Brain systems underlying the affective and social monitoring of actions: An integrative review

• Review of brain systems underlying affective and social influences on action monitoring.
• Meta-analyses of error-processing, emotion, and social cognition brain regions.
• Error/action monitoring is shaped by affective and social factors.
• Dissociable roles of dMFC, amygdala, and AI during action monitoring.

Action monitoring allows the swift detection of conflicts, errors, and the rapid evaluation of outcomes. These processes are crucial for learning, adaptive behavior, and for the regulation of cognitive control. Our review discusses neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies that have explored the contribution of emotional and social factors during action monitoring. Meta-analytic brain activation maps demonstrate reliable overlap of error monitoring, emotional, and social processes in the dorsal mediofrontal cortex (dMFC), lateral prefrontal areas, and anterior insula (AI). Cumulating evidence suggests that action monitoring is modulated by trait anxiety and negative affect, and that activity of the dMFC and the amygdala during action monitoring might contribute to the ‘affective tagging’ of actions along a valence dimension. The role of AI in action monitoring may be the integration of outcome information with self-agency and social context factors, thereby generating more complex situation-specific and conscious emotional feeling states. Our review suggests that action-monitoring processes operate at multiple levels in the human brain, and are shaped by dynamic interactions with affective and social processes.