Development of response inhibition in the context of relevant versus irrelevant emotions

Fronto—Parietal Regions Predict Transient Emotional States in Emotion Modulated Response Inhibition via Low Frequency and Beta Oscillations

The current study evaluated the impact of task-relevant emotion on inhibitory control while focusing on midline cortical regions rather than brain asymmetry. Single-trial time-frequency analysis of electroencephalography recordings linked with response execution and response inhibition was done while thirty-four participants performed the emotion modulated stop-signal task. To evaluate individual differences across decision-making processes involved in inhibitory control, a hierarchical drift-diffusion model was used to fit data from Go-trials for each of the 34 participants. Response threshold in the early processing stage for happy and disgust emotions could be distinguished from the later processing stage at the mid-parietal and mid-frontal regions, respectively, by the single-trial power increments in low frequency (delta and theta) bands. Beta desynchronization in the mid-frontal region was specific for differentiating disgust from neutral emotion in the early as well as later processing stages. The findings are interpreted based on the influence of emotional stimuli on early perceptual processing originating as a bottom-up process in the mid-parietal region and later proceeding to the mid-frontal region responsible for cognitive control processing, which resulted in enhanced inhibitory performance. The results show the importance of mid-frontal and mid-parietal regions in single-trial dynamics of inhibitory control processing.

Testing whether implicit emotion regulation mediates the association between discrimination and symptoms of psychopathology in late childhood: An RDoC perspective

Discrimination has been associated with adverse mental health outcomes, though it is unclear how early in life this association becomes apparent. Implicit emotion regulation, developing during childhood, is a foundational skill tied to a range of outcomes. Implicit emotion regulation has yet to be tested as an associated process for mental illness symptoms that can often emerge during this sensitive developmental period. Youth aged 9-11 were recruited for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Associations between psychotic-like experiences, depressive symptoms, and total discrimination (due to race, ethnicity, nationality, weight, or sexual minority status) were tested, as well as associations with implicit emotion regulation measures (emotional updating working memory and inhibitory control). Analyses examined whether associations with symptoms were mediated by implicit emotion regulation. Discrimination related to decreased implicit emotion regulation performance, and increased endorsement of depressive symptoms and psychotic-like experiences. Emotional updating working memory performance partially mediated the association between discrimination and psychotic-like experiences, while emotional inhibitory control did not. Discrimination and implicit emotion regulation could serve as putative transdiagnostic markers of vulnerability. Results support the utility of using multiple units of analysis to improve understanding of complex emerging neurocognitive functions and developmentally sensitive periods.

Differential impacts of natural L2 immersion and intensive classroom L2 training on cognitive control

The relationship between bilingualism and cognitive control has been controversial. We believe that the discrepant findings are likely driven by the complexities of the bilingual experience, which is consistent with the Adaptive Control Hypothesis. The current study investigates whether the natural language immersion experience and the classroom intensive language training experience have differential impacts on cognitive control. Among unbalanced Chinese-English bilingual students, a natural L2 (second language) immersion group, an L2 public speaking training group, and a control bilingual group without immersion or training experience were compared on their cognitive control abilities, with the participants' demographic factors strictly controlled. The results showed that the L2 immersion group and the L2 speaking group had faster speed than the control group in the Flanker task, whereas the L2 immersion group had fewer errors than the other two groups in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). These results generally provide evidence in favour of the Adaptive Control Hypothesis, specifying that natural L2 immersion and L2 public speaking training experiences are distinctively related to cognitive control. The current study is the first of its kind to link specific bilingual experiences (natural L2 immersion vs. intensive L2 public speaking) with different components of cognitive control.

Children cannot ignore what they hear: Incongruent emotional information leads to an auditory dominance in children

Effective emotion recognition is imperative to successfully navigating social situations. Research suggests differing developmental trajectories for the recognition of bodily and vocal emotion, but emotions are usually studied in isolation and rarely considered as multimodal stimuli in the literature. When adults are presented with basic multimodal sensory stimuli, the Colavita effect suggests that they have a visual dominance, whereas more recent research finds that an auditory sensory dominance may be present in children under 8 years of age. However, it is not currently known whether this phenomenon holds for more complex multimodal social stimuli. Here we presented children and adults with multimodal social stimuli consisting of emotional bodies and voices, asking them to recognize the emotion in one modality while ignoring the other. We found that adults can perform this task with no detrimental effects on performance regardless of whether the ignored emotion was congruent or not. However, children find it extremely challenging to recognize bodily emotion while trying to ignore incongruent vocal emotional information. In several instances, they performed below chance level, indicating that the auditory modality actively informs their choice of bodily emotion. Therefore, this is the first evidence, to our knowledge, of an auditory dominance in children when presented with emotionally meaningful stimuli.

