What shall I be, what must I be: neural correlates of personal goal activation

Abstract

How is the brain engaged when people are thinking about their hopes, dreams, and obligations? Regulatory focus theory postulates two classes of personal goals and motivational systems for pursuing them. Ideal goals, such as hopes and aspirations, are pursued via the promotion system through “making good things happen.” Ought goals, such as obligations or responsibilities, are pursued via the prevention system through “keeping bad things from happening.” This study investigated the neural correlates of ideal and ought goal priming using an event-related fMRI design with rapid masked stimulus presentations. We exposed participants to their self-identified ideal and ought goals, yoked-control words and non-words. We also examined correlations between goal-related activation and measures of regulatory focus, behavioral activation/inhibition, and negative affect. Ideal priming led to activation in frontal and occipital regions as well as caudate and thalamus, whereas prevention goal priming was associated with activation in precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex. Individual differences in dysphoric/anxious affect and regulatory focus, but not differences in BAS/BIS strength, were predictive of differential activation in response to goal priming. The regions activated in response to ideal and ought goal priming broadly map onto the cortical midline network that has been shown to index processing of self-referential stimuli. Individual differences in regulatory focus and negative affect impact this network and appeared to influence the strength and accessibility of the promotion and prevention systems. The results support a fundamental distinction between promotion and prevention and extend our understanding of how personal goals influence behavior.

Reward Sensitivity Enhances Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex Activation during Free Choice

“…Although TEPS provides one validated approach for measuring reward sensitivity, we note that other scales have also been used to relate brain responses to personality traits associated with reward and motivation. For instance, recent work has demonstrated that individual differences in regulatory focus are associated with PCC responses to promotion goals (Strauman et al, 2013) and ventral striatal responses to reward (Scult et al, 2016). These observations suggest that future work may be able to build on our findings be integrating regulatory focus theory and other personality measures with classical measures of reward sensitivity (e.g., TEPS and BIS/BAS).…”

The posterior medial cortex in urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome

“…Particularly, our observation of increased PCC - left amygdala FC in patients was associated with increased pain and urinary symptom severity. This association may reflect enhanced levels of prevention [31] [52] and fear-avoidance behaviors [45; 57] in UCPPS as part of the chronic pain experience [30]. The hippocampus is implicated in default mode network processes and is functionally connected to the PCC [28].…”

Human mesostriatal response tracks motivational tendencies under naturalistic goal conflict

“…Another region substantially elicited in the HiGC condition was the precuneus, known to be activated when subjects make choices which may result in lower gain or punishment (Paulus et al, 2003;Roy et al, 2011). The precuneus was also indicated as related to the 'prevention system' (Strauman et al, 2012) conceptualized as a goal-attainment harm-prevention regulatory system by the 'Regulatory Focus Theory' (Higgins, 1997), and its activation during HiGC may represent this role. However, because HiGC conditions also involved the appearance of more balls on the screen, precuneus activation may result from the richer visual scene during HiGC.…”