The multifaceted role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex in emotion, decision-making, social cognition, and psychopathology

By Jaryd Hiser, Michael Koenigs. Biological Psychiatry, 2017

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The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has been implicated in a variety of social, cognitive, and affective functions that are commonly disrupted in mental illness. In this review, we summarize data from a diverse array of human and animal studies demonstrating that vmPFC is a key node of cortical and subcortical networks that subserve at least three broad domains of psychological function linked to psychopathology. One track of research indicates that vmPFC is critical for the representation of reward and value-based decision-making, through interactions with ventral striatum and amygdala. A second track of research demonstrates that vmPFC is critical for the generation and regulation of negative emotion, through its interactions with amygdala, bed nucleus of stria terminalis, periaqueductal gray, hippocampus, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. A third track of research shows the importance of vmPFC in multiple aspects of social cognition, such as facial emotion recognition, theory of mind ability, and processing self-relevant information, through its interactions with posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala. We then present meta-analytic data revealing distinct subregions within vmPFC that correspond to each of these three functions, as well as the associations between these subregions and specific psychiatric disorders (depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, addiction, social anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder). We conclude by describing several translational possibilities for clinical studies of vmPFC-based circuits, including neuropsychological assessment of transdiagnostic functions, anatomical targets for intervention, predictors of treatment response, markers of treatment efficacy, and subtyping within disorders.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/affab1e46702d5e477fc39b307c4c0c912024153

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