The role of orbital frontal cortex in emotional reasoning.

摘要

While it is widely accepted that emotions interact with and affect logical reasoning, very few studies have explored the basis of this interaction, particularly at the neural level. Goel and his colleagues' (Goel & Dolan, 2003) recent study provided initial evidence for differential roles of the dorsolateral prefrontal and ventral medial prefrontal cortex in reasoning about emotionally neutral and emotionally salient material, respectively. The present study further examined the role of orbital frontal cortex in emotional reasoning. We tested patients with unilateral focal lesions in orbital frontal cortex (i.e., OFC - BA 10 and 11), patients with lesions in parietal cortex, and normal participants as they made logical inference on emotionally salient and neutral syllogisms. We found only patients with OFC to be impaired in reasoning about emotional material but not in reasoning about neutral material. The subsequent analyses revealed that this impairment was driven by the incongruent syllogisms. The fact that the same patients were reasoning well in the neutral incongruent trials suggested it was the presence of emotion that interrupted the conflict detection system. These results consolidated the findings of the imaging study by demonstrating the necessity of OFC for reasoning with emotional material. This suggests OFC plays a crucial role in processing or abstracting emotion from the materials before passing on to the logical reasoning engine.