Attentional deployment training impacts neural responses to subsequent regret

Abstract

As a common negative emotion in daily life, regret is harmful to mental health and even inclined to induce mental illness. Therefore, to modulate and reduce regret is of wide concern. The current fMRI study aimed to investigate the modulation of attentional deployment training on subsequent regret by using a sequential risk taking task. On each trial of the task, participants were asked to open a series of boxes consecutively and decided when to stop. Each box contained a reward, except for one containing a devil to zero one's gain in the trial. After participants stopped, both collected gains and missed chances were revealed. The study consisted of training and testing stages. At training stage, attentional deployment manipulation was carried out during the outcome feedback of the task, i.e. participants were induced to focus on gains or missed chances by highlighting different parts of the outcome. In the testing stage followed, participants completed the task with no attentional deployment manipulation. Behaviorally, after a training stage focusing on gains, participants felt less regret when encountered with worse outcome at testing stage. At the neural level, more activities of reward related brain regions such as right putamen and cognitive control related brain regions such as dmPFC, SFG and MFG were observed at testing stage followed by a training stage focusing on gains. The current study highlighted that attentional deployment training could modulate the subsequent regret effectively, and that dmPFC, SFG and MFG played a key role in this process.