A Lifespan Model of Interference Resolution and Inhibitory Control: Risk for Depression and Changes with Illness Progression

The cognitive processes involved in inhibitory control accuracy (IC) and interference resolution speed (IR) or broadly - inhibition - are discussed in this review, and both are described within the context of a lifespan model of mood disorders. Inhibitory control (IC) is a binary outcome (success or no for response selection and inhibition of unwanted responses) for any given event that is influenced to an extent by IR. IR refers to the process of inhibition, which can be manipulated by task design in earlier and later stages through use of distractors and timing, and manipulation of individual differences in response proclivity. We describe the development of these two processes across the lifespan, noting factors that influence this development (e.g., environment, adversity and stress) as well as inherent difficulties in assessing IC/IR prior to adulthood (e.g., cross-informant reports). We use mood disorders as an illustrative example of how this multidimensional construct can be informative to state, trait, vulnerability and neuroprogression of disease. We present aggregated data across numerous studies and methodologies to examine the lifelong development and degradation of this subconstruct of executive function, particularly in mood disorders. We highlight the challenges in identifying and measuring IC/IR in late life, including specificity to complex, comorbid disease processes. Finally, we discuss some potential avenues for treatment and accommodation of these difficulties across the lifespan, including newer treatments using cognitive remediation training and neuromodulation.

Benefits of emotion-based training for the rehabilitation of stroke patients: A scoping review

BACKGROUND

The application of emotional stimuli is beneficial when practicing tasks that must be learned.

OBJECTIVE

This scoping review examined related literature to identify the applicability of emotion-based training for therapeutic activities.

METHOD

All relevant literature published as of April 1, 2020 in four prominent databases was searched (CINAHL, Embase, PubMed, and PsycINFO) using the five-stage review framework proposed by Arksey and O'Malley.

RESULTS

After sophisticated searches and exclusions, ten publications were included for further review. Our results revealed three types of emotion-based stimulation methods that can influence therapeutic effects on stroke patients. However, the research did not compare the difference between the pros, cons, and effectiveness of each type of sensory stimulation.

CONCLUSION

Rehabilitation specialists are encouraged to obtain a broad understanding of therapeutic situations and their possible impacts on a given environment.

Positive information facilitates response inhibition in older adults only when emotion is task-relevant

Emotional information is integral to everyday life and impacts a variety of cognitive abilities including response inhibition, a critical skill for maintaining appropriate and flexible behaviour. However, reported effects of emotion on response inhibition are inconsistent in younger adults, and very limited in older adults. Effects of aging are especially relevant because emotion regulation improves with aging despite declining inhibitory control over neutral information. Across three studies, we assessed the impact of emotional facial expressions on response inhibition in younger and older adults while manipulating attention to task stimuli. Emotional faces (versus neutral faces) altered response inhibition only when task instructions required explicit attention to emotional attributes of the faces. When directly comparing fear faces to happy faces, both age groups had better response inhibition to happy faces. Age further influenced differences across conditions, in that happy faces enhanced response inhibition relative to neutral faces in older adults but not younger adults. Thus, emotional response inhibition for task-relevant (but not task-irrelevant) positive information is enhanced in late life compared to early adulthood. The present work extends the nascent literature on emotional response inhibition in aging, and proffers a framework to reconcile the mixed literature on this topic in younger adults.

Age-related differences in affective control and its association with mental health difficulties

Difficulties in regulating affect are core characteristics of a wide range of mental health conditions and are associated with deficits in cognitive control, particularly in affective contexts, affective control. The current study explored how affective control relates to mental health over the course of adolescence. We developed an Affective Control Task, which was administered to young adolescents (11-14 years; n = 29); mid-adolescents (15-18 years; n = 31), and adults (22-30 years; n = 31). The task required individuals to sort cards according to continuously changing rules: color, number, or item type. There was a neutral condition in which items were shapes, and an affective condition, in which items were emotional facial expressions. Better affective control was associated with fewer mental health difficulties (p < .001, R2 = .15). Affective control partially accounted for the association between age group and mental health problems, z = 2.61, p = .009, Akaike information criterion = 484, with the association being strongest in young adolescents, r (27) = -.44, p = .018. Affective control further accounted for variance in the association between self-reported (but not experimental) emotion regulation and mental health (z = -3.44, p < .001, Akaike information criterion = 440). Poor affective control, especially in young adolescents, is associated with more mental health problems and higher levels of emotion regulation difficulties. Improving affective control therefore may constitute a promising target for prevention.

