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lea_hazelExcerpted from Positive Affect Versus Reward: Emotional and Motivational Influences on Cognitive Control
Kimberly S. Chiew and Todd S. Braver
At Frontiers in Psychology:
The neural mechanisms underlying positive emotion’s effects on cognition remain unclear. Different theories have been posited to explain these effects. One influential theory, the dopaminergic theory of positive affect (Ashby et al., 1999) was developed to address findings that positive emotion is linked to broadened cognition. Ashby and colleagues extrapolated from the literature on the neural substrates of reward processing to propose that the psychological effects of positive emotion are specifically linked to increased dopamine (DA) release (via the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area) in these states. The particular cognitive effects of increased DA release during positive affect were postulated to occur through mesocorticolimbic system projections to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and substantia nigra projections to striatum, with increased DA facilitating the ability of ACC and striatum to initiate a switch among active task sets, rules, or goal representations maintained in lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). This facilitation of switching among task-set representations under positive affect enables unusual or non-dominant sets to become active with a greater probability than under neutral affect conditions, which then facilitates creative problem-solving. In connectionist simulations, the account was tested and exhibited an ability to account for certain behavioral performance patterns observed by Isen and colleagues under positive affect manipulations (i.e., improved performance on creative problem-solving and semantic association tasks; Ashby et al., 1999, 2002).
The limbic system's regulation of positive affect influences the prefrontal cortex's role in novel problem-solving.
Kimberly S. Chiew and Todd S. Braver
At Frontiers in Psychology:
The neural mechanisms underlying positive emotion’s effects on cognition remain unclear. Different theories have been posited to explain these effects. One influential theory, the dopaminergic theory of positive affect (Ashby et al., 1999) was developed to address findings that positive emotion is linked to broadened cognition. Ashby and colleagues extrapolated from the literature on the neural substrates of reward processing to propose that the psychological effects of positive emotion are specifically linked to increased dopamine (DA) release (via the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area) in these states. The particular cognitive effects of increased DA release during positive affect were postulated to occur through mesocorticolimbic system projections to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and substantia nigra projections to striatum, with increased DA facilitating the ability of ACC and striatum to initiate a switch among active task sets, rules, or goal representations maintained in lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). This facilitation of switching among task-set representations under positive affect enables unusual or non-dominant sets to become active with a greater probability than under neutral affect conditions, which then facilitates creative problem-solving. In connectionist simulations, the account was tested and exhibited an ability to account for certain behavioral performance patterns observed by Isen and colleagues under positive affect manipulations (i.e., improved performance on creative problem-solving and semantic association tasks; Ashby et al., 1999, 2002).
The limbic system's regulation of positive affect influences the prefrontal cortex's role in novel problem-solving.
