Trait optimism, which is linked to resilience (as discussed above), might relate to reward circuit function. Sharot et al.94 scanned participants who were imagining positive and negative future events. Optimism bias — the tendency to expect future events to be positive — was associated with higher activation in the amygdala and the rostral ACC when imagining positive events than when imagining negative events. The level of activation in the rostral ACC was positively correlated with dispositional optimism94. Research on special forces soldiers showed that their reward-processing regions had higher reactivity than those of healthy civilian controls95. Conversely, susceptibility to social-reward frustration in healthy males was associated with increased activation in prefrontal (top-down control) areas during performance of a monetary task96.