Emotional Response Inhibition Is Greater in Older Than Younger Adults

Emotional information rapidly captures our attention and also often invokes automatic response tendencies, whereby positive information motivates approach, while negative information encourages avoidance. However, many circumstances require the need to override or inhibit these automatic responses. Control over responses to emotional information remains largely intact in late life, in spite of age-related declines in cognitive control and inhibition of responses to non-emotional information. The goal of this behavioral study was to understand how the aging process influences emotional response inhibition for positive and negative information in older adults. We examined emotional response inhibition in 36 healthy older adults (ages 60–89) and 44 younger adults (ages 18–22) using an emotional Go/No-Go task presenting happy (positive), fearful (negative), and neutral faces. In both younger and older adults, happy faces produced more approach-related behavior (i.e., fewer misses), while fearful faces produced more avoidance-related behavior, in keeping with theories of approach/avoidance-motivated responses. Calculation of speed/accuracy trade-offs between response times and false alarm rates revealed that younger and older adults both favored speed at the expense of accuracy, most robustly within blocks with fearful faces. However, there was no indication that the strength of the speed/accuracy trade-off differed between younger and older adults. The key finding was that although younger adults were faster to respond to all types of faces, older adults had greater emotional response inhibition (i.e., fewer false alarms). Moreover, younger adults were particularly prone to false alarms for happy faces. This is the first study to directly test effects of aging on emotional response inhibition. Complementing previous literature in the domains of attention and memory, these results provide new evidence that in the domain of response inhibition older adults may more effectively employ emotion regulatory ability, albeit on a slower time course, compared to younger adults. Older adults’ enhanced adaptive emotion regulation strategies may facilitate resistance to emotional distraction. The present study extends the literature of emotional response inhibition in younger adulthood into late life, and in doing so further elucidates how cognitive aging interacts with affective control processes.

Differential inter-trial effects in the visual search of children, adolescents, and young adults

We examined the age-related variation in one type of inter-trial effect of visual search, the distractor previewing effect (DPE), in affectively neutral and affectively charged contexts. In Experiment 1, children, adolescents, and young adults were faster to identify the shape of a color target when the color of the current distractors had already been previewed than when the target had been previewed in the preceding target-absent trial, indicative of a color-based DPE. The results revealed a greater DPE in children than in adolescents and young adults, but it can be attributed to children's slower RTs than the other two groups. In Experiment 2, children, adolescents, and young adults were instructed to respond to a schematic face that was different from the other two faces. Young adults were faster in searching for a threatening face among friendly ones when they had previewed a target-absent display consisting of friendly faces than that of threatening faces, indicating an emotional DPE. By contrast, children showed a reversed DPE under the same condition, whereas adolescents showed no DPE. Taken together, these results suggested that the three age groups were all able to create an inhibitory attentional bias on the basis of trial history in affectively neutral context, whereas children and adolescents were not able to create such an inhibitory attentional bias in affectively charged contexts in the same way as adults did. These findings implied that the development of attentional inhibition abilities in affectively charged contexts might be delayed compared to those in affectively neutral contexts.

Task-irrelevant emotional faces impair response adjustments in a double-step saccade task

Cognitive control enables us to adjust behaviours according to task demands, and emotion influences the cognitive control. We examined how task-irrelevant emotional stimuli impact the ability to inhibit a prepared response and then programme another appropriate response. In the study, either a single target or two sequential targets appeared after emotional face images (positive, neutral, and negative). Subjects were required to freely viewed the emotional faces and make a saccade quickly upon target onset, but inhibit their initial saccades and redirect gaze to the second target if it appeared. We found that subjects were less successful at inhibiting their initial saccades as the inter-target delay increased. Emotional faces further reduced their inhibition ability with a longer delay, but not with a shorter delay. When subjects failed to inhibit the initial saccade, the longer delay produced longer intersaccadic interval. Especially, positive faces lengthened the intersaccadic interval with a longer delay. These results showed mere presence of emotional stimuli influences gaze redirection by impairing the ability to cancel a prepared saccade and delaying the programming of a corrective saccade. Therefore, we propose that the modulation of response adjustment exerted by emotional faces is related to the stage of initial response programming.

