Generalizability of control across cognitive and emotional conflict

Abstract

People can learn to control their thoughts and emotions. The scientific study of control has been conducted mostly independently for cognitive and emotional conflicts. However, recent theoretical proposals suggest a close link between emotional and cognitive control processes. Indeed, mounting evidence from clinical sciences, social and personality psychology and developmental neuroscience suggests that the ability to control thoughts and behavior goes hand in hand with the ability to control emotions. Yet, the precise interface between control over cognition and emotions remains controversial. The present study investigates the question whether control is a ´general-purpose´ mechanism or rather a set of domain-specific mechanisms. Following previous research, we tested participants’ control in a cognitive and an emotional Stroop task and assessed the Congruency Sequence Effect which has been taken as a marker of cognitive or (implicit) emotional control, respectively. Going beyond previous research, we asked how control in one domain (e.g., cognitive) interacts with control in the other domain (e.g., emotional) on a trial-by-trial basis. Four experiments (N = 259) presented participants with a task-switching design that intermixed cognitive and emotional conflicts. This procedure produced significant Congruency Sequence Effects across cognitive-emotional domains, suggesting that control can interact across domains. However, effect sizes of within-domain Congruency Sequence Effects were twice as large, indicating that control is also domain-specific. These results neither support the ´general-purpose´ account nor the domain-specificity hypothesis of control. Rather, a hybrid account fits the data best, which also reconciles previous behavioral and neurophysiological findings, suggesting domain-general and specific processes.

Investigating the nature of spatial codes for different modes of Simon tasks: Evidence from congruency sequence effects and delta functions.

“…Lee & Cho, 2013;Notebaert & Verguts, 2008). According to this control view of the CSE, experiencing a conflict-present (i.e., incongruent) trial enhances the conflict modulation in the subsequent task through a feature-specific focus or domain-general cognitive control (e.g., Egner, 2008;Straub et al, 2022). A cross-task paradigm, where two different tasks are alternated on every trial, is largely used to examine the sequential modulation of the congruency effect between task conditions.…”