Negative and positive emotions are known to shape decision-making toward more or less impulsive responses, respectively. Decision-making and emotion processing are underpinned by shared brain regions including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the amygdala. How these processes interact at the behavioral and brain levels is still unclear. We used a lesion model to address this question. Study participants included individuals diagnosed with behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, n = 18), who typically present deficits in decision-making/emotion processing and atrophy of the vmPFC, individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD, n = 12) who present with atrophy in limbic structures and age-matched healthy controls (CTRL, n = 15). Prior to each choice on the delay discounting task participants were cued with a positive, negative or neutral picture and asked to vividly imagine witnessing the event. As hypothesized, our findings showed that bvFTD patients were more impulsive than AD patients and CTRL and did not show any emotion-related modulation of delay discounting rate. In contrast, AD patients showed increased impulsivity when primed by negative emotion. This increased impulsivity was associated with reduced integrity of bilateral amygdala in AD but not in bvFTD. Altogether, our results indicate that decision-making and emotion interact at the level of the amygdala supporting findings from animal studies.

中文翻译：

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行为变异额颞痴呆和阿尔茨海默氏病中决策与情绪之间的相互作用。

众所周知，消极情绪和积极情绪分别影响着或多或少的冲动反应。共同的大脑区域（包括腹膜前额叶皮层（vmPFC）和杏仁核）共同支持决策和情感处理。这些过程如何在行为和大脑水平上相互作用尚不清楚。我们使用了病变模型来解决这个问题。研究参与者包括被诊断为行为变异性额颞叶痴呆（bvFTD，n  = 18）的个体，这些个体通常在决策/情感处理和vmPFC萎缩方面表现出缺陷，患有阿尔茨海默氏病（AD，n  = 12）的个体边缘结构萎缩和年龄匹配的健康对照者（CTRL，n = 15）。在对延误折扣任务的每个选择之前，参与者都需要以正面，负面或中性的图片来暗示，并要求他们生动地想象目击事件。根据假设，我们的研究结果表明，bvFTD患者比AD患者和CTRL更易冲动，并且没有显示出与情绪相关的延迟贴现率的调节。相比之下，AD患者在受到负面情绪的刺激时表现出更高的冲动性。这种冲动的增加与AD中双侧杏仁核的完整性降低有关，而与bvFTD中则不相关。总之，我们的结果表明，决策和情感在杏仁核水平上相互作用，从而支持了动物研究的结果。