Prolonged Interruption of Cognitive Control of Conflict Processing Over Human Faces by Task-Irrelevant Emotion Expression

Abstract

As documented by Darwin 150 years ago, emotion expressed in human faces readily draws our attention and promotes sympathetic emotional reactions. How do such reactions to the expression of emotion affect our goal-directed actions? Despite the substantial advance made in the neural mechanisms of both cognitive control and emotional processing, it is not yet known well how these two systems interact. Here, we studied how emotion expressed in human faces influences cognitive control of conflict processing, spatial selective attention and inhibitory control in particular, using the Eriksen flanker paradigm. In this task, participants viewed displays of a central target face flanked by peripheral faces and were asked to judge the gender of the target face; task-irrelevant emotion expressions were embedded in the target face, the flanking faces, or both. We also monitored how emotion expression affects gender judgment performance while varying the relative timing between the target and flanker faces. As previously reported, we found robust gender congruency effects, namely slower responses to the target faces whose gender was incongruent with that of the flanker faces, when the flankers preceded the target by 0.1 s. When the flankers further advanced the target by 0.3 s, however, the congruency effect vanished in most of the viewing conditions, except for when emotion was expressed only in the flanking faces or when congruent emotion was expressed in the target and flanking faces. These results suggest that emotional saliency can prolong a substantial degree of conflict by diverting bottom-up attention away from the target, and that inhibitory control on task-irrelevant information from flanking stimuli is deterred by the emotional congruency between target and flanking stimuli.

Angry and Fearful Face Conflict Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

“…In other words, if only neutral target faces been used (with a task of gender identification), would emotional flankers then have been more distracting? One emotional face flanker study in controls used a gender identification task (Kim et al, 2017). Significantly larger congruency effects were found when target faces were neutral and flanker faces were emotional, compared to when target faces were emotional and flanker faces were neutral (Kim et al, 2017).…”

“…One emotional face flanker study in controls used a gender identification task (Kim et al, 2017). Significantly larger congruency effects were found when target faces were neutral and flanker faces were emotional, compared to when target faces were emotional and flanker faces were neutral (Kim et al, 2017). In the current mixed block design, emotional targets appeared to play a key role in the impact of flanker expressions.…”

The effect of working memory load on selective attention to emotional faces for social anxiety individuals

“…In summary, in order to investigate whether the attentional bias of SA individuals towards threat stimuli depends on topdown cognitive control, the present study examined the effect of WM load on selective attention to emotional faces in SA individuals. Consistent with previous studies, the present study used a flanker task involving "cognitive conflict processing" (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974;Kim et al, 2017;Zhou & Liu, 2013). The target stimuli always appeared in the center of the flanker task, while the distractors appeared to the left or right of the targets (Petrucci & Pecchinenda, 2016).…”

“…Furthermore, the visual search task used in most studies assesses attentional bias rather than attentional control (Soares et al, 2015 ). A more important way to explore cognitive control is to use tasks involving “conflict handling,” such as the flanker task (Kim et al, 2017 ). Although a recent study also used the modified flanker task to investigate the selective attention of SA individuals (Chen et al, 2016 ), this study did not control for participants' depression levels and did not consider WM load as a variable.…”