Although the involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in emotional response inhibition is well established, there are several outstanding issues about the nature of this involvement that are not well understood. The present study aimed to examine the precise contribution of the ACC to emotion-modulated response inhibition by capitalizing on fine temporal resolution of the event-related potentials (ERPs) and the recent advances in source localization. To this end, participants (N = 30) performed an indirect affective Go/Nogo task (i.e., unrelated to the emotional content of stimulation) that required the inhibition of a motor response to three types of visual stimuli: arousing negative (A-), neutral (N), and arousing positive (A+). Behavioral data revealed that participants made more commission errors to A+ than to N and A-. Electrophysiological data showed that a specific region of the ACC at the intersection of its dorsal and rostral subdivisions was significantly involved in the interaction between emotional processing and motor inhibition. Specifically, activity reflecting this interaction was observed in the P3 (but not in the N2) time range, and was greater during the inhibition of responses to A+ than to N and A-. Additionally, regression analyses showed that inhibition-related activity within this ACC region was associated with the emotional content of the stimuli (its activity increased as stimulus valence was more positive), and also with behavioral performance (both with reaction times and commission errors). The present results provide additional data for understanding how, when, and where emotion interacts with response inhibition within the ACC.
Contrary to what occurs with negative pictures, negative words are, in general, not capable of interfering with performance in ongoing cognitive tasks in normal subjects. A probable explanation is the limited arousing power of linguistic material. Especially intense words (insults and compliments), neutral personal adjectives, and pseudowords were presented to 28 participants while they executed a lexical decision task. Insults were associated with the poorest performance in the task and compliments with the best. Amplitude of the late positive component of the event-related potentials, originating at parietal areas, was maximal in response to compliments and insults, but latencies were delayed in response to the latter. Results suggest that intense emotional words modulate ongoing cognitive processes through both bottom-up (attentional capture by insults) and top-down (facilitation of cognitive processing by arousing words) mechanisms.
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