Positive Bias in Affective Decision Making: Neurocognitive Mechanisms Mediating Links to Resilience

Biased information processing plays an important role in mental disorders. This study investi-gates biases in value-based decision making and how links to psychological resilience can be accounted for by individual differences in the cognitive and neural processing of affective in-formation. Decision making was studied in 82 people (41 female, 41 male; age: 18–37 years) using a cost-benefit integration task. Neural activity was recorded via fMRI, cognitive pro-cessing modeled with an evidence-accumulation model. Choice bias was positively associated with self-reported resilience (particularly the facet ‘acceptance’) – and this association was me-diated by differences in the neural processing of affective information during decision making: Participants with a more positive bias and higher resilience showed stronger increases in neural activity in response to loss in ten prefrontal and parietal brain regions – and stronger decreases in response to gain in the right inferior frontal junction. Cognitive-computational modeling re-vealed that more positive biases were associated with lower sensitivity to and lower valuation of negative information – along with relatively higher sensitivity to and higher valuation of positive information. Notably, higher valuation of positive information was associated with stronger neural responses to negative information in dACC and bilateral insula. Finally, bias and resili-ence were associated with differential functional connectivity between prefrontal seeds, midbrain, striatum, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that stronger activation of brain regions associated with cognitive control – specifically in response to negative information – promotes a positive cognitive bias in affective decision making that may support resilience to mental disorders.