Adolescents' inhibitory control: keep it cool or lose control

Inhibitory control (i.e., the ability to resist automatisms, temptations, distractions, or interference and to adapt to conflicting situations) is a determinant of cognitive and socio-emotional development. In light of the discrepancies of previous findings on the development of inhibitory control in affectively charged contexts, two important issues need to be addressed. We need to determine (a) whether cool inhibitory control (in affectively neutral contexts) and hot inhibitory control (in affectively charged contexts) follow the same developmental pattern and (b) the degree of specificity of these two types of inhibitory control at different ages. Thus, in the present study, we investigated the developmental patterns of cool and hot inhibitory control and the degree of specificity of these abilities in children, adolescents and adults. Typically developing children, adolescents, and adults performed two Stroop-like tasks: an affectively neutral one (Cool Stroop task) and an affectively charged one (Hot Stroop task). In the Cool Stroop task, the participants were asked to identify the ink color of the words independent of color that the words named; in the Hot Stroop task, the participants were asked to identify the emotional expression of a face independent of the emotion named by a simultaneously displayed written word. We found that cool inhibitory control abilities develop linearly with age, whereas hot inhibitory control abilities follow a quadratic developmental pattern, with adolescents displaying worse hot inhibitory control abilities than children and adults. In addition, cool and hot inhibitory control abilities were correlated in children but not in adolescents and adults. The present study suggests (a) that cool and hot inhibitory control abilities develop differently from childhood to adulthood - i.e., that cool inhibition follows a linear developmental pattern and hot inhibition follows an adolescent-specific pattern - and (b) that they become progressively more domain-specific with age.

Neurocognitive bases of emotion regulation development in adolescence

Emotion regulation is the ability to recruit processes to influence emotion generation. In recent years there has been mounting interest in how emotions are regulated at behavioural and neural levels, as well as in the relevance of emotional dysregulation to psychopathology. During adolescence, brain regions involved in affect generation and regulation, including the limbic system and prefrontal cortex, undergo protracted structural and functional development. Adolescence is also a time of increasing vulnerability to internalising and externalising psychopathologies associated with poor emotion regulation, including depression, anxiety and antisocial behaviour. It is therefore of particular interest to understand how emotion regulation develops over this time, and how this relates to ongoing brain development. However, to date relatively little research has addressed these questions directly. This review will discuss existing research in these areas in both typical adolescence and in adolescent psychopathology, and will highlight opportunities for future research. In particular, it is important to consider the social context in which adolescent emotion regulation develops. It is possible that while adolescence may be a time of vulnerability to emotional dysregulation, scaffolding the development of emotion regulation during this time may be a fruitful preventative target for psychopathology.

The effects of age, sex, and hormones on emotional conflict-related brain response during adolescence

While cognitive and emotional systems both undergo development during adolescence, few studies have explored top-down inhibitory control brain activity in the context of affective processing, critical to informing adolescent psychopathology. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain response during an Emotional Conflict (EmC) Task across 10-15-year-old youth. During the EmC Task, participants indicated the emotion of facial expressions, while disregarding emotion-congruent and incongruent words printed across the faces. We examined the relationships of age, sex, and gonadal hormones with brain activity on Incongruent vs. Congruent trials. Age was negatively associated with middle frontal gyrus activity, controlling for performance and movement confounds. Sex differences were present in occipital and parietal cortices, and were driven by activation in females, and deactivation in males to Congruent trials. Testosterone was negatively related with frontal and striatal brain response in males, and cerebellar and precuneus response in females. Estradiol was negatively related with fronto-cerebellar, cingulate, and precuneus brain activity in males, and positively related with occipital response in females. To our knowledge, this is the first study reporting the effects of age, sex, and sex steroids during an emotion-cognition task in adolescents. Further research is needed to examine longitudinal development of emotion-cognition interactions and deviations in psychiatric disorders in adolescence.

Choosing not to act: neural bases of the development of intentional inhibition

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Intentional inhibition shows an early development.

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Intentional inhibition is associated with fronto-basal ganglia network activation.

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Fronto-basal ganglia activity is stronger in children than adults.

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Self-reported impulsivity and intentional inhibition are positively correlated.

Choosing not to act, or the ability to intentionally inhibit your actions lies at the core of self-control. Even though most research has focused on externally primed inhibition, an important question concerns how intentional inhibition develops. Therefore, in the present study children (aged 10–12) and adults (aged 18–26) performed the marble task, in which they had to choose between acting on and inhibiting a prepotent response, while fMRI data were collected. Intentional inhibition was associated with activation of the fronto-basal ganglia network. Activation in the subthalamic nucleus and dorsal fronto-median cortex, regions which have previously been associated with intentional inhibition, did not differ between intentional inhibition and intentional action. Even though both children and adults intentionally inhibited their actions to a similar extent, children showed more activation in the fronto-basal ganglia network during intentional inhibition, but not in the subthalamic nucleus and dorsal fronto-median cortex. Furthermore, a positive relation between self-reported impulsivity and intentional inhibition was observed. These findings have important implications for our understanding of disorders of impulsivity, such as ADHD, which are associated with poor self-control abilities.