Abstract
The preponderance of research on trial-by-trial recruitment of affective control (e.g., conflict adaptation) relies on stimuli wherein lexical word information conflicts with facial affective stimulus properties (e.g., the face-Stroop paradigm where an emotional word is overlaid on a facial expression). Several studies, however, indicate different neural time course and properties for processing of affective lexical stimuli versus affective facial stimuli. The current investigation used a novel task to examine control processes implemented following conflicting emotional stimuli with conflict-inducing affective face stimuli in the absence of affective words. Forty-one individuals completed a task wherein the affective-valence of the eyes and mouth were either congruent (happy eyes, happy mouth) or incongruent (happy eyes, angry mouth) while high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. There was a significant congruency effect and significant conflict adaptation effects for error rates. Although response times (RTs) showed a significant congruency effect, the effect of previous-trial congruency on current-trial RTs was only present for current congruent trials. Temporospatial principal components analysis showed a P3-like ERP source localized using FieldTrip software to the medial cingulate gyrus that was smaller on incongruent than congruent trials and was significantly influenced by the recruitment of control processes following previous-trial emotional conflict (i.e., there was significant conflict adaptation in the ERPs). Results show that a face-only paradigm may be sufficient to elicit emotional conflict and suggest a system for rapidly detecting conflicting emotional stimuli and subsequently adjusting control resources, similar to cognitive conflict detection processes, when using conflicting facial expressions without words.
Highlights
Cognitive control is necessary to focus attention on pertinent information in order to strategically adapt to changes in the environment [1]
response times (RTs) were shorter for congruent trials preceded by congruent trials than for congruent trials preceded by incongruent trials, TWJt/c(1.0,40.0)=15.04, p=.0004; no differences were shown for cI and iI trials suggesting that significant conflict adaptation effects were not observed for RTs, TWJt/c(1.0,40.0)=0.08, p=
Error rates were larger for cI trials compared to iI trials confirming that error rate data showed significant conflict adaptation effects, TWJt/ c(1.0,40.0)=8.36, p=.044; no differences were shown for cC
Summary
Cognitive control is necessary to focus attention on pertinent information in order to strategically adapt to changes in the environment [1]. Salient conflicting information may signal the recruitment of control to more traditional tasks that involve cognitive conflict (such as the incongruent condition of the Stroop task); the preponderance of research examining emotional conflict to date utilizes a combination of emotional word (i.e., lexical stimuli) and face stimuli to investigate this possibility [6,9]. In order to examine emotional conflict processing and adaptation in the absence of a lexical component, we designed a novel paradigm in which the eyes and mouths of angry and happy faces were combined and mixed to investigate the effects of emotional conflict on the recruitment of control processes. Following the identification of the PCA factor sensitive to these processes, source localization was conducted to implicate a possible neural generator of the observed ERP activity
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