Self-Positivity or Self-Negativity as a Function of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex

Abstract

Self and emotions are key motivational factors of a person strivings for health and well-being. Understanding neural mechanisms supporting the relationship between these factors bear far-reaching implications for mental health disorders. Recent work indicates a substantial overlap between self-relevant and emotion information processing and has proposed the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) as one shared neural signature. However, the precise cognitive and neural mechanisms represented by the MPFC in investigations of self- and emotion-related processing are largely unknown. Here we examined whether the neural underpinnings of self-related processing in the MPFC link to positive or negative emotions. We collected fMRI data to test the distinct and shared neural circuits of self- and emotion-related processing while participants performed personal (self, friend, or stranger) and emotion (happy, sad, or neutral) associative matching tasks. By exploiting tight control over the factors that determine the effects of self-relevance and emotions (positive: Happy vs. neutral; negative: Sad vs. neutral), our univariate analysis revealed that the ventral part of the MPFC (vmPFC), which has established involvement in self-prioritisation effects, was not recruited in the negative emotion prioritisation effect. In contrast, there were no differences in brain activity between the effects of positive emotion- and self-prioritisation. These results were replicated by both region of interest (ROI)-based analysis in the vmPFC and the seed- to voxel functional connectivity analysis between the MPFC and the rest of the brain. The results suggest that the prioritisation 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.

Self‐prioritization is supported by interactions between large‐scale brain networks

“…We employed fMRI data sets from a previously reported study where healthy young adults performed two associative matching tasks using personal and emotion associations (Yankouskaya & Sui, 2021, Study 1). In the personal task, participants learned associations between simple geometrical shapes (e.g.…”

“…A large body of research, including our previous work, reported overlapped neural substrates for emotion-prioritization effect and SPE (Kim et al, 2016;Smith et al, 2018). In particular, the effects of positive emotion resemble those triggered by self-relatedness (Yankouskaya & Sui, 2021). Most of the work used a seed-to-voxel connectivity analysis with the MPFC as a seed commonly reported in both self-referential and emotion processing.…”

Differences in working memory coding of biological motion attributed to oneself and others

“…In behavioral studies, the same procedure has been also used with bodily stimuli such as faces and avatar bodies, yielding similar effects (Mattan, Quinn, Apperly, Sui, & Rotshtein, 2015 ; Payne, Tsakiris, & Maister, 2017 ; Woźniak & Hohwy, 2020 ; Woźniak & Knoblich, 2019 ). At the neural level, several previous experiments investigated which brain areas are affected by creating such arbitrary self‐associations for abstract, symbolic stimuli (Lockwood et al, 2018 ; Sui et al, 2013 ; Sui, Liu, Mevorach, & Humphreys, 2015 ; Yankouskaya et al, 2017 ; Yankouskaya & Sui, 2021 ; Yin et al, 2021 ; Zhao, Uono, Li, Yoshimura, & Toichi, 2018 ) and found that midline cortical structures (especially the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) are critically involved in such tasks. However, to date, no neuroimaging study used this approach to investigate which brain areas represent bodily, rather than abstract, information associated with the self.…”

Perceiving the Self and Emotions with an Anxious Mind: Evidence from an Implicit Perceptual Task

“…The underlying mechanisms of the self-prioritisation effect and the positivity bias are still debated. One possibility is that the two biases are underpinned by the same neural substrate, the medial prefrontal cortex [25]. A combined self-positivity bias can be tested using a shape-label matching task which distinguishes between "good" and "bad" in addition to "self" and "other" [26].…”