The amygdala and appraised concern-relevance: Initial evidence that intrinsic motivation modulates amygdala response to otherwise neutral stimuli.

Abstract

Based on an affective neuroscience approach to appraisal theories of emotion, the present study tested the hypothesis that the amygdala is involved in the processing of concern-relevance . Thirty-fi ve students with varying intrinsic academic motivation performed three target-detection tasks using affectively neutral letter stimuliastargets.In onetask,participants weregiven acover storythat their taskperformancewas indicative of future academic success. This intrinsic motivation condition was controlled with two otherconditions: an extrinsic motivation condition allowing participants to earn money for themselves based on their task performance, and a baseline condition where participants were simply requested to perform the task while they weretoldthatwewerecalibratingthescanner.Participantsreportedtheirintrinsicacademicmotivationusingastandardizedacademicmotivationscale.Resultsillustratedaninteractioneffectbothatthewhole-brainand region of interest levels. When accounting for all three conditions, only during the intrinsic motivation condition did bilateral amygdala activation signi fi cantly increase with increasing academic motivation scores when responding to targets (vs. nontargets). Findings suggest that intrinsic academic motivation modulates amygdala response to otherwise neutral stimuli when they are relevant to academic success, consistent with the proposal that the amygdala is sensitive to the degree towhich stimuli are relevant to the individual ’ s concerns. This stresses the need for more personalized analyses of brain responses to stimuli and tasks that are typically considered “ neutral ” and hold important implications for psychiatric populations suffering from de fi ciencies in affective processing, particularly anxiety disorders.