Interactions between reward motivation and emotional processing

Abstract

Much of the past research on how reward motivation and emotional information influence brain and behavior has been conducted separately. Recently, a few behavioral and brain imaging studies have investigated how reward and emotional information co-jointly impact brain and behavior. The present chapter reviews findings from this recent line of work to summarize our current knowledge about the influence of reward expectancy on brain and behavior in the context of emotional information. The available findings suggest that behaviorally reward counteracts the adverse impact of potent emotional distractors on task performance. Additionally, brain findings suggest that the ventral striatum plays an active role in upregulating attentional control processes to limit the influence of emotional distractors. Overall, task relevance seems to play an important role in shaping interactions between reward and emotional processing. We conclude by outlining a few open questions for future research.

Keywords: Amygdala; Attentional control; Emotion; Reward; Ventral striatum.