Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Eudaimonic and Hedonic Rewards Differentially Modulate Neural Engagement During Stressful Cognitive Task Performance

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Yi-Fan Fu¹ (r10454013@ntu.edu.tw), Jie-Rong Lin¹, Joshua Oon Soo Goh¹; ¹National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

Studies suggest that prospective rewards can buffer task-related mental stress and thereby enhance psychological resilience. However, the neural mechanisms underlying how rewards modulate stress responses during cognitive processing remain unclear, limiting applications for mental health. This study examines neural responses during task performance without extrinsic reward compared to performance with incentives, which can be hedonic with self-centric outcomes or eudaimonic with non-self-centric outcomes. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, 17 participants (9 females) solved arithmetic problems under (a) no time constraints, (b) time pressure with score ranking (non-incentivized), (c) time pressure with performances linked to charity donations (eudaimonic reward), and (d) time pressure with remunerated performances (hedonic reward). With eudaimonic rewards, arithmetic calculation accuracies were higher and self-reported stress levels were lower, compared to the case with non-incentivized pressured performance. Critically, neural responses increased in the anterior cingulate cortex and declined in the default mode network (DMN) during incentivized relative to non-incentivized task performance. In addition, neural responses in the putamen were highest during non-incentivized pressured processing, followed by performance with hedonic reward, then performance with eudaimonic reward, and were lowest under the non-constrained case. These findings suggest that eudaimonic rewards are effective motivators for circumventing stress-related effects induced by task demands. Moreover, the provision of different task reward types modulates activity in corticostriatal and DMN regions implicated in value-based and self-related processing, respectively. Having non-self-centric motivations might afford more resilient neurocomputional strategies in these brain areas that bypass stressful reactions when facing challenging problems in life.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions