Subjective emotional ratings dissociate brain activation and network patterns during counterfactual outcome processing.

Abstract

Human decision-making integrates outcome evaluation, counterfactual comparison, and individual traits. We investigated the neural processing of outcome-related emotions during economic decision-making by classifying feedback according to participants' subjective emotional ratings rather than objective gain-loss categories. Participants completed a Wheel of Fortune gambling task during fMRI scanning and provided emotional ratings for feedback outcomes, enabling identification of regret, relief, disappointment, and elation. We also assessed individual differences in regret proneness, maximization tendencies, alternative search, high standards, and decision difficulty. Behaviorally, emotional ratings increased with larger obtained outcomes and decreased as reference outcomes increased, indicating robust modulation of outcome evaluation by counterfactual information Whole-brain analyses revealed greater activation for low-rating than high-rating outcomes, indicating stronger neural responses to negative than positive emotions across feedback types. Complete feedback also elicited greater activation than partial feedback within the same emotional valence. Network-level analyses revealed partially dissociable neural profiles for positive and negative emotions. Positive emotions, including elation and relief, predominantly recruited the somatomotor network, whereas negative emotions, including disappointment and regret, engaged broader distributions across the default mode, dorsal attention, and other large-scale networks. Regret elicited the largest activation extent, whereas elation elicited the smallest. Region-of-interest analyses showed that bilateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) responses were significantly greater for negative than positive emotions and for complete than partial feedback conditions. Across all four emotions, right OFC activation was negatively associated with maximization. For elation, relief, and disappointment, right OFC activation was also negatively associated with alternative search and decision difficulty, whereas these associations were absent for regret. Together, these findings demonstrate that subjective emotional evaluation, counterfactual context, and decision-related traits jointly shape the neural processing of decision outcomes, while suggesting relatively trait-independent neural processing of regret.