influences how time flies when you’re having fun.

Numerous studies have shown that a positive state, relative to a negative state, makes time appear to pass more quickly and causes assessments of elapsed time to be shorter. Gable and Pool examine how the degree of motivation - as distinguished from positive or negative valence (as in approach versus withdrawal) - influences subjective time:

Time flies when you’re having fun, but what is it about pleasant experiences that makes time seem to go by faster? In the experiments reported here, we tested the proposal that approach motivation causes perceptual shortening of time during pleasant experiences. A first experiment showed that, relative to a neutral state or a positive state with low approach motivation, a positive state with high approach motivation shortened perceptions of time. Also, individual differences in approach motivation predicted shorter perceptions of time. In a second experiment we manipulated approach motivation independently of the affective state and showed that increasing approach motivation caused time to be perceived as passing more quickly. Finally we showed that positive approach motivation, as opposed to arousal, shortens perception of time by comparing a highly arousing positive state with a highly arousing negative state. Shortening of time perception in appetitive states may prolong approach-motivated behavior and increase the likelihood of acquiring appetitive objects or goals.

Compassion towards one person generalizes to others.

DeSteno does a NYTimes OpEd piece to point to his papers in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychyology (PDF here) and the journal Emotion (PDF here). Clips:

Whether it’s the parable of the good Samaritan in Christianity, Judaism’s “13 attributes of compassion” or the Buddha’s statement that “loving kindness and compassion is all of our practice,” empathy with the suffering of others is seen as a special virtue that has the power to change the world. This idea is often articulated by the Dalai Lama, who argues that individual experiences of compassion radiate outward and increase harmony for all.

...does the experience of compassion toward one person measurably affect our actions and attitudes toward other people? If so, are there practical steps we can take to further cultivate this feeling? Recently, my colleagues and I conducted experiments that answered yes to both questions.

The links provided give the details of the experiments, here are the abstracts, first on the generalization of compassion:

The ability of compassion felt toward one person to reduce punishment directed at another was examined. The use of a staged interaction in which one individual cheats to earn higher compensation than others resulted in heightened third-party punishment being directed at the cheater. However, among participants who were induced to feel compassion toward a separate individual, punishment of the cheater disappeared even though the cheater clearly intended to cheat and showed no remorse for doing so. Moreover, additional analyses revealed that the reduction in punishment was directly mediated by the amount of compassion participants experienced toward the separate individual.

And second, on a technique to foster compassion:

Although evidence has suggested that synchronized movement can foster cooperation, the ability of synchrony to increase costly altruism and to operate as a function of emotional mechanisms remains unexplored. We predicted that synchrony, due to an ability to elicit low-level appraisals of similarity, would enhance a basic compassionate response toward victims of moral transgressions and thereby increase subsequent costly helping behavior on their behalf. Using a manipulation of rhythmic synchrony, we show that synchronous others are not only perceived to be more similar to oneself but also evoke more compassion and altruistic behavior than asynchronous others experiencing the same plight. These findings both support the view that a primary function of synchrony is to mark others as similar to the self and provide the first empirical demonstration that synchrony-induced affiliation modulates emotional responding and altruism.

Serotonin modulates reward value in our decision making.

Seymour et al. find further behavioral and neural evidence that serotonin modulates (is necessary for) distinct behavioral and anatomical components of decision-making. Most surprising is their observation of a strongly positive dependence of reward outcome value on serotonin signaling, with corresponding cue-value-related activity in vmPFC and prediction-error-related activity in dorsolateral putamen (for errors). This value-dependent effect was behaviorally and anatomically distinct from an effect of serotonin on behavioral flexibility, as indicated by choice perseveration. Here is their abstract:

Establishing a function for the neuromodulator serotonin in human decision-making has proved remarkably difficult because if its complex role in reward and punishment processing. In a novel choice task where actions led concurrently and independently to the stochastic delivery of both money and pain, we studied the impact of decreased brain serotonin induced by acute dietary tryptophan depletion. Depletion selectively impaired both behavioral and neural representations of reward outcome value, and hence the effective exchange rate by which rewards and punishments were compared. This effect was computationally and anatomically distinct from a separate effect on increasing outcome-independent choice perseveration. Our results provide evidence for a surprising role for serotonin in reward processing, while illustrating its complex and multifarious effects.

Both mental and physical effort rise from deep sub-cortical structures.

Schmidt et al. show that a common motivational system within the basala ganglia underlies performance of both mental and physical efforts.

