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Published May 2014 | public
Journal Article

The neural signature of escalating frustration in humans

Abstract

Mammalian studies show that frustration is experienced when goal-directed activity is blocked. Despite frustration's strongly negative role in health, aggression and social relationships, the neural mechanisms are not well understood. To address this we developed a task in which participants were blocked from obtaining a reward, an established method of producing frustration. Levels of experienced frustration were parametrically varied by manipulating the participants' motivation to obtain the reward prior to blocking. This was achieved by varying the participants' proximity to a reward and the amount of effort expended in attempting to acquire it. In experiment 1, we confirmed that proximity and expended effort independently enhanced participants' self-reported desire to obtain the reward, and their self-reported frustration and response vigor (key-press force) following blocking. In experiment 2, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that both proximity and expended effort modulated brain responses to blocked reward in regions implicated in animal models of reactive aggression, including the amygdala, midbrain periaqueductal grey (PAG), insula and prefrontal cortex. Our findings suggest that frustration may serve an energizing function, translating unfulfilled motivation into aggressive-like surges via a cortical, amygdala and PAG network.

Additional Information

© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. Received 16 December 2013. Reviewed 31 January 2014. Revised 5 February 2014. Accepted 11 February 2014. Published online 11 March 2014. Action editor Pia Rotshtein This work was funded by the U.K. Medical Research Council (Grant MC_US_A060_5PQ50 to A.J.C.). JBR is funded by the Wellcome Trust (100004440) (088324). RY is funded by Foundation for High-level Talents in Higher Education of Guangdong (C10454) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (31371128).

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023