Abstract
Humor elicits feelings of amusement and can be thought of as a social reward. We identified distinct mesolimbic reward system (MRS) processing patterns for monetary and humorous rewards. During both the reward anticipation and outcome phases, the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) were active in response to monetary cues and monetary gains, while the amygdala and midbrain showed a differential response to humorous rewards, apparently driven by the hedonic enjoyment and appreciation of humor consumption. Psychophysiological interaction analysis (PPI) further demonstrated the functional coupling of the amygdala-midbrain circuit in response to humorous gains during the reward outcome phase, while neural signaling was observed in the NAc-ACC circuit during both the reward anticipation and outcome phases in response to monetary rewards. This is consistent with a view in which the NAc plays a key role in the ‘motivation brain’, and the amygdala in the ‘hedonic brain’. The findings further suggest that the neural mechanisms underlying reward consumption are more modality-specific than those underlying reward anticipation. Our study contributes to a growing understanding of neural responses to social rewards and represent an important first step toward understanding the neural processing of humor as one significant type of social reward.
Highlights
Affective neuroscience has recently emerged as an exciting discipline evaluating the neural correlates of motivation, affect, and emotion
The present study revealed an interaction between reward type and phase and provided evidence supporting distinct neural correlates underlying reward anticipation and outcome phases associated with monetary, humorous and no reward types
The nucleus accumbens (NAc) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) were primarily recruited during the anticipation phase in response to a monetary reward (MA-MO; monetary reward and humorous reward conditions (MA-HA))
Summary
Affective neuroscience has recently emerged as an exciting discipline evaluating the neural correlates of motivation, affect, and emotion. There has been a growing interest in identifying the neural substrates of appetite and consumption using both MID and social incentive delay (SID) tasks[11,12]. Monetary rewards elicit pleasure and humorous rewards elicit feelings of amusement during the hedonic consumption phase. Both of these experiences are generated by MRS circuits but whether and how the neural substrates underlying these experiences differ or are shared between monetary and humorous reward types remain unclear. The present study employed a humorous incentive delay (HID) task along with a MID task to investigate whether humorous and monetary rewards recruit different regions of the MRS. The NAc is generally known to be associated with the MRS during reward prediction[5,6,15] and dopamine release in the NAc during reward anticipation is more robust than that during reward consumption[1,6,7,8]
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