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. 2014 Feb;35(2):503-12.
doi: 10.1002/hbm.22197. Epub 2012 Oct 25.

Attention modulates the dorsal striatum response to love stimuli

Sandra J E Langeslag  1 , Frederik M van der Veen, Christian H Röder
Affiliations

Attention modulates the dorsal striatum response to love stimuli

Sandra J E Langeslag et al. Hum Brain Mapp. 2014 Feb.

Abstract

In previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies concerning romantic love, several brain regions including the caudate and putamen have consistently been found to be more responsive to beloved-related than control stimuli. In those studies, infatuated individuals were typically instructed to passively view the stimuli or to think of the viewed person. In the current study, we examined how the instruction to attend to, or ignore the beloved modulates the response of these brain areas. Infatuated individuals performed an oddball task in which pictures of their beloved and friend served as targets and distractors. The dorsal striatum showed greater activation for the beloved than friend, but only when they were targets. The dorsal striatum actually tended to show less activation for the beloved than the friend when they were distractors. The longer the love and relationship duration, the smaller the response of the dorsal striatum to beloved-distractor stimuli was. We interpret our findings in terms of reinforcement learning. By virtue of using a cognitive task with a full factorial design, we show that the dorsal striatum is not activated by beloved-related information per se, but only by beloved-related information that is attended.

Keywords: emotion; functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); love; motivation; reward.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Estimated BOLD responses to the four event types of interest compared to the baseline (i.e., correct standard trials) in the seven bilateral ROIs.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The seven bilateral ROIs at z = 7 (left panel) and x = −10 (right panel). Dark blue = caudate, orange = putamen, red = VTA, yellow = insula, pink = ACC, green = PCC, light blue = IFG. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at http://wileyonlinelibrary.com.]
Figure 3
Figure 3
Average percent signal change in putamen at 4–6 s after stimulus onset for each of the four stimuli types compared to the baseline (i.e., standard correct trials). The BOLD response was significantly larger for beloved‐target than for friend‐target and beloved‐distractor stimuli, which is indicated by the double asterisks. The BOLD response tended to be smaller for beloved‐distractor than for friend‐distractor stimuli, which is indicated by the single asterisk.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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