ArticleeLife2025
Omissions of threat trigger subjective relief and prediction error-like signaling in the human reward and salience systems.
Article in eLife, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dopamine D2/3 receptors and functional connectivity during fear extinction: A PET-fMRI study.Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Habenula-ventral tegmental area functional coupling and risk aversion in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens and amygdala underlies avoidance learning during adolescence: Implications for developmental psychopathology.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- Article
- Intersect between brain mechanisms of conditioned threat, active avoidance, and reward.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- The neurocomputational link between defensive cardiac states and approach-avoidance arbitration under threat.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Towards a Real-Life Understanding of the Altered Functional Behaviour of the Default Mode and Salience Network in Chronic Pain: Are People with Chronic Pain Overthinking the Meaning of Their Pain?Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The unexpected absence of danger constitutes a pleasurable event that is critical for the learning of safety. Accumulating evidence points to similarities between the processing of absent threat and the well-established reward prediction error (PE). However, clear-cut evidence for this analogy in humans is scarce. In line with recent animal data, we showed that the unexpected omission of (painful) electrical stimulation triggers activations within key regions of the reward and salience pathways and that these activations correlate with the pleasantness of the reported relief. Furthermore, by parametrically violating participants' probability and intensity related expectations of the upcoming stimulation, we showed for the first time in humans that omission-related activations in the VTA/SN were stronger following omissions of more probable and intense stimulations, like a positive reward PE signal. Together, our findings provide additional support for an overlap in the neural processing of absent danger and rewards in humans.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.