The relationship between neuroticism and appetitive conditioning

Appetitive conditioning is considered a central mechanism for the vulnerability to psychiatric disorders. However, the investigation of individual differences that are related to altered appetitive learning has been almost neglected so far. The aim of this study was to investigate the link between neuroticism and appetitive conditioning processes. 79 subjects participated in a differential conditioning procedure in which a conditioned stimulus (CS+) was paired with a reward (money) after a fast behavioral response, while a second conditioned stimulus (CS-) was never followed by a reward, irrespective of the behavioral response. As a main result, neuroticism correlated negatively with the underlying neural processes of appetitive conditioning in females, but not in males. In detail, higher levels of neuroticism were associated with decreased neural responses in the left (p = .001) and right amygdala (p = .011), left (p = .063) and right (p = .019) nucleus accumbens, and left (p = .002) and right (p = .021) orbitofrontal cortex (all results are family-wise-error-corrected). The present results support previous findings, which also showed an inverse sex-specific effect in the context of neuroticism and emotional processing in females. In addition, the findings suggest that neuroticism is not solely linked to increased amygdala sensitivity during the processing of negative stimuli but also to decreased neural responses when processing rewarding stimuli. Possible explanations for the sex differences and implications are discussed.