Motivation enhances control of positive and negative emotional distractions

On the relationship between emotions and cognitive control: Evidence from an observational study on emotional priming Stroop task

Evidence is discordant regarding how emotional processing and cognitive control interact to shape behavior. This observational study sought to examine this interaction by looking at the distinction between proactive and reactive modes of control and how they relate to emotional processing. Seventy-four healthy participants performed an emotional priming Stroop task. On each trial, target stimuli of a spatial Stroop task were preceded by sad or neutral facial expressions, providing two emotional conditions. To manipulate the requirement of both proactive and reactive control, the proportion of congruent trials (PC) was varied at the list-wide (LWPC) and item-specific (ISPC) levels, respectively. We found that sad priming led to behavioral costs only in trials with low proactive and reactive cognitive control demands. Our findings suggest that emotional processing affects cognitive processes other than cognitive control in the Stroop task. Moreover, both proactive and reactive control modes seem effective in overcoming emotional interference of priming stimuli.

Emotion-Induced Blindness Is Impervious to Working Memory Load

Emotionally-salient stimuli receive attentional priority. Here, we tested the extent to which top-down control can modulate this prioritization within the domain of temporal attention. To test this prioritization, we measured emotion-induced blindness, which is the effect whereby the perception of a target is impaired by the presentation of a negative distractor that precedes the target in a rapid serial visual presentation stream, relative to target perception following a neutral distractor. The degree of top-down control was investigated by manipulating participants' concurrent working memory load while performing the task. The working-memory load consisted of participants performing mathematical calculations (no load = no calculation; low load = adding two numbers; and high load = adding and subtracting four numbers). Results indicated that the magnitude of emotion-induced blindness was not affected by the working-memory load. This finding, when combined with those of previous studies, supports the notion that the prioritization of emotionally-salient stimuli in the temporal allocation of attention does not require top-down processing, while it does in the spatial allocation of attention.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00176-9.

Proactive and reactive cognitive control for emotional conflict in individuals with high schizotypy: An ERP study

OBJECTIVE

The present study aimed to examine how individuals with high schizotypy, a high risk group of schizophrenia patients, resolve emotional conflict in proactive and reactive control and the underlying neural mechanisms.

METHODS

Thirty-two individuals with high schizotypy and 30 matched individuals with low schizotypy completed an emotional face-word Stroop task with electroencephalographic data recorded. The proportion of incongruent trials was manipulated in the task to induce proactive control (mostly incongruent trials context, MI context) or reactive control (mostly congruent trials context, MC context). Two event-related potential (ERP) components (N170 and N2) were examined, which represent face processing and cognitive control processes, respectively.

RESULTS

In the MC context, significantly decreased N2 and N170 amplitudes were found in high schizotypy individuals compared with low schizotypy individuals, suggesting abnormal neural activity of reactive control in high schizotypy individuals. No significant differences were found between the two groups in the MI context.

CONCLUSIONS

These results provide initial evidence for dissociation of neural activity of proactive and reactive control on emotional conflict in individuals with high schizotypy.

SIGNIFICANCE

The current findings provide important insight into the emotional conflict resolution in the schizophrenia spectrum.

Arousal-driven interactions between reward motivation and categorization of emotional facial expressions

Reward motivation and emotion share common dimensions of valence and arousal, but the nature of interactions between the two constructs is relatively unclear. On the one hand, based on the common valence dimension, valence-compatible interactions are expected where reward motivation would facilitate the processing of compatible (i.e., positive) emotion and hamper the processing of incompatible (i.e., negative) emotion. On the other hand, one could hypothesize valence-general interactions driven by the arousal dimension, where the processing of both positive and negative emotions would be facilitated under reward motivation. Currently, the evidence for valence-compatible vs. valence-general type interactions between reward motivation and goal-relevant emotion is relatively mixed. Moreover, as most of the previous work focused primarily on appetitive motivation, the influence of aversive motivation on goal-relevant emotion is largely unexplored. To address these important gaps, in the present study, we investigated the interactions between motivation and categorization of facial emotional expressions by manipulating the valence dimension of motivation (appetitive and aversive motivation levels) together with that of emotion (positive and negative valence stimuli). Specifically, we conducted two behavioral experiments to separately probe the influence of appetitive and aversive motivation (manipulated via an advance cue signaling the prospect of monetary gains in Experiment 1 and losses in Experiment 2, respectively) on the categorization of happy, fearful, and neutral faces. We tested the two competing hypotheses regarding the interactions between appetitive/aversive motivation and emotional face categorization: Valence-compatible vs. Valence-general. We found evidence consistent with valence-general interactions where both appetitive and aversive motivation facilitated the categorization of happy and fearful faces relative to the neutral ones. Our findings demonstrate that interactions between reward motivation and categorization of emotional faces are driven by the arousal dimension, not by valence.

