TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2009//
TI  - On the neural control of social emotional behavior
JO  - Social cognitive and affective neuroscience
A1  - Roelofs, Karin
A1  - Minelli, Alessandra
A1  - Mars, Rogier B.
A1  - van Peer, Jacobien
A1  - Toni, I.
SP  - 50
EP  - 58
VL  - 4
IS  - 1
N2  - 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.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1749-5016
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsn036
ID  - ref1
ER  -