Mental and physical efforts, such as paying attention and lifting weights, have been shown to involve different brain systems. These cognitive and motor systems, respectively, include cortical networks (prefronto-parietal and precentral regions) as well as subregions of the dorsal basal ganglia (caudate and putamen). Both systems appeared sensitive to incentive motivation: their activity increases when we work for higher rewards. Another brain system, including the ventral prefrontal cortex and the ventral basal ganglia, has been implicated in encoding expected rewards. How this motivational system drives the cognitive and motor systems remains poorly understood. More specifically, it is unclear whether cognitive and motor systems can be driven by a common motivational center or if they are driven by distinct, dedicated motivational modules. To address this issue, we used functional MRI to scan healthy participants while performing a task in which incentive motivation, cognitive, and motor demands were varied independently. We reasoned that a common motivational node should (1) represent the reward expected from effort exertion, (2) correlate with the performance attained, and (3) switch effective connectivity between cognitive and motor regions depending on task demand.

The ventral striatum fulfilled all three criteria and therefore qualified as a common motivational node capable of driving both cognitive and motor regions of the dorsal striatum. Thus, we suggest that the interaction between a common motivational system and the different task-specific systems underpinning behavioral performance might occur within the basal ganglia.

Liljeholm and O'Doherty also offer context and perspective on this work.

Delayed gratification - 40 years later.

Casey et al. (open access) do a followup of the famous "marshmallow experiments" that showed young children who are better at delaying gratification to obtain a greater reward do better latter in life. They were able to test 60 individuals from the original study, now in their mid-40s, and in a subset of these were able to demonstrate stable differences in frontostriatal circuitries that integrate motivational and control processes in low delayers versus high delayers.

We examined the neural basis of self-regulation in individuals from a cohort of preschoolers who performed the delay-of-gratification task 4 decades ago. Nearly 60 individuals, now in their mid-forties, were tested on “hot” and “cool” versions of a go/nogo task to assess whether delay of gratification in childhood predicts impulse control abilities and sensitivity to alluring cues (happy faces). Individuals who were less able to delay gratification in preschool and consistently showed low self-control abilities in their twenties and thirties performed more poorly than did high delayers when having to suppress a response to a happy face but not to a neutral or fearful face. This finding suggests that sensitivity to environmental hot cues plays a significant role in individuals’ ability to suppress actions toward such stimuli. A subset of these participants (n = 26) underwent functional imaging for the first time to test for biased recruitment of frontostriatal circuitry when required to suppress responses to alluring cues. Whereas the prefrontal cortex differentiated between nogo and go trials to a greater extent in high delayers, the ventral striatum showed exaggerated recruitment in low delayers. Thus, resistance to temptation as measured originally by the delay-of-gratification task is a relatively stable individual difference that predicts reliable biases in frontostriatal circuitries that integrate motivational and control processes.

The dark side of emotion in decision making.

A mindblog reader emailed me pointing out this (before MindBlog started up) 2005 publication by Bechara and collaborators on the role of emotion in making decisions in risky situations (rather relevant to our current financial crisis, with investors rushing like lemmings to emotionally drive the market in huge up or down swings). Disabling normal emotional reactivity by either brain lesions or substance abuse leads people to make more advantageous decision in risky situation. (In a 2009 post I noted Bechara's more recent work on reward processing in different parts of the brain.

Can dysfunction in neural systems subserving emotion lead, under certain circumstances, to more advantageous decisions? To answer this question, we investigated how individuals with substance dependence (ISD), patients with stable focal lesions in brain regions related to emotion (lesion patients), and normal participants (normal controls) made 20 rounds of investment decisions. Like lesion patients, ISD made more advantageous decisions and ultimately earned more money from their investments than the normal controls. When normal controls either won or lost money on an investment round, they adopted a conservative strategy and became more reluctant to invest on the subsequent round, suggesting that they were more affected than lesion patients and ISD by the outcomes of decisions made in the previous rounds.

Why worry? It's good for you.

I've been meaning to point out an interesting piece by Robert Frank in the business section of the NYTimes, a subject mindblog has touched on in several posts. It's a bit of a gloss, but I pull out a few clips:

…people are particularly inept at predicting how changes in their life circumstances will affect their happiness. Even when the changes are huge — positive or negative — most people adapt much more quickly and completely than they expected…Paradoxically, our prediction errors often lead us to choices that are wisest in hindsight. In such cases, evolutionary biology often provides a clearer guide than cognitive psychology for thinking about why people behave as they do…the brain has evolved not to make us happy, but to motivate actions that help push our DNA into the next round. Much of the time, in fact, the brain accomplishes that by making us unhappy. Anxiety, hunger, fatigue, loneliness, thirst, anger and fear spur action to meet the competitive challenges we face…pleasure is an inherently fleeting emotion, one we experience while escaping from emotionally aversive states. In other words, pleasure is the carrot that provokes us to extricate ourselves from such states, but it almost always fades quickly…The human brain was formed by relentless competition in the natural world, so it should be no surprise that we adapt quickly to changes in circumstances.

