Electrophysiological correlates of interference control in the modified emotional Stroop task with emotional stimuli differing in valence, arousal, and subjective significance

Abstract

The role of emotional factors in maintaining cognitive control is one of the most intriguing issues in understanding emotion-cognition interactions. In the current experiment, we assessed the role of emotional factors (valence, arousal, and subjective significance) in perceptual and conceptual inhibition processes. We operationalised both processes with the classical cognitive paradigms, i.e., the flanker task and the emotional Stroop task merged into a single experimental procedure. The procedure was based on the presentation of emotional words displayed in four different font colours flanked by the same emotional word printed with the same or different font colour. We expected to find distinct effects of both types of interference: earlier for perceptual and later for emotional interference. We also predicted an increased arousal level to disturb inhibitory control effectiveness, while increasing the subjective significance level should improve this process. As we used orthogonal manipulations of emotional factors, our study allowed us for the first time to assess interactions within emotional factors and between types of interference. We found on the behavioural level the main effects of flanker congruency as well as effects of emotionality. On the electrophysiological level, we found effects for EPN, P2, and N450 components of ERPs. The exploratory analysis revealed that effects due to perceptual interference appeared earlier than the effects of emotional interference, but they lasted for an extended period of processing, causing perceptual and emotional interference to partially overlap. Finally, in terms of emotional interference, we showed the effect of subjective significance: the reduction of interference cost in N450 for highly subjective significant stimuli. This study is the first one allowing for the investigation of two different types of interference in a single experiment, and provides insight into the role of emotion in cognitive control.

The role of subjective significance, valence and arousal in the explicit processing of emotion-laden words

“…Data were collected as previously described in Imbir et al (2021a) . We did not collect any personal data that would allow the identification of the participants.…”

“…We did not collect any personal data that would allow the identification of the participants. The participants provided informed consent to participate in the experiment, and the fact was documented in a research diary ( Imbir et al, 2021a ). The bioethical committee of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Warsaw approved the design, experimental conditions, and procedure.…”

“…The bioethical committee of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Warsaw approved the design, experimental conditions, and procedure. All of the procedures involving human participants were conducted following the institutional and national research committee’s ethical standards ( Imbir et al, 2021a ) and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.…”

“…Positively valenced stimuli have been shown to promote processing in generalised, global terms, faster reactions and decisions, and less accurate responses ( Fredrickson, 1998 ; Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005 ; Imbir et al, 2020a ). On the other hand, negatively charged stimuli promote focusing on details, but may also increase reaction times compared to neutral stimuli ( Hinojosa, Méndez-Bértolo & Pozo, 2010 ; Palazova, Sommer & Schacht, 2013 ; Gupta, Hur & Lavie, 2016 ; Imbir et al, 2020a , 2021a ). Both positive and negative valence might also be applied to concepts (objects) and constitute an affect assigned to them, being an appraisal on how pleasant, neutral or unpleasant a given stimulus is Russell (1980) ; a similar appraisal procedure is used during the creation of affective norms for words ( e.g ., Bradley & Lang, 1999 ).…”

“…This approach allows not only the exploration of potential interactions between the factors, but also to check whether results regarding particular factors of emotional processing are independent of the influence of other factors. In most of our previous experiments exploring emotional words’ properties we used 2-factorial design ( e.g ., Imbir et al, 2017 , 2018b ), and the 3-factorial design recently incorporated by our research team has already been proven reliable in cognitive tasks ( Imbir et al, 2021a , 2021b ). What is more, this study is one of the first to explore how subjective significance affects ERPs during decision-making, with a previous study reporting only exploratory results of subjective significance producing ERP modulation during emotional categorisation ( Imbir et al, 2018b ).…”