Neural Correlates of Conflict Control on Facial Expressions with A Flanker Paradigm

Abstract

Conflict control is an important cognitive control ability and it is also crucial for human beings to execute conflict control on affective information. To address the neural correlates of cognitive control on affective conflicts, the present study recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) during a revised Eriksen Flanker Task. Participants were required to indicate the valence of the central target expression while ignoring the flanker expressions in the affective congruent condition, affective incongruent condition and neutral condition (target expressions flanked by scramble blocks). Behavioral results manifested that participants exhibited faster response speed in identifying neutral target face when it was flanked by neutral distractors than by happy distractors. Electrophysiological results showed that happy target expression induced larger N2 amplitude when flanked by sad distractors than by happy distractors and scramble blocks during the conflict monitoring processing. During the attentional control processing, happy target expression induced faster P3 response when it was flanked by happy distractors than by sad distractors, and sad target expression evoked larger P3 amplitude when it was flanked by happy distractors comparing with sad distractors. Taken together, the current findings of temporal dynamic of brain activity during cognitive control on affective conflicts shed light on the essential relationship between cognitive control and affective information processing.

Neural Correlates of Response Inhibition and Conflict Control on Facial Expressions

“…In line with prior studies, it was currently observed that the response speed was faster to identify happy faces than fearful faces (Leppänen et al, 2003 ; Leppänen and Hietanen, 2004 ; Schulz et al, 2007 ). In addition, participants performed with higher accuracies when identifying happy faces in congruent trials (HHHHH) than in incongruent trials (FFHFF), which was consistent with previous findings of conflict control on emotional information (Eastwood et al, 2001 ; Fenske and Eastwood, 2003 ; Rowe et al, 2007 ; Ochsner et al, 2009 ; Liu et al, 2013 ). Fenske and Eastwood’s ( 2003 ) behavioral findings manifested that the flanker-compatibility effect was smaller for negative target faces compared with positive target faces, which illustrated that the constriction of attention could be influenced by the valence of emotional faces.…”

“…The P3 responses are associated with conflict resolution and allocation of attentional control (Hillman et al, 2009a , b ; Clayson and Larson, 2011 ), and the incongruent trials induce larger P3 than the congruent trials (Hillman et al, 2009a , b ). Previous behavioral and electrophysiological studies showed that response speed was faster in emotional congruent trials than emotional incongruent trials, and happy faces with sad distracters induced more negative N2 amplitudes than happy faces flanked by identical faces during conflict monitoring stage (Fenske and Eastwood, 2003 ; Liu et al, 2013 ); while during the conflict resolution stage, happy faces in the incongruent trials elicited slower P3 responses compared to that in the congruent trials, and the attentional control on sad faces in the incongruent trials induced larger P3 responses than that in the congruent trials (Fenske and Eastwood, 2003 ; Liu et al, 2013 ). In the same line, Ochsner et al ( 2009 ) adopted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to investigated conflict control on affective words and reported that bilateral dorsal ACC were strongly activated in the affective incongruent condition.…”

Emotional and Nonemotional Conflict Processing in Pediatric and Adult Anxiety Disorders

“…Additional research in anxious patients is needed to test whether cognitive control perturbations in anxiety vary as a function of the emotional versus nonemotional sources of conflict. Paradigms such as the face-word Stroop task (Etkin et al 2006;Egner et al 2008) and the Eriksen flanker task (Ochsner et al 2009;Alguacil et al 2013;Liu et al 2013) have been studied using matched-task versions that compare emotional versus nonemotional forms of cognitive control, and are, therefore, well suited to test this hypothesis. Attempts to replicate anxietyrelated differences in cognitive control should simultaneously examine measures of conflict adaptation, post-error slowing/accuracy, and ERN, to explore how robust the phenomena are and, whenever possible, directly compare emotional and nonemotional tasks to test for affect-based specificity.…”

The Relationships Among Testosterone, Cortisol, and Cognitive Control of Emotion as Underlying Mechanisms of Emotional Intelligence of 10- to 11-Year-Old Children

“…The facial images in the revised emotional flanker task (Fenske and Eastwood, 2003;Liu et al, 2013) were of the face of six models (three males, three females) displaying both happy and fearful faces. The face stimuli were from our lab's collection, and they were collected and used under the standardized procedure.…”

“…According to the dimensional overlap theory (Kornblum et al, 1990(Kornblum et al, , 1999, conflicts can be further categorized based on the overlap between the response (R), the taskrelevant stimulus (SR), and the task-irrelevant stimulus (SI). The emotional flanker task contains the stimulus-stimulus (S-S) conflicts that SR (the target emotional facial expression) overlaps with SI (the bilateral distractor emotional faces) (Fenske and Eastwood, 2003;Liu et al, 2013). The emotional Stroop task contains both S-S and S-R conflicts, with the affective word ("FEARFUL" or "HAPPY") on an emotional (happy or fearful) face, and participants are required to report the expression on the face (Etkin et al, 2006(Etkin et al, , 2010Egner, 2008;Liu et al, 2010;Chechko et al, 2012;Soutschek and Schubert, 2013).…”