Opposite effect of conflict context modulation on neural mechanisms of cognitive and affective control

Neural responses of in-group "favoritism" and out-group "discrimination" toward moral behaviors

People hate being deceived. However, what would it be if lies come from in-group members compared with that from out-group members? In the current Electroencephalography (EEG) study, we recruited thirty-six participants to play a modified estimator and advisor game to investigate the mental and neural processes to lies and truth conveyed by in-group and out-group members. At the behavioral level, lies are less morally acceptable, arose less positive emotion, and made participants distribute less money to the advisor in a dictator game. Meanwhile, participants liked the in-group university more than the out-group university and they thought they were more similar to in-group members than to out-group members. However, there were no significant interactions of group type (i.e., in-group and out-group) and message type (i.e., lies and truth) in the aforementioned behavioral assessments. At the neural level, significant interaction effects were found in the parietal N1 and P3 amplitude. More importantly, no significant N1 and P3 amplitude differences between in-group lies and truth were found, while outgroup lies elicited larger P3 amplitude than outgroup truth and out-group truth elicited larger N1 amplitude than outgroup lies. What's more, P3 amplitude differences between lies vs. truth positively correlated with fairness scores only in the in-group condition but not in the out-group condition. Current study showed that the P3 component was sensitive in capturing subtle differences when participants were processing different types of lies and truth that could not be captured by behavioral measurements. Besides, the fairness trait modulated the in-group bias related P3 patterns. The current study provides insight into the neurobiological mechanism underlying the mental process of in-group and out-group lies and truth, and suggests individuals' tendency of general in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination toward moral behaviors.

Reward Modulates Affective Priming Effect in Cognitive Conflict Processing: Electrophysiological Evidence

Previous research demonstrated that cognitive conflict could induce an affective priming effect, and the stage (detection/resolution) of conflict processing led to different directions (positive/negative) of the affective priming effect. We suggested that rewards play a critical role in the affective priming effect on conflict resolution. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs), using the arrow flanker task as primes and choosing specific affective words as targets to investigate the affective priming effect induced by cognitive conflict during the resolution stage. Our question was whether rewards created a modulating effect. Participants were asked to judge the congruency of the prime stimuli and then evaluate the valence of the target words. For behavioral results, the conflict effect was significant, and the reward promoted the behavioral performance of participants. For ERP results, enhanced N2 amplitudes for incongruent primes indicated a significant conflict effect. More importantly, as expected, in the rewarded condition, the enhanced N400 amplitudes for positive targets following incongruent primes were found, indicating a positive priming effect. However, in the unrewarded condition, the reduced N400 amplitudes for positive targets following incongruent primes were found, indicating conflict resolution hindered the processing of positive stimuli. These findings suggested that cognitive conflict-induced the positive priming effect during the resolution stage and that rewards had a moderating effect on the positive priming effect.

A domain-general brain network underlying emotional and cognitive interference processing: evidence from coordinate-based and functional connectivity meta-analyses

The inability to control or inhibit emotional distractors characterizes a range of psychiatric disorders. Despite the use of a variety of task paradigms to determine the mechanisms underlying the control of emotional interference, a precise characterization of the brain regions and networks that support emotional interference processing remains elusive. Here, we performed coordinate-based and functional connectivity meta-analyses to determine the brain networks underlying emotional interference. Paradigms addressing interference processing in the cognitive or emotional domain were included in the meta-analyses, particularly the Stroop, Flanker, and Simon tasks. Our results revealed a consistent involvement of the bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, left inferior frontal gyrus, and superior parietal lobule during emotional interference. Follow-up conjunction analyses identified correspondence in these regions between emotional and cognitive interference processing. Finally, the patterns of functional connectivity of these regions were examined using resting-state functional connectivity and meta-analytic connectivity modeling. These regions were strongly connected as a distributed system, primarily mapping onto fronto-parietal control, ventral attention, and dorsal attention networks. Together, the present findings indicate that a domain-general neural system is engaged across multiple types of interference processing and that regulating emotional and cognitive interference depends on interactions between large-scale distributed brain networks.

Dissociable early attentional control mechanisms underlying cognitive and affective conflicts

It has been well documented that cognitive conflict is sensitive to the relative proportion of congruent and incongruent trials. However, few studies have examined whether affective conflict processing is modulated as a function of proportion congruency (PC). To address this question we recorded event-related potentials (ERP) while subjects performed both cognitive and affective face-word Stroop tasks. By varying the proportion of congruent and incongruent trials in each block, we examined the extent to which PC impacts both cognitive and affective conflict control at different temporal stages. Results showed that in the cognitive task an anteriorly localized early N2 component occurred predominantly in the low proportion congruency context, whereas in the affective task it was found to occur in the high proportion congruency one. The N2 effects across the two tasks were localized to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, where responses were increased in the cognitive task but decreased in the affective one. Furthermore, high proportions of congruent items produced both larger amplitude of a posteriorly localized sustained potential component and a larger behavioral Stroop effect in cognitive and affective tasks. Our findings suggest that cognitive and affective conflicts engage early dissociable attentional control mechanisms and a later common conflict response system.