Enhanced conflict-driven cognitive control by emotional arousal, not by valence

Abstract

Emotion is widely agreed to have two dimensions, valence and arousal. Few studies have explored the effect of emotion on conflict adaptation by considering both of these, which could have dissociate influence. The present study aimed to fill the gap as to whether emotional valence and arousal would exert dissociable influence on conflict adaptation. In the experiments, we included positive, neutral, and negative conditions, with comparable arousal between positive and negative conditions. Both positive and negative conditions have higher arousal than neutral ones. In Experiment 1, by using a two-colour-word Flanker task, we found that conflict adaptation was enhanced in both positive and negative contexts compared to a neutral context. Furthermore, this effect still existed when controlling stimulus-response repetitions in Experiment 2, which used a four-colour-word Flanker task. The findings suggest emotional arousal enhances conflict adaptation, regardless of emotional valence. Thus, future studies should consider emotional arousal when studying the effect of emotion on conflict adaptation. Moreover, the unique role of the emotional context in conflict-driven cognitive control is emphasised.

Emotion and conflict adaptation: the role of phasic arousal and self-relevance

“…Our results replicate and extend the findings of Zeng et al (2017) who demonstrated that emotional arousal manipulated at a block-level increases conflict adaptation. Our results clearly show that this effect of arousal also occurred when emotion is manipulated at the trial-level, thus demonstrating that the induction of phasic emotional arousal is sufficient to increase conflict adaptation.…”

“…Consistent with the hypothesis, conflict adaptation was increased by positive and negative emotional words compared to neutral words, irrespective of the between-subject factor valence. These findings extend the findings of Zeng et al (2017) that revealed increased conflict adaptation for emotional words in a blocked design that did not allow the disentanglement of the phasic and tonic effects of arousal. The present results show for the first time that phasic arousal elicited by emotional words increases conflict adaptation in the subsequent trial.…”

“…The words on the distractor display could be in either the same colour (congruent) or a different colour (incongruent) from the target stimulus. There were two possible colour combinations of the flankers and target stimuli, which were yellow/ blue and red/green, following the design of Zeng et al (2017). On congruent trials, only one of the colours was used.…”

“…These findings clearly suggest that phasic arousal, but not valence, increases cognitive control provided that the emotional stimulus is embedded in the task itself (for reviews, see Cohen & Henik, 2012;Kanske, 2012). Following up on this line of research, Zeng et al (2017) recently used the same colour flanker task to investigate the effect of valence and arousal on conflict adaptation in the same study. Consistent with a role of arousal on conflict adaptation, they observed increased conflict adaptation when stimuli were emotional as opposed to neutral.…”

“…In Experiment 1, we used an adapted version of the task developed by Zeng et al (2017). We manipulated valence and arousal by randomly presenting colour flanker stimuli with emotional (negative or positive) and neutral content within blocks.…”