Get Aroused and Be Stronger: Emotional Facilitation of Physical Effort in the Human Brain
Open Access
- 29 July 2009
- journal article
- Published by Society for Neuroscience in Journal of Neuroscience
- Vol. 29 (30), 9450-9457
- https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.1951-09.2009
Abstract
Effort magnitude is commonly thought to reflect motivation, but little is known about the influence of emotional factors. Here, we manipulated the emotional state of subjects, via the presentation of pictures, before they exerted physical effort to win money. After highly arousing pictures, subjects produced more force and reported lower effort sensation, regardless of monetary incentives. Functional neuroimaging revealed that emotional arousal, as indexed by postscan ratings, specifically correlated with bilateral activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. We suggest that this region, by driving the motor cortex, constitutes a brain pathway that allows emotional arousal to facilitate physical effort.This publication has 46 references indexed in Scilit:
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