How the Brain Converts Negative Evaluation into Performance Facilitation.

Surpassing negative evaluation is a recurrent theme of success stories. Yet, there is little evidence supporting the counterintuitive idea that negative evaluation might not only motivate people, but also enhance performance. To address this question, we designed a task that required participants to decide whether taking up a risky challenge after receiving positive or negative evaluations from independent judges.

Associative Self-Anchoring Interacts with Obtainability of Chosen Objects.

While there is evidence that implicit self-esteem transfers to chosen objects (associative self-anchoring), it is still unknown whether this phenomenon extends to explicit self-esteem. Moreover, whether the knowledge that these objects might belong to the self in the future or not affects the evaluation of these objects has received little attention. Here, we demonstrate that evaluations of chosen objects are further enhanced when they are obtainable as compared to when they are not in participants with high explicit self-esteem, whereas participants with low explicit self-esteem exhibit the opposite pattern.

Inferences of Others' Competence Reduces Anticipation of Pain When under Threat.

On a daily basis, we place our lives in the hands of strangers. From dentists to pilots, we make inferences about their competence to perform their jobs and consequently to keep us from harm. Here we explore whether the perceived competence of others can alter one's anticipation of pain.

The ecology of human fear: survival optimization and the nervous system.

We propose a Survival Optimization System (SOS) to account for the strategies that humans and other animals use to defend against recurring and novel threats. The SOS attempts to merge ecological models that define a repertoire of contextually relevant threat induced survival behaviors with contemporary approaches to human affective science. We first propose that the goal of the nervous system is to reduce surprise and optimize actions by (i) predicting the sensory landscape by simulating possible encounters with threat and selecting the appropriate pre-encounter action and (ii) prevention strategies in which the organism manufactures safe environments.

Evidence for model-based computations in the human amygdala during Pavlovian conditioning.

Contemporary computational accounts of instrumental conditioning have emphasized a role for a model-based system in which values are computed with reference to a rich model of the structure of the world, and a model-free system in which values are updated without encoding such structure. Much less studied is the possibility of a similar distinction operating at the level of Pavlovian conditioning. In the present study, we scanned human participants while they participated in a Pavlovian conditioning task with a simple structure while measuring activity in the human amygdala using a high-resolution fMRI protocol.

Neural correlates of specific and general Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer within human amygdalar subregions: a high-resolution fMRI study.

It is widely held that the interaction between instrumental and Pavlovian conditioning induces powerful motivational biases. Pavlovian-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) is one of the key paradigms demonstrating this effect, which can further be decomposed into a general and specific component. Although these two forms of PIT have been studied at the level of amygdalar subregions in rodents, it is still unknown whether they involve different areas of the human amygdala.

Differentiable contributions of human amygdalar subregions in the computations underlying reward and avoidance learning.

To understand how the human amygdala contributes to associative learning, it is necessary to differentiate the contributions of its subregions. However, major limitations in the techniques used for the acquisition and analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data have hitherto precluded segregation of function with the amygdala in humans. Here, we used high-resolution fMRI in combination with a region-of-interest-based normalization method to differentiate functionally the contributions of distinct subregions within the human amygdala during two different types of instrumental conditioning: reward and avoidance learning.

Separate valuation subsystems for delay and effort decision costs.

Decision making consists of choosing among available options on the basis of a valuation of their potential costs and benefits. Most theoretical models of decision making in behavioral economics, psychology, and computer science propose that the desirability of outcomes expected from alternative options can be quantified by utility functions. These utility functions allow a decision maker to assign subjective values to each option under consideration by weighting the likely benefits and costs resulting from an action and to select the one with the highest subjective value.