Most people would love to have a job with interesting, capable colleagues, a high level of autonomy and ample opportunities for creative expression. But only a limited number of such jobs are available — and it’s our fretting that can motivate us to get them....Within limits, worry about success causes students to study harder to gain admission to better universities. It makes assistant professors work harder to earn tenure. It leads film makers to strive harder to create the perfect scene, and songwriters to dig deeper for the most pleasing melody. In every domain, people who work harder are more likely to succeed professionally, more likely to make a difference...The anxiety we feel about whether we’ll succeed is evolution’s way of motivating us.

Boredom - a Lively History

Peter Toohey's book with the title of this post is reviewed by Anthony Gottlieb in the NYTimes:

In Oscar Wilde’s play “A Woman of No Importance,” Lord Illingworth says of society: “To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.” To be a bore oneself is the ultimate failing and makes one the target for a quintessentially English put-down. “Even the grave yawns for him,” the actor and theater manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree once said of an earnest writer. ...it was (and still is) regarded in some quarters as stylish and rather aristocratic to suffer from boredom, so the English ought really to thank their bores for providing them with the occasion to display wit and appear grand.

Toohey...suggests that the unpleasant feeling of simple boredom developed as a warning signal to steer us away from social situations that are “confined, predictable, too samey for one’s sanity.” In other words, it is a useful aversion: the discomfort of boredom is a blessing in disguise...a colleague of his once argued that there isn’t really any such thing as boredom, just a blurring together of a constellation of feelings and moods — frustration, surfeit, apathy and the like. Toohey rejects this idea, and perhaps there is indeed little harm in keeping the word, provided that one is vigilantly aware of the loose, subjective and confusing ways in which it is often used. When the actor George Sanders — the archetypal cad, at least on-screen, and in the title of his autobiography — committed suicide in a Spanish hotel in 1972, he left a note that began: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.” It is worth noting that he was ill, lonely and had sold his beloved house on Majorca. Was boredom really what his death was about? When a man says he is bored — as Oscar Wilde never quite got round to saying — it sometimes means that he cannot be bothered to tell you what really ails him.

The utility of being vague.

I'm just getting to glance at the last few issue of Psychological Science, and find this gem, "In Praise of Vagueness" by Mishra et al., which they introduce as follows:

People are increasingly surrounded by devices that provide highly precise information. For instance, technologically advanced bathroom scales can now give measurements of weight, body fat, and hydration levels within two and even three decimal places. People can find out exactly how many calories they are eating, how much weight they can lift, and how many steps they walk in a typical day. The overarching belief exemplified by the use of such technologies could be summed up by the phrase, “If I can measure it, I can manage it.” In other words, people seem to believe that precise information increases their likelihood of performing better and meeting personal goals (e.g., improving physical strength or losing weight). People generally prefer precise information over vague information because precise information gives them a greater sense of security and confidence in their ability to predict unknown outcomes in their environment. Despite this preference, we have found that vague information sometimes serves people better than precise information does.

Why might individuals perform better when they receive vague information than when they receive precise information? We posit that vague information allows individuals leeway in interpretation so that they form expectancies in accordance with the outcomes that they desire. Further, we posit that these positive expectancies can give rise to favorable performance-related outcomes.

Their experiments examined the progress of people towards goals when they were given precise versus vague (error range given) feedback on that progress. Perhaps the most striking example was provided in the weight loss experiment whose participants gained, on average, one pound over the course of the experiment after being given precise feedback, those given vague feedback lost nearly four pounds. Here is their abstract:

Is the eternal quest for precise information always worthwhile? Our research suggests that, at times, vagueness has its merits. Previous research has demonstrated that people prefer precise information over vague information because it gives them a sense of security and makes their environments more predictable. However, we show that the fuzzy boundaries afforded by vague information can actually help individuals perform better than can precise information. We document these findings across two laboratory studies and one quasi–field study that involved different performance-related contexts (mental acuity, physical strength, and weight loss). We argue that the malleability of vague information allows people to interpret it in the manner they desire, so that they can generate positive response expectancies and, thereby, perform better. The rigidity of precise information discourages desirable interpretations. Hence, on certain occasions, precise information is not as helpful as vague information in boosting performance.