Unconscious social relation threats: Invisible boss face biases attention

Threatening stimuli as a kind of salient information often guide attentional orienting. Besides physically threatening stimuli, social threats can also strongly bias attention, even in the absence of conscious awareness. However, the available evidence mainly came from studies on an emotional face. It is unclear whether social relation threats, such as a boss face without emotional expressions, can also direct attentional orienting unconsciously. This study aimed to reveal the extent to which the attentional system has developed to process threatening stimuli by exploring whether invisible social relation threats unconsciously biased attention. We asked graduate and undergraduate students to perform a modified Posner's cue-target task, in which the probe was preceded by a pair of competitive face cues (an advisor's face and another faculty member's face), rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression. Experiment 1a's results showed that the advisor's face reflexively oriented graduate students' spatial attention, which was significantly correlated with subjective social threat evaluation. However, Experiment 1b showed that an invisible advisor's face did not induce the same effect in undergraduate students, as they reported significantly fewer threats from their advisors than graduates. To ensure the robustness of this new effect, we preregistered a replicate study and successfully replicated the above results in Experiments 2a and 2b. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of an attentional orienting bias toward invisible social relation threats. These results suggest that the attentional system evolved to promote the exploration of our visual environment for threatening social relation signals.

The interactive effects of reward expectation and emotional interference on cognitive conflict control: An ERP study

The effects of reward expectation and task-irrelevant emotional content on performance and event-related potential (ERP) recordings in a cognitive conflict control task were investigated using the face-word Stroop paradigm. A precue indicating additional monetary rewards for fast and accurate responses during the upcoming trial (incentive condition; relative to a cue indicating no additional reward, i.e., nonincentive condition) was followed by the presentation of target Chinese words (male vs. female) superimposed on background emotional faces (happy vs. fearful). The face's gender was congruent or incongruent with the target Chinese words. ERP results revealed that incentive cues elicited larger P1, P3, and CNV responses compared to nonincentive cues. There was a significant three-way interaction of reward expectation, emotional content, and congruency during the target processing stage such that emotionality and congruency interacted to affect the N170 and N2 component responses during the nonincentive condition but not during the incentive condition. These results indicate that reward-induced motivation reduces the interference effect of task-irrelevant emotional information, leading to better conflict resolution.

Efficacy of single-session transcranial direct current stimulation on addiction-related inhibitory control and craving: a randomized trial in males with Internet gaming disorder

BACKGROUND

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) may reduce substance use and other addictive behaviours. However, the cognitive mechanisms that underpin such effects remain unclear. Impaired inhibitory control linked to hypoactivation of the prefrontal cortex may allow craving-related motivations to lead to compulsive addictive behaviours. However, very few studies have examined whether increasing the activation of the dlPFC via anodal tDCS could enhance inhibitory control over addiction-related distractors. The current study aimed to enrich empirical evidence related to this issue.

METHODS

Thirty-three males with Internet gaming disorder underwent active (1.5 mA for 20 minutes) and sham tDCS 1 week apart, in randomized order. We assessed inhibitory control over gaming-related distractors and craving pre- and post-stimulation.

RESULTS

Relative to sham treatment, active tDCS reduced interference from gaming-related (versus non-gaming) distractors and attenuated background craving, but did not affect cue-induced craving.

LIMITATIONS

This study was limited by its relatively small sample size and the fact that it lacked assessments of tDCS effects on addictive behaviour. Future tDCS studies with multiple sessions in larger samples are warranted to examine the effects on addictive behaviours of alterations in addiction-related inhibitory control.

CONCLUSION

These findings demonstrate that stimulation of the dlPFC influences inhibitory control over addiction-related cues and addiction-related motivation. This is the first empirical study to suggest that enhanced inhibitory control may be a cognitive mechanism underlying the effects of tDCS on addictions like Internet gaming disorder. Our finding of attenuated background craving replicated previous tDCS studies. Intriguingly, our finding of distinct tDCS effects on 2 forms of craving suggests that they may have disparate underlying mechanisms or differential sensitivity to tDCS.

CLINICAL TRIALS #

NCT03352973.

