Belief in one's ability to exert control over the environment and to produce desired results is essential for an individual's well being. It has been repeatedly argued that the perception of control is not only desirable, but it is likely a psychological and biological necessity. In this article, we review the literature supporting this claim and present evidence for a biological basis for the need for control and for choice -that is, the means by which we exercise control over the environment. Converging evidence from animal research, clinical studies, and neuroimaging work suggest that the need for control is a biological imperative for survival, and a corticostriatal network is implicated as the neural substrate of this adaptive behavior.

Research suggests that the exercise of control is desirable and adaptive, but the precise mechanisms underlying the value of control are not well understood. The current study characterizes the affective experience of personal control by examining the neural substrates recruited when anticipating the opportunity for choice, the means by which individuals exercise control. Using an experimental paradigm that probed the value of choice, participants reported liking cues that predicted future choice opportunity more than cues predicting no-choice. Anticipation of choice itself was associated with increased activity in corticostriatal regions involved in affective and motivational processes, particularly the ventral striatum. This study provides the first direct examination of the affective value of having the opportunity to choose. These findings have important implications for understanding the role of perception of control, and choice itself, in self-regulatory processes.

Recent studies have identified brain correlates of placebo analgesia, but none have assessed how accurately patterns of brain activity can predict individual differences in placebo responses. We reanalyzed data from two fMRI studies of placebo analgesia (N = 47), using patterns of fMRI activity during the anticipation and experience of pain to predict new subjects’ scores on placebo analgesia and placebo-induced changes in pain processing. We used a cross-validated regression procedure, LASSO-PCR, which provided both unbiased estimates of predictive accuracy and interpretable maps of which regions are most important for prediction. Increased anticipatory activity in a frontoparietal network and decreases in a posterior insular/temporal network predicted placebo analgesia. Patterns of anticipatory activity across the cortex predicted a moderate amount of variance in the placebo response (~12% overall, ~40% for study 2 alone), which is substantial considering the multiple likely contributing factors. The most predictive regions were those associated with emotional appraisal, rather than cognitive control or pain processing. During pain, decreases in limbic and paralimbic regions most strongly predicted placebo analgesia. Responses within canonical pain-processing regions explained significant variance in placebo analgesia, but the pattern of effects was inconsistent with widespread decreases in nociceptive processing. Together, the findings suggest that engagement of emotional appraisal circuits drives individual variation in placebo analgesia, rather than early suppression of nociceptive processing. This approach provides a framework that will allow prediction accuracy to increase as new studies provide more precise information for future predictive models.

Psychological research has placed great emphasis on inhibitory control due to its integral role in normal cognition and clinical disorders. The stop-signal task, in conjunction with the stop-signal reaction time (SSRT) measure, provides a well-established paradigm for measuring motor response inhibition. However, the influence of motivation and strategic decision-making on stop-signal performance and SSRT has not been examined. In the present study, we conceptualize the stop-signal paradigm as a decision-making task involving the tradeoff between fast responding and accurate inhibition. In four experiments, we demonstrate that this performance tradeoff is influenced by inherent motivational biases as well as explicit strategic control, resulting in systematic differences in conventional measures of inhibitory ability, such as SSRT. Within subjects, we found that SSRT was lower when participants favored correct stopping over fast responding, and was higher when participants favored fast responding over correct stopping. We present a novel variant of the stop-signal task that uses a monetary incentive structure to manipulate motivated speed-accuracy tradeoffs. By sampling performance at multiple tradeoff settings, we obtain a measure of inhibitory ability that is not confounded with motivational or strategic bias, and thus, more easily interpretable when comparing across participants. We present a working theoretical model to explain the effects of motivational context on response inhibition.

Using fMRI, we examined how the affective experience of choice, the means by which individuals exercise control, is modulated by the valence of potential outcomes (gains, losses). When trials involved potential gains, participants reported liking cues predicting a choice opportunity better than cues predicting no-choice – an effect that corresponded with BOLD increases in ventral striatum (VS). Surprisingly, no differences were observed between choice and no-choice cues when anticipating potential losses. Individual differences in subjective choice preference in the loss condition, however, corresponded to choice-related BOLD activity in the VS. We conducted a second study to examine if monetary losses were perceived differently in the context of simultaneous gains. Participants reported greater liking of choice trials and greater choice cue-related VS activity. Collectively, the findings suggest that the affective experience of choice involves reward processing circuitry when anticipating appetitive and aversive outcomes, but may be sensitive to context and individual differences.