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

Valence and arousal of words in visual and conceptual interference control efficiency

“…No main effect of valence was observed in the current experiments, which is in contrast to many of the published results [26,38,44,50,62,68]. This sheds even more light on the role of arousal, as some recent studies already reported the lack of pure valence effects in the procedures requiring cognitive control, especially when arousal is orthogonally crossed with valence [56,60,61,63,64].…”

“…In regards to the congruence between colours of flankers and the target word, we found that incongruent trials elicited longer responses in both of the procedures. This effect has the same shape as differences in reaction times between congruent and incongruent trials in the Stroop task [1,11,12,14,47,61] and flanker task [1,40,47,48,[62][63][64]. Observation of this effect confirms that the tasks employed for both of the experiments described in this study engaged cognitive control in a similar way, like the tasks that were the inspiration for developing these flanker-modified EST procedures.…”

“…The emotional factors played their role in the length of delivering the response, but they did not affect the disturbance provided by the incongruence between the flankers and the target. This stands in contrast to an entire set of studies where emotional factors affect the effects of flankers [40,43,44,[60][61][62][63]. In the modified EST tasks proposed in this study [57,60], emotional factors were operating in the exact same moment as the incongruence between the flankers and the target-as they were displayed on the same screen, interference also affected the same modality.…”

“…In the modified EST tasks proposed in this study [57,60], emotional factors were operating in the exact same moment as the incongruence between the flankers and the target-as they were displayed on the same screen, interference also affected the same modality. This is an important difference between the proposed procedures and many of the flanker tasks previously used in studies involving emotional stimuli [40,43,44,47,48,62,63].…”

Moving towards dynamics: Emotional modulation of cognitive and emotional control

“…1 These authors also argue that it is not emotion that modulates cognitive control, but rather the recruitment of executive resources that modulates the processing of emotion (i.e., negates the distracting effects from negative stimuli), a point of view that we do not explicitly discuss in the current review (for details see Cohen et al, 2012;Cohen, Mor, & Henik, 2015; see also Straub et al, 2019 for more recent evidence).…”