Self-positivity or self-negativity as a function of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex.

Abstract

Self and emotions are key motivational factors of a person’s strivings for health and well-being. Understanding neural mechanisms supporting the relationship between these factors bears far-reaching implications for mental health disorders. Recent work indicates a substantial overlap between processing of self-relevant and emotion information and proposed the MPFC as one of the neural signatures of the shared mechanisms. However, the precise cognitive and neural mechanisms represented by the MPFC are largely unknown. Here we addressed the question whether the neural underpinnings of self-related processing in the MPFC reflect positive or negative emotions. To test the distinct and shared neural circuits of self- and emotional-related processing, we collected fMRI data while participants performed personal and emotion associative matching tasks. By exploiting tight control over the factors that determine the effects of self-relevance and emotions, we contrasted these effects across the whole brain. We also assessed a seed-to voxel functional connectivity between the MPFC and the rest of the brain while accounting for the magnitude of self and emotions prioritization effects at the behavioural level. our univariate analysis revealed no differences in brain activation between the effects of self- and positive emotion-prioritization. Our results indicate that the ventral part of the MPFC which has established involvement in self-prioritization effects was not recruited in the negative emotion prioritization effect. In contrast, we found overlapping effects between self- and positive emotion prioritization. The results suggest that the prioritization effects for self and positive emotions are tightly linked together and the MPFC plays a large role in discriminating between positive and negative emotions in relation to self-relevance.