Neurobiology of social reward valuation in adults with a history of anorexia nervosa.

Objective: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a disorder characterized by atypical patterns of reward valuation (e.g. positive valuation of hunger).

The functional significance of shyness in anorexia nervosa.

The defining features of anorexia nervosa (AN) include disordered eating and disturbance in the experience of their bodies; however, many women with AN also demonstrate higher harm avoidance (HA), lower novelty seeking, and challenges with interpersonal functioning. The current study explored whether HA and novelty seeking could explain variation in disordered eating and social functioning in healthy control women ( n = 18), weight-restored women with a history of AN (n = 17), and women currently-ill with AN (AN; n = 17). Our results indicated that clinical participants (AN + weight-restored women) reported poorer social skills than healthy control participants.

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex encodes emotional value.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays a critical role in processing appetitive stimuli. Recent investigations have shown that reward value signals in the vmPFC can be altered by emotion regulation processes; however, to what extent the processing of positive emotion relies on neural regions implicated in reward processing is unclear. Here, we investigated the effects of emotion regulation on the valuation of emotionally evocative images.

Infrequent, task-irrelevant monetary gains and losses engage dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.

Decision making is commonly conceived to reflect the interplay of mutually antagonistic systems: executive processes must inhibit affective information to make adaptive choices. Consistent with this interpretation, prior studies have shown that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is activated by executive processing and deactivated during emotional processing, with the reverse pattern found within the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC). To evaluate whether this pattern generalizes to other affective stimuli--here, monetary rewards--we modified the emotional oddball task to use behaviorally irrelevant reward stimuli, while matching analysis methods and task parameters to those of previous research.

Vicarious reinforcement in rhesus macaques (macaca mulatta).

What happens to others profoundly influences our own behavior. Such other-regarding outcomes can drive observational learning, as well as motivate cooperation, charity, empathy, and even spite. Vicarious reinforcement may serve as one of the critical mechanisms mediating the influence of other-regarding outcomes on behavior and decision-making in groups.

Cognitive and neural contributors to emotion regulation in aging.

Older adults, compared to younger adults, focus on emotional well-being. While the lifespan trajectory of emotional processing and its regulation has been characterized behaviorally, few studies have investigated the underlying neural mechanisms. Here, older adults (range: 59-73 years) and younger adults (range: 19-33 years) participated in a cognitive reappraisal task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning.