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Viswanathan et al 2015 Loss Aversion fMRI.pdf (1.4 MB)

Age-related striatal BOLD changes without changes in behavioral loss aversion

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posted on 2015-09-04, 13:45 authored by Vijay Viswanathan, Sang Lee, Jodi M. Gilman, Byoung Woo Kim, Nick Lee, Laura Chamberlain, Sherri L. Livengood, Kalyan Raman, Myung Joo Lee, Jake Kuster, Daniel B. Stern, Bobby Calder, Frank J. Mulhern, Anne J. Blood, Hans C. Breiter
Loss aversion (LA), the idea that negative valuations have a higher psychological impact than positive ones, is considered an important variable in consumer research. The literature on aging and behavior suggests older individuals may show more LA, although it is not clear if this is an effect of aging in general (as in the continuum from age 20 and 50 years), or of the state of older age (e.g., past age 65 years). We also have not yet identified the potential biological effects of aging on the neural processing of LA. In the current study we used a cohort of subjects with a 30 year range of ages, and performed whole brain functional MRI (fMRI) to examine the ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens (VS/NAc) response during a passive viewing of affective faces with model-based fMRI analysis incorporating behavioral data from a validated approach/avoidance task with the same stimuli. Our a priorifocus on the VS/NAc was based on (1) the VS/NAc being a central region for reward/aversion processing; (2) its activation to both positive and negative stimuli; (3) its reported involvement with tracking LA. LA from approach/avoidance to affective faces showed excellent fidelity to published measures of LA. Imaging results were then compared to the behavioral measure of LA using the same affective faces. Although there was no relationship between age and LA, we observed increasing neural differential sensitivity (NDS) of the VS/NAc to avoidance responses (negative valuations) relative to approach responses (positive valuations) with increasing age. These findings suggest that a central region for reward/aversion processing changes with age, and may require more activation to produce the same LA behavior as in younger individuals, consistent with the idea of neural efficiency observed with high IQ individuals showing less brain activation to complete the same task.

Funding

This work was supported by grants to HCB (#14118, 026002, 026104, 027804) from the NIDA, Bethesda, MD, and grants DABK39-03-0098 and DABK39-03-C-0098. The Phenotype Genotype Project in Addiction and Mood Disorder) from the Office of National Drug Control Policy—Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center, Washington, D.C

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE

Volume

9

Pages

? - ? (12)

Citation

VISWANATHAN, V. ...et al.,2015. Age-related striatal BOLD changes without changes in behavioral loss aversion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9:176.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Frontiers Research Foundation

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Frontiers Research Foundation under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

1662-5161

Language

  • en

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