Monetary incentives have only limited effects on auditory distraction: evidence for the automaticity of cross-modal attention capture

The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction postulates that two distinct forms of auditory distraction can be distinguished by whether or not they can be cognitively controlled. While the interference-by-process component of auditory distraction is postulated to be automatic and independent of cognitive control, the stimulus-aspecific attention capture by auditory deviants and the stimulus-specific attentional diversion by auditorily presented distractor sentences should be suppressed by increased task engagement. Here we test whether incentive-induced changes in task engagement affect the disruption of serial recall by auditory deviants (Experiment 1) and distractor sentences (Experiment 2). Monetary incentives substantially affected recall performance in both experiments. However, the incentive-induced changes in task engagement had only limited effects on auditory distraction. In Experiment 2, increased task engagement was associated with a small decrease of distraction relative to a quiet condition, but strong effects of auditory distraction on performance persisted in conditions of high task engagement in both experiments. Most importantly, and in contrast to the predictions of the duplex-mechanism account, the effects of stimulus-aspecific attention capture (Experiment 1) and stimulus-specific attentional diversion (Experiment 2) remained unaffected by incentive-induced changes in task engagement. These findings are consistent with an automatic-capture account according to which only the processes responsible for the deliberate memorization of the target items are dependent on controlled mental effort while the attention capture by auditory deviants and the attentional diversion by distractor speech are largely automatic.

Fronto-temporal brain activity and connectivity track implicit attention to positive and negative social words in a novel socio-emotional Stroop task

Previous inconsistencies on the effects of implicitly processing positively - vs. negatively - connotated emotional words might reflect the influence of uncontrolled psycholinguistic dimensions, and/or social facets inherent in putative "emotional" stimuli. Based on the relevance of social features in semantic cognition, we developed a socio-emotional Stroop task to assess the influence of social vs. individual (non-social) emotional content, besides negative vs. positive valence, on implicit word processing. The effect of these variables was evaluated in terms of performance and RTs, alongside associated brain activity/connectivity. We matched conditions for several psycholinguistic variables, and assessed a modulation of brain activity/connectivity by trial-wise RT, to characterize the maximum of condition- and subject-specific variability. RTs were tracked by insular and anterior cingulate activations likely reflecting implicit attention to stimuli, interfering with task-performance based on condition-specific processing of their subjective salience. Slower performance for negative than neutral/positive words was tracked by left-hemispheric structures processing negative stimuli and emotions, such as fronto-insular cortex, while the lack of specific activations for positively-connotated words supported their marginal facilitatory effect. The speeding/slowing effects of processing positive/negative individual emotional stimuli were enhanced by social words, reflecting in specific activations of the right anterior temporal and orbitofrontal cortex, respectively. RTs to social positive and negative words modulated connectivity from these regions to fronto-striatal and sensorimotor structures, respectively, likely promoting approach vs. avoidance dispositions shaping their facilitatory vs. inhibitory effect. These results might help assessing the neural correlates of impaired social cognition and emotional regulation, and the effects of rehabilitative interventions.

Proactive Control of Emotional Distraction: Evidence From EEG Alpha Suppression

Biased attention towards emotional stimuli is adaptive, as it facilitates responses to important threats and rewards. An unfortunate consequence is that emotional stimuli can become potent distractors when they are irrelevant to current goals. How can this distraction be overcome despite the bias to attend to emotional stimuli? Recent studies show that distraction by irrelevant flankers is reduced when distractor frequency is high, even if they are emotional. A parsimonious explanation is that the expectation of frequent distractors promotes the use of proactive control, whereby attentional control settings can be altered to minimize distraction before it occurs. It is difficult, however, to infer proactive control on the basis of behavioral data alone. We therefore measured neural indices of proactive control while participants performed a target-detection task in which irrelevant peripheral distractors (either emotional or neutral) could appear either frequently (on 75% of trials) or rarely (on 25% of trials). We measured alpha power during the pre-stimulus period to assess proactive control and during the post-stimulus period to determine the consequences of control for subsequent processing. Pre-stimulus alpha power was tonically suppressed in the high, compared to low, distractor frequency condition, regardless of expected distractor valence, indicating sustained use of proactive control. In contrast, post-stimulus alpha suppression was reduced in the high-frequency condition, suggesting that proactive control reduced the need for post-stimulus adjustments. Our findings indicate that a sustained proactive control strategy accounts for the reduction in both emotional and non-emotional distraction when distractors are expected to appear frequently.

Monetary and non-monetary rewards reduce attentional capture by emotional distractors

Irrelevant emotional stimuli often capture attention, disrupting ongoing cognitive processes. In two experiments, we examined whether availability of rewards (monetary and non-monetary) can prevent this attentional capture. Participants completed a central letter identification task while attempting to ignore negative, positive, and neutral distractor images that appeared above or below the targets on 25% of trials. Distraction was indexed by slowing on distractor-present trials. Half the participants completed the task with no performance-contingent reward, while the other half earned points for fast and accurate performance. In Experiment 1, points translated into monetary reward, but in Experiment 2, points had no monetary value. In both experiments, reward reduced capture by emotional distractors, showing that even non-monetary reward can aid attentional control. These findings suggest that motivation encourages use of effective cognitive control mechanisms that effectively prevent attentional capture, even when distractors are emotional.

