The Role of Frontal Cortex in Distinguishing Helpful From Hurtful Emotional Information

Emotion has been both lauded and vilified for its role in decision making. How are people able to ensure that helpful emotions guide decision making and irrelevant emotions are kept out of decision making? The orbitofrontal cortex has been identified as a neural area involved in incorporating emotion into decision making. Is this area’s function specific to the integration of emotion and cognition, or does it more broadly govern whether emotional information should be integrated into cognition? The present research examined the role of orbitofrontal cortex when it was appropriate to control (i.e., prevent) the influence of emotion in decision making (Experiment 1) and to incorporate the influence of emotion in decision making (Experiment 2). Together, the two studies suggest that activity in lateral orbitofrontal cortex is associated with evaluating the contextual relevance of emotional information for decision making. The utility of emotional information for decision making presents something of a puzzle. Functional accounts of emotion (see Keltner & Gross, 1999) and theories such as the somatic marker hypothesis (i.e., Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2000) suggest that emotion is particularly helpful for decision making. However, these theories contradict the notion that people should ‘‘think with a clear head’’ and ignore emotions when making decisions. This latter notion itself has theoretical and empirical support. The affect infusion model (Forgas, 1995), the emotionas-information perspective (Schwarz, 1990), economic models of decision making (see Loewenstein, 2001), and their supporting empirical evidence suggest that emotions may bias judgments and decision making. For example, although negative moods may promote elaborative processing and lead to overestimations of risk, positive moods may promote automatic processing and, in some cases, lower perceptions of risk (e.g., Isen & Means, 1983; Johnson & Tversky, 1983). Therefore, in cases in which the emotion is incidental (i.e., contextually irrelevant) rather than integral (i.e., contextually relevant) to the decision making (Bodenhausen, 1993), emotion may exert inappropriate influence. For example, a bad day at work may generate a bad mood that colors decisions about an unrelated family event. What neural systems support the need to flexibly incorporate useful emotion and control (i.e., inhibit) irrelevant emotion? If controlling the influence of emotion on decision making engages a system governing control over the integration of emotion and decision making, then the neural areas involved in controlling the influence of emotion on decision making would be very similar to the areas involved in incorporating emotion into decision making. In other words, a common neural system would govern both attempts to incorporate and attempts to prevent emotional influence on decision making, depending on the relevance of the emotional state for decision making. Previous research suggests that using emotional information to guide decision making is most consistently associated with activity within the orbitofrontal cortex (Brodmann’s Area, or BA, 11; Elliott, Dolan, & Frith, 2000) and is impaired when the orbitofrontal cortex is damaged (BA11/12; Bechara et al., 2000). Furthermore, it has been theorized that the lateral orbitofrontal cortex/inferior frontal gyrus (BA 47) is important for evaluating the implications of negative events for future consequences (Kringelbach & Rolls, 2004) and suppressing previously rewarded responses (Elliott et al., 2000). These studies suggest that Address correspondence to Jennifer S. Beer, Center for Mind and Brain, 267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA 95616, e-mail: jsbeer@ ucdavis.edu. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 448 Volume 17—Number 5 Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science this area may play a role in both incorporating negative emotional stimuli when they are relevant and inhibiting negative emotional stimuli when they are irrelevant for future decision making. The present set of experiments examined the neural underpinnings of controlling emotional influence on decision making when emotional information is explicitly irrelevant (Experiment 1) and incorporating emotional information when it is explicitly relevant (Experiment 2). Together, these studies address whether there is common neural activity associated with evaluating the relevance and the irrelevance of emotional information for decision making or whether one of two independent systems is engaged depending on whether emotional information is being inhibited or incorporated in decision making.