Previous studies have reported hemispheric asymmetries in brain activity in anxiety, but the direction of asymmetry has been inconsistent. A distinction between anxious apprehension (e.g., worry) and anxious arousal (e.g., panic), as types of anxiety, may account for some of the discrepancies. To test this proposition, the authors selected participants with self-reported anxious apprehension and experimentally manipulated anxious arousal. Regional brain activity was examined by recording electroencephalograms during rest and during an emotional narrative task designed to elicit anxious arousal. Overall, anxious participants showed a larger asymmetry in favor of the left hemisphere than did controls. In contrast, during the task, anxious participants showed a selective increase in right parietal activity. The results support the hypothesis that anxious apprehension and anxious arousal are associated with different patterns of regional brain activity.
Evidence is reviewed to suggest that parietotemporal regions of the right hemisphere not only are specialized for the processing of emotional information but also play a critical role in the experience of emotion. In particular, it is argued that these regions of the right hemisphere constitute a system involved in modulating autonomic and behavioral arousal in emotional states. This system is characterized by a set of cognitive and attentional qualities that make it uniquely suited to respond to environmental events in an adaptive fashion. The current proposal is an elaboration of a model of emotion and brain organization (Heller, 1990) that incorporates several aspects of emotional function: (a) perception and production of emotional information, (b) mood and emotional experience, and (c) autonomic arousal. In the context of this model, it is suggested that the right-hemisphere system operates in conjunction with a system localized to the frontal lobes that is involved in modulating the emotional valence of experience. The interaction of these two systems is hypothesized to be conditioned by individual differences and developmental tendencies that contribute to the production of a unique and stable pattern of personality traits and emotional characteristics.This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a serious and often chronically disabling condition. The current dominant model of OCD focuses on abnormalities in prefrontal-striatal circuits that support executive function (EF). While there is growing evidence for EF impairments associated with OCD, results have been inconsistent, making the nature and magnitude of these impairments controversial. The current meta-analysis uses random-effects models to synthesize 110 previous studies that compared participants with OCD to healthy control participants on at least one neuropsychological measure of EF. The results indicate that individuals with OCD are impaired on tasks measuring most aspects of EF, consistent with broad impairment in EF. EF deficits were not explained by general motor slowness or depression. Effect sizes were largely stable across variation in demographic and clinical characteristics of samples, although medication use, age, and gender moderated some effects.
Cognition and emotion are intricately intertwined, because individuals orient toward, perceive, and interpret external stimuli in the context of their motivational and behavioral significance. Information associated with danger, for example, may be especially likely to capture or engage attention. Behavioral studies have confirmed that people are slower to shift attention away from words with emotional significance (e.g., Stormark, Nordby, & Hugdahl, 1995), supporting the notion that emotional factors may have an important influence on the deployment and operation of attention. How emotional factors modulate activity in brain regions involved in attention is thus an important question. To address this issue, in the present investigation, we examined the impact of emotional salience on activity in neural systems of attention by examining the influence of emotional and nonemotional distractors on brain activation.One viewpoint regarding the relationship between emotion and cognition holds that reciprocal brain regions are involved in emotional versus cognitive tasks. For example, Drevets and Raichle (1998) found, across a wide range of PET studies, that a constellation of regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), was consistently more active during cognitive tasks but was less active during tasks with an emotional component. A complementary constellation of regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the ventral ACC, and the amygdala, was more active for emotional tasks and less active for nonemotional tasks. The authors interpreted these findings as supporting a reciprocity, or tradeoff, between cognition and emotion, such that as activity increases in cognitive regions, it decreases in emotional regions and vice versa.Although the reciprocity conception of cognition and emotion may be a useful heuristic for conceptualizing In this research, we investigated the degree to which brain systems involved in ignoring emotionally salient information differ from those involved in ignoring nonemotional information. The design allowed examination of regional brain activity, using fMRI during color-word and emotional Stroop tasks. Twelve participants indicated the color of words while ignoring word meaning in conditions in which neutral words were contrasted to emotionally negative, emotionally positive, and incongruent color words. Dorsolateral frontal lobe activity was increased by both negative and incongruent color words, indicating a common system for maintaining an attentional set in the presence of salient distractors. In posterior regions of the brain, activity depended on the nature of the information to be ignored. Ignoring color-incongruent words increased left parietal activity and decreased parahippocampal gyrus activity, whereas ignoring negative emotional words increased bilateral occipito-temporal activityand decreasedamygdala activity. The results indicate that emotion and attention are intimately related via a network of regions tha...
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