The Interactive Effects of Negative Emotion and Reward Motivation on Visual Perception

Although there is a rapidly growing interest in reward-emotion interactions, our current understanding of how negative emotion influences reward motivation and modulates reward-driven enhancements in visual perception remains limited. To address these gaps, we conducted an fMRI study using a novel variant of the monetary incentive delay task where the valence (negative or neutral) of an emotional scene image served as a cue to indicate a reward or no-reward prospect in the subsequent house-building discrimination task. During the initial cue stage, we hypothesized competitive interactions between reward anticipation and negative emotion along the common value/valence dimension. However, we instead found independent neural signatures of reward (vs. no-reward) anticipation in the ventral striatum and negative (vs. neutral) emotion in the ventromedial pFC and amygdala, with a lack of evidence for their interaction. Notably, during the subsequent task stage, we detected an Emotion × Reward interaction in the parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), wherein reward-driven enhancements in task-related processing were attenuated in the case of negative (vs. neutral) cue images. Furthermore, the Emotion × Reward interaction scores in PHG and behavioral RTs were correlated across participants. Finally, a regression analysis revealed that negative valence-related activity in ventromedial pFC moderated the relationship between ventral striatum reward anticipation activity and PHG task-related processing. These findings demonstrate that negative emotion and reward motivation, which were largely segregated during the cue stage, interactively modulated subsequent visual perception, thus potentially influencing behavior.