In the eye of the beholder: Psychopathy and fear enjoyment

OBJECTIVE

We investigated the relations between psychopathic traits and fear enjoyment.

METHOD

In Study 1, 140 undergraduate participants (62 men, 78 women) watched the footage of video game play meant to induce either excitement or fear, rating each on positive/negative adjectives. In Study 2, 150 undergraduate participants (94 women, 56 men) rated valence (positive/negative) of 20 sets of morphed surprise/fear photos.

RESULTS

In Study 1, participants with higher levels of psychopathy rated the fear video as less negative and more positive. In Study 2, valence ratings became more negative as fear information increased (fear-laden faces were rated more negatively than surprise-laden faces). As well, there were significant interactions between psychopathy and morph level in predicting valence with psychopathic traits being associated with giving higher positivity ratings to fear-laden faces.

CONCLUSIONS

The results of these two studies suggest that people with psychopathic traits have a more positive interpretation of the experience of fear, which could extend to evaluations of others' experiences of fear.

Reward elicits cognitive control over emotional distraction: Evidence from pupillometry

Attention is biased toward emotional stimuli, even when they are irrelevant to current goals. Motivation, elicited by performance-contingent reward, reduces behavioural emotional distraction. In emotionally neutral contexts, reward is thought to encourage use of a proactive cognitive control strategy, altering anticipatory attentional settings to more effectively suppress distractors. The current preregistered study investigates whether a similar proactive shift occurs even when distractors are highly arousing emotional images. We monitored pupil area, an online measure of both cognitive and emotional processing, to examine how reward influences the time course of control. Participants (n = 110) identified a target letter flanking an irrelevant central image. Images were meaningless scrambles on 75% of trials; on the remaining 25%, they were intact positive (erotic), negative (mutilation), or neutral images. Half the participants received financial rewards for fast and accurate performance, while the other half received no performance-contingent reward. Emotional distraction was greater than neutral distraction, and both were attenuated by reward. Consistent with behavioural findings, pupil dilation was greater following emotional than neutral distractors, and dilation to intact distractors (regardless of valence) was decreased by reward. Although reward did not enhance tonic pupil dilation (an index of sustained proactive control), exploratory analyses showed that reward altered the time course of control-eliciting a sharp, rapid, increase in dilation immediately preceding stimulus onset (reflecting dynamic use of anticipatory control), that extended until well after stimulus offset. These findings suggest that reward alters the time course of control by encouraging proactive preparation to rapidly disengage from emotional distractors.

A Motivational Framework for Psychopathy: Toward a Reconceptualization of the Disorder

Abstract. The link between psychopathy and violence has been well documented. Estimates suggest psychopathic offenders are responsible for as much as 40% of violence-related crime, and that they show rates of violent recidivism up to five times higher than non-psychopathic offenders. Existing theories of the disorder argue that this violence stems from a core insensitivity to emotional/aversive information, or from a core inability to optimally allocate processing resources in complex environments. However, some newer findings have been difficult for existing theories to assimilate; moreover, successful treatment programs based off current conceptualizations have been slow to develop. With this in mind, the current paper proposes a new motivational framework for psychopathy, within which the disorder is conceptualized as stemming from more strategic, motivated processes. The paper begins by reviewing traditional theories of psychopathy and highlighting their explanatory strengths and limitations. The proposed motivational framework is then outlined, and a supportive rationale for the framework provided. Next, the paper undertakes a selective review of some of the most empirically supported features of the disorder, to highlight how these features may be productively reformulated within a motivational framework. Finally, the paper suggests several methods through which an empirical evaluation of the proposed ideas may be undertaken, and explores potential implications of a motivational framework for next-generation rehabilitation and treatment opportunities.

Attention Capture of Non-target Emotional Faces: An Evidence From Reward Learning

The aim of this study was to explore whether reward learning would affect the processing of targets when an emotional stimulus was task irrelevant. In the current study, using a visual search paradigm to establish an association between emotional faces and reward, an emotional face appeared as a task-irrelevant distractor during the test after reward learning, and participants were asked to judge the orientation of a line on the face. In experiment 1, no significant difference was found between the high reward-fear distractor condition and the no reward-neutral condition, but the response times of the high reward-fear condition were significantly longer than those of the low reward-happy condition. In experiment 2, there was no significant difference in participants' performance between high reward-happy and no reward-neutral responses. In addition, response times of the low reward-fear condition wear significantly longer than those of the high reward-happy and no reward-neutral conditions. The results show that reward learning affects attention bias of task-irrelevant emotional faces even when reward is absent. Moreover, the high reward selection history is more effective in weakening the emotional advantage of the processing advantage than the low reward.