1. The effect of obstructed action efficacy on reward-based decision-making in healthy adolescents: a novel functional MRI task to assay frustration
- Author
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Harlé, Katia M, Ho, Tiffany C, Connolly, Colm G, Simmons, Alan N, and Yang, Tony T
- Subjects
Biological Psychology ,Psychology ,Neurosciences ,Pediatric ,Clinical Research ,Behavioral and Social Science ,Basic Behavioral and Social Science ,Underpinning research ,1.2 Psychological and socioeconomic processes ,Mental health ,Adolescent ,Brain ,Brain Mapping ,Child ,Frustration ,Humans ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Parietal Lobe ,Reward ,fMRI ,Reward processing ,Action efficacy ,Adolescents ,Cognitive Sciences ,Behavioral Science & Comparative Psychology ,Experimental Psychology ,Biological psychology ,Cognitive and computational psychology - Abstract
Frustration is common in adolescence and often interferes with executive functioning, particularly reward-based decision-making, and yet very little is known about how incidental frustrating events (independent of task-based feedback) disrupt the neural circuitry of reward processing in this important age group. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 45 healthy adolescents played a card game in which they had to guess between two options to earn points, in low- and high-stake conditions. Functioning of button presses through which they made decisions was intermittently blocked, thereby increasing frustration potential. Neural deactivation of the precuneus, a Default Mode Network region, was observed during obstructed action blocks across stake conditions, but less so on high- relative to low-stake trials. Moreover, less deactivation in goal-directed reward processing regions (i.e., caudate), frontoparietal "task control" regions, and interoceptive processing regions (i.e., somatosensory cortex, thalamus) were observed on high-stake relative to low-stake trials. These findings are consistent with less disruption of goal-directed reward seeking during blocked action efficacy in high-stake conditions among healthy adolescents. These results provide a roadmap of neural systems critical to the processing of frustrating events during reward-based decision-making in youths and could help to characterize how frustration regulation is altered in a range of pediatric psychopathologies.
- Published
- 2022