Dissociating brain systems that respond to contingency and valence during monetary loss avoidance in adolescence

Intersect between brain mechanisms of conditioned threat, active avoidance, and reward

Active avoidance is a core behavior for human coping, and its excess is common across psychiatric diseases. The decision to actively avoid a threat is influenced by cost and reward. Yet, threat, avoidance, and reward have been studied in silos. We discuss behavioral and brain circuits of active avoidance and the interactions with fear and threat. In addition, we present a neural toggle switch model enabling fear-to-anxiety transition and approaching reward vs. avoiding harm decision. To fully comprehend how threat, active avoidance, and reward intersect, it is paramount to develop one shared experimental approach across phenomena and behaviors, which will ultimately allow us to better understand human behavior and pathology.

The Limits of Motivational Influence in ADHD: No Evidence for an Altered Reaction to Negative Reinforcement

Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have reported a diminished response in the brain’s reward circuits to contingent cues predicting future monetary gain in adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The situation with regard to monetary loss is less clear, despite recognition that both positive and negative consequences impact ADHD behaviour. Here, we employ a new Escape Monetary Loss Incentive task in an MRI scanner, which allows the differentiation of contingency and valence effects during loss avoidance, to examine ADHD-related alterations in monetary loss processing. There was no evidence of atypical processing of contingent or non-contingent monetary loss cues in ADHD — either in terms of ratings of emotional and motivational significance or brain responses. This suggests that the ability to process contingencies between performance and negative outcomes is intact in ADHD and that individuals with ADHD are no more (or less) sensitive to negative outcomes than controls. This latter finding stands in stark contrast to recent evidence from a similar task of atypical emotion network recruitment (e.g. amygdala) in ADHD individuals to cues predicting another negative event, the imposition of delay, suggesting marked specificity in the way they respond to negative events.