Cognitive control of emotional distraction – valence-specific or general?

ABSTRACT

Emotional information captures attention due to privileged processing. Consequently, performance in cognitive tasks declines (i.e. emotional distraction, ED). Therefore, shielding current goals from ED is essential for adaptive goal-directed- behaviour. It has been shown that ED is reduced when participants recruit cognitive control before or after the presentation of an emotional negative distractor. Following up on this, we asked first, whether cognitive control of ED is negative-valence-specific or valence-general. A valence-general-account predicts that control shields against distracting influence of emotion, irrespective of the specific valence. In contrast, a negative-valence-specific-account predicts that control interacts with the valence and ED is reduced for negative stimuli only. Second, we asked whether this effect of ED differs between control modes operating on different time scales (i.e. proactively or reactively). To test this, we manipulated emotional distractor valence (positive/high-arousal; negative/high-arousal; neutral/low-arousal) and assessed how control interacts with ED. Results showed that ED was reduced for negative and positive valent stimuli when control was triggered before (i.e. proactive control, n_Exp1 = 141, between-subject-design) and after (reactive control, n_Exp2 = 37, within-subject-design) the emotional stimuli. Accordingly, control blocks off high-arousing emotional distractors from interfering with goal-directed-actions, irrespective of their valence (i.e. valence-general-account) and for both, proactive and reactive control modes.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive control
• cognitive conflict
• affect
• valence

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant within the Priority Program, SPP 1772 from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), grant no DI 2126/1-1 and DI 2126/1-2 to DD. We thank our student assistants Julia Ditz, Patrik Seuling, Jessica Helm and Sari Al Salti for data collection. We are grateful to Dr. Noga Cohen for providing materials of the experimental design and to Ronja Khelifa for translating original experiment’s instructions from Hebrew into English. We thank Dr. Lisa Hüther-Pape and Dr. Edita Poljac for improving the English and Lea Johannsen and Moritz Schiltenwolf for helpful discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Visual angles were calculated from a viewing distance of 60 cm.

2 We decided to take erotic content pictures from NAPS, because pilot testing showed that our participants considered the erotic pictures from the IAPS as less erotic than indicated by the ratings and more funny due to the “retro look” of older pictures.

3 Please note that effect sizes for main and interaction effects were small compared to the ones reported in previous literature with related paradigms (Cohen et al., 2012, Experiment 2).

4 Please note that effect sizes for main and interaction effects were small compared to the ones reported in previous literature with related paradigms (Cohen et al., 2012, Experiment 1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number DI 2126/1-1].