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The Journal of Neuroscience, December 5, 2007, 27(49):13532-13540; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3337-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
How Pleasant and Unpleasant Stimuli Combine in Different Brain Regions: Odor Mixtures

Fabian Grabenhorst,¹ Edmund T. Rolls,¹ Christian Margot,² Maria A. A. P. da Silva,³ and Maria Ines Velazco²

¹University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford OX1 3UD, United Kingdom, ²Firmenich SA, CH-1211 Geneva 8, Switzerland, and ³Campinas State University, Food Engineering Faculty, CEP 13083-970, Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Correspondence should be addressed to Prof. Edmund T. Rolls, University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK. Email: Edmund.Rolls{at}psy.ox.ac.uk

Many affective stimuli are hedonically complex mixtures containing both pleasant and unpleasant components. To investigate whether the brain represents the overall affective value of such complex stimuli, or the affective value of the different components simultaneously, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activations to a pleasant odor (jasmine), an unpleasant odor (indole), and a mixture of the two that was pleasant. In brain regions that represented the pleasantness of the odors such as the medial orbitofrontal cortex (as shown by activations that correlated with the pleasantness ratings), the mixture produced activations of similar magnitude to the pleasant jasmine, but very different from the unpleasant indole. These regions thus emphasize the pleasant aspects of the mixture. In contrast, in regions representing the unpleasantness of odors such as the dorsal anterior cingulate and midorbitofrontal cortex the mixture produced activations that were relatively further from the pleasant component jasmine and closer to the indole. These regions thus emphasize the unpleasant aspects of the mixture. Thus mixtures that are found pleasant can have components that are separately pleasant and unpleasant, and the brain can separately and simultaneously represent the positive and negative hedonic value of a complex affective stimulus that contains both pleasant and unpleasant olfactory components. This type of representation may be important for affective decision making in the brain in that separate representations of different affective components of the same sensory stimulus may provide the inputs for making a decision about whether to choose the stimulus or not.

Key words: emotion; affect; odor; pleasant mixtures; unpleasant mixtures; decision making; fMRI; humans

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Received July 23, 2007; revised Aug. 23, 2007; accepted Sept. 14, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Prof. Edmund T. Rolls, University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK. Email: Edmund.Rolls{at}psy.ox.ac.uk

This article has been cited by other articles:

				E. T. Rolls, F. Grabenhorst, C. Margot, M. A. A. P. da Silva, and M. I. Velazco Selective Attention to Affective Value Alters How the Brain Processes Olfactory Stimuli J. Cogn. Neurosci., October 1, 2008; 20(10): 1815 - 1826. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				J. A. Boyle, J. Djordjevic, M. J. Olsson, J. N. Lundstrom, and M. Jones-Gotman The Human Brain Distinguishes between Single Odorants and Binary Mixtures Cereb Cortex, April 28, 2008; (2008) bhn058v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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