Performance on emotional tasks engaging cognitive control depends on emotional intelligence abilities: an ERP study

Abstract

Cognitive control is a key process in decision making and adequately adapting our behavior to the environment. Previous studies have provided evidence of a lower capacity for cognitive control in emotion-laden contexts in comparison with neutral contexts. The aim of the present research was to study changes in cognitive control performance as a function of emotional intelligence (EI) level in contexts involving emotional information. The study sample was composed of 2 groups of 22 participants each: the high and low EI group. Participants carried out an emotional go/no-go task while brain activity was recorded by EEG. N2 and P3 ERPs were used as indices of cognitive control processing. Participants with higher EI showed a larger N2, reflecting a greater capacity for cognitive control related to changes in conflict monitoring, and to a better detection and evaluation of the emotional stimuli. Moreover, in general, response inhibition accuracy was reduced when emotional information was involved in this process. Our findings reveal that neural mechanisms underlying tasks that engage cognitive control depend on emotional content and EI level. This study indicates the important role played by EI in the relationship between emotion and cognition. EI training may be a very useful tool for improving performance in emotion-laden contexts.

A New Layered Model on Emotional Intelligence

“…The results show that negative mood and anticipated fear are two factors of the relationship between trait EI and risk-taking in decision-making processes among adults [ 158 ]. Research has also shown this positive correlation between emotional intelligence and cognitive processes and this demonstrates the important role that emotional intelligence plays with emotion and cognition, thus, empowering individuals and their personality and benefitting the whole society [ 159 , 160 , 161 , 162 , 163 , 164 ].…”

Orbitofrontal Lesion Alters Brain Dynamics of Emotion-Attention and Emotion-Cognitive Control Interaction in Humans

“…In Go-situation we chose time windows corresponding to the time of P3 peak and the following slow positive waveform, the LPP, which is reported to be larger when emotional stimuli is only attended to but reduced with successful reappraisal of emotion (Hajcak and Nieuwenhuis, 2006 ), i.e., 700–800 ms and 800–900 ms in our paradigm. In NoGo-situation we chose time windows around the N2 peak and the P3 peak, i.e., 600–700 ms and 700–800 ms, for further analysis as these potentials are thought to reflect different phases of cognitive control required for response inhibition and are known to be modulated by emotion with the extent of modulation reflecting factors influencing emotion-cognition interaction such as emotional intelligence (Megías et al, 2017 ). The amount of selected time windows was kept to minimum to control for familywise error rate.…”

“…Such simple threat-related stimuli used in the current study are known to be prioritized for attention networks (Vuilleumier and Schwartz, 2001 ) and provide means to tap into potential alterations in emotion-attention interaction due to OFC lesion. Because the N2 potential reflects early cognitive control, particularly in a response inhibition/NoGo task (Donkers and van Boxtel, 2004 ; Megías et al, 2017 ), and the P3 potential reflects response inhibition and possibly response cancellation in a NoGo task (Kok et al, 2004 ; Randall and Smith, 2011 ; Groom and Cragg, 2015 ) as well as attention allocation (Polich, 2007 ), they are suitable candidates for studying the interaction of emotion and attention/cognitive control. We further combined these amplitudes to N2P3 peak-to-peak amplitude as our previous studies with clinical populations have suggested that in contrast to single peak measurements, N2P3 peak-to-peak amplitude may provide a more robust measure of attention (Mäki-Marttunen et al, 2015 , 2017 ) and help control for abnormal EEG shifts and slow waves frequently observed in clinical populations.…”

Threat-induced impulsivity in Go/Nogo tasks: Relationships to task-relevance of emotional stimuli and virtual proximity

“…In one version, the emotional stimulus was a task-irrelevant distractor: Go versus Nogo responses were signaled by probe stimuli independent from the emotional content. In the other version, the emotional stimulus was the task-relevant probe stimulus: participants had to perform Go versus Nogo responses based on the emotional content of the stimuli (Megías, Gutiérrez-Cobo, Gómez-Leal, Cabello, & Fernández-Berrocal, 2017). This allowed us to test whether task-relevant emotional, in this case threatening, stimuli would be more able to induce the theoretically expected threat-enhanced impulsivity: more commission errors and lower Go-…”