Limitations of cognitive control on emotional distraction - Congruency in the Color Stroop task does not modulate the Emotional Stroop effect.

Emotional information receives prioritized processing over concurrent cognitive processes. This can lead to distraction if emotional information has to be ignored. In the cognitive domain, mechanisms have been described that allow control of (cognitive) distractions. However, whether similar cognitive control mechanisms also can attenuate emotional distraction is an active area of research. This study asked whether cognitive control (triggered in the Color Stroop task) attenuates emotional distraction in the Emotional Stroop task. Theoretical accounts of cognitive control, and the Emotional Stroop task alike, predict such an interaction for tasks that employ the same relevant (e.g., color-naming) and irrelevant (e.g., word-reading) dimension. In an alternating-runs design with Color and Emotional Stroop tasks changing from trial to trial, we analyzed the impact of proactive and reactive cognitive control on Emotional Stroop effects. Four experiments manipulated predictability of congruency and emotional stimuli. Overall, results showed congruency effects in Color Stroop tasks and Emotional Stroop effects. Moreover, we found a spillover of congruency effects and emotional distraction to the other task, indicating that processes specific to one task impacted to the other task. However, Bayesian analyses and a mini-meta-analysis across experiments weigh against the predicted interaction between cognitive control and emotional distraction. The results point out limitations of cognitive control to block off emotional distraction, questioning views that assume a close interaction between cognitive control and emotional processing.

Situation selection and cognitive conflict: explicit knowledge is necessary for conflict avoidance.

Humans transform their environment in order to regulate their own affect. One way to do so is to avoid situations that come with negative rather than positive affect. This selection might not solely bear on expectations of full-blown emotions, but may also be invoked by anticipating the aversiveness of cognitive conflict, when a situation suggests competing behavioural responses. If cognitive conflict is indeed aversive, it may trigger affect regulation goals, which in turn influence choices of situations depending on the magnitude of conflict they contain. People should prefer actions that produce conflict-free situations to actions that produce conflicting situations. In three experiments, participants had to solve a Stroop task by freely choosing between response keys that were either associated with low-conflict or high-conflict in the subsequent trial. We find that people do not automatically prefer actions associated with conflict-free situations to actions that are associated with conflicting situations. They only do so, when they are explicitly informed about the contingency between action and congruency of an upcoming situation. This suggests that cognitive conflict, at least at the level of a standard conflict task as used here, is insufficient to invoke affect regulation processes.

Affective distraction along the flexibility-stability continuum.

This study explored whether conditions that promote flexibility in task processing enhance the detrimental impact of irrelevant negative stimulation on performance. We approached this flexibility from a transient and a sustained perspective, by manipulating whether participants repeated or switched between two tasks in consecutive trials and whether they performed the tasks in separate blocks or randomly mixed. Participants categorised either a letter or the colour of a bar, which were presented close to an irrelevant negative or neutral picture. Performance was worse in the presence of negative rather than neutral pictures. Repeating or switching tasks transiently did not modulate this detrimental impact of affective distraction in three experiments (nExp1 = 32, nExp2 = 32, nExp3 = 64). Attentional capture by negative content did decline in single compared to mixed task contexts, but only when these sustained task contexts also differed in the frequency of affective stimulation. When affective stimulation was the same in mixed and single task contexts, this modulation vanished. Overall, these results suggest that the influence of task-irrelevant negative stimulation on performance is surprisingly independent of cognitive states that favour either flexible or stable processing of task-relevant information.

Conflict modification: predictable production of congruent situations facilitates responding in a stroop task.

Humans cope with cognitive conflict in various ways, such as focusing on task-relevant instead of task-irrelevant information or avoiding situations where conflict is likely. These adaptations to conflict resemble those used to cope with negative affect. We examined whether situation modification, a strategy derived from the extended process model of emotion regulation, may influence responding in cognitive conflict tasks. This should be evident by a facilitation of actions that consistently modify situations towards congruent (positive) situations rather than to incongruent (negative) situations. In four experiments, participants modified stimuli in a color-word Stroop task towards congruent or incongruent stimuli of (un)predictable identity. A modification effect emerged insofar as participants were faster when they foreseeably produced congruent stimuli of predictable identity than when they produced incongruent stimuli or stimuli of unpredictable identity. Our results add to the body of evidence connecting affect and cognitive conflict, and reveal a constraint when using situation modification as a means to regulate cognitive conflict.

Proactive control of affective distraction: Experience-based but not expectancy-based.

Unpleasant stimuli disrupt ongoing information processing, even when they are entirely task-irrelevant. We examined whether such affective disturbances can be controlled explicitly and proactively. Specifically, we studied two different mechanisms to induce proactive control: the experience of frequent affective distraction and cueing of upcoming affective distraction. We predicted that both mechanisms would shield the attentional system from affective disturbance. Participants solved a letter classification task while being exposed to neutral or negative distractor pictures. We varied whether the proportion of negative distractors was low or high and whether cues for the upcoming type of distractor valence were informative or uninformative. In three experiments (N = 114), we found support for the notion that experience-based control shields information processing from affective disturbances, whereas distractor valence expectations were not helpful. These data suggest that there is no explicit top-down influence on attentional control settings of affective distraction, just adjustments to the context.

Focused cognitive control in dishonesty: Evidence for predominantly transient conflict adaptation.

Giving a dishonest response to a question entails cognitive conflict due to an initial activation of the truthful response. Following conflict monitoring theory, dishonest responding could therefore elicit transient and sustained control adaptation processes to mitigate such conflict, and the current experiments take on the scope and specificity of such conflict adaptation in dishonesty. Transient adaptation reduces differences between honest and dishonest responding following a recent dishonest response. Sustained adaptation has a similar behavioral signature but is driven by the overall frequency of dishonest responding. Both types of adaptation to recent and frequent dishonest responses have been separately documented, leaving open whether control processes in dishonest responding can flexibly adapt to transient and sustained conflict signals of dishonest and other actions. This was the goal of the present experiments which studied (dis)honest responding to autobiographical yes/no questions. Experiment 1 showed robust transient adaptation to recent dishonest responses whereas sustained control adaptation failed to exert an influence on behavior. It further revealed that transient effects may create a spurious impression of sustained adaptation in typical experimental settings. Experiments 2 and 3 examined whether dishonest responding can profit from transient and sustained adaption processes triggered by other behavioral conflicts. This was clearly not the case: Dishonest responding adapted markedly to recent (dis)honest responses but not to any context of other conflicts. These findings indicate that control adaptation in dishonest responding is strong but surprisingly focused and they point to a potential trade-off between transient and sustained adaptation. (PsycINFO Database Record

Action effects are coded as transitions from current to future stimulation: Evidence from compatibility effects in tracking.

There is ample evidence that motor actions are stored in terms of, and controlled by, the sensory effects that these actions produce. At present it is unclear, though, whether action control is governed by intended sensory changes (e.g., the transition from darkness to brightness when switching on a light) or only by intended sensory end states (e.g., the light being on). The present study explored the role of sensory changes for action control. To address this issue, participants engaged in a spatial tracking task. We show that performance is determined by the compatibility between motor patterns and subsequent changes of a controlled stimulus, while the intended end state of the stimulus remains constant. Spatial compatibility increases performance even when perceptual changes of spatial features are not the primary target of control. These results suggest that intended transitions of stimulation have the potential to bias motor actions. We consider these results as an important step toward integrating closed-loop regulation approaches and ideomotor approaches of action control. (PsycINFO Database Record