Emotion, Motivation, Reasoning, and How Their Brain Systems Are Related.

A unified theory proposes that motivational states drive goal-directed actions to obtain anticipated rewards or avoid punishers, while emotional states arise when those rewards or punishers are actually received or not. The same genes and brain systems define primary rewards and punishers, like sweet taste or pain, and learn to anticipate them. The primate orbitofrontal cortex computes reward value, and the anterior cingulate cortex learns actions to obtain goals. Overlearned habits involve less emotion. The orbitofrontal cortex connects to language-related inferior frontal gyrus for declarative reports of subjective feelings. Reasoning brain systems offer alternative strategies for obtaining rewards or avoiding punishers, sometimes setting different goals than emotional systems.

Study at a glance

Abstract

A unified theory of emotion and motivation is updated in which motivational states are states in which instrumental goal-directed actions are performed to obtain anticipated rewards or avoid punishers, and emotional states are states that are elicited when the (conditioned or unconditioned) instrumental reward or punisher is or is not received. This advances our understanding of emotion and motivation, for the same set of genes and associated brain systems can define the primary or unlearned rewards and punishers such as a sweet taste or pain, and the brain systems that learn to expect rewards or punishers and that therefore produce motivational and emotional states. It is argued that instrumental actions under the control of the goal are important for emotion, because they require an intervening emotional state in which an action is learned or performed to obtain the goal, that is, the reward, or to avoid the punisher. The primate including human orbitofrontal cortex computes the reward value, and the anterior cingulate cortex is involved in learning the action to obtain the goal. In contrast, when the instrumental response is overlearned and becomes a habit with stimulus-response associations, emotional states may be less involved. In another route to output, the human orbitofrontal cortex has effective connectivity to the inferior frontal gyrus regions involved in language and provides a route for declarative reports about subjective emotional states to be produced. Reasoning brain systems provide alternative strategies to obtain rewards or avoid punishers and can provide different goals for action compared to emotional systems.