The Orbitofrontal Cortex and Emotion in Health and Disease, Including Depression

The orbitofrontal cortex represents the reward or affective value of primary reinforcers including taste, touch, texture, and face expression. It learns to associate other stimuli with these to produce representations of the expected reward value for visual, auditory, and abstract stimuli including monetary reward value. The orbitofrontal cortex thus plays a key role in emotion, by representing the reward value of the goals for action. The learning process is stimulus-reinforcer association learning. Negative reward prediction error neurons are related to this affective learning. Activations in the orbitofrontal cortex correlate with the subjective emotional experience of affective stimuli, and damage to the orbitofrontal cortex impairs emotion-related learning, emotional behaviour, and subjective affective state. Top-down attention to affect modulates orbitofrontal cortex representations, and attention to intensity modulates representations in earlier cortical areas that represent the physical properties of stimuli. Top-down word-level cognitive inputs can bias affective representations in the orbitofrontal cortex, providing a mechanism for cognition to influence emotion. Whereas the orbitofrontal cortex provides a representation of reward or affective value on a continuous scale, areas beyond the orbitofrontal cortex such as the medial prefrontal cortex area 10 are involved in binary decision-making when a choice must be made. For this decision-making, the orbitofrontal cortex provides a representation of the value of each specific reward on the same scale, with no conversion to a common currency. Increased activity in a lateral orbitofrontal cortex non-reward area provides a new attractor-related approach to understanding and treating depression. Consistent with the theory, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex has increased functional connectivity in depression, and the medial orbitofrontal cortex, involved in reward, has decreased functional connectivity in depression.