Abstract
Emotion-cognition interactions are critical in goal-directed behavior and may be disrupted in psychopathology. Growing evidence also suggests that emotion-cognition interactions are modulated by genetic variation, including genetic variation in the serotonin system. The goal of the current study was to examine the impact of threat-related distracters and serotonin transporter promoter polymorphism (5-HTTLPR/rs25531) on cognitive task performance in healthy females. Using a novel threat-distracter version of the Multi-Source Interference Task specifically designed to probe emotion-cognition interactions, we demonstrate a robust and temporally dynamic modulation of cognitive interference effects by threat-related distracters relative to other distracter types and relative to no-distracter condition. We further show that threat-related distracters have dissociable and opposite effects on cognitive task performance in easy and difficult task conditions, operationalized as the level of response interference that has to be surmounted to produce a correct response. Finally, we present evidence that the 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 genotype in females modulates susceptibility to cognitive interference in a global fashion, across all distracter conditions, and irrespective of the emotional salience of distracters, rather than specifically in the presence of threat-related distracters. Taken together, these results add to our understanding of the processes through which threat-related distracters affect cognitive processing, and have implications for our understanding of disorders in which threat signals have a detrimental effect on cognition, including depression and anxiety disorders.
Highlights
The ability to successfully carry out a task despite interference from task-irrelevant stimuli is a crucial requirement for goal-directed behavior
Our data demonstrate that threat-related distracters robustly modulate cognitive interference effects but the modulation dynamically changes over time
Threat-related distracters potentiated interference effects in both accuracy and in reaction times (RTs) relative to non-threat-related distracter types and relative to the no-distracter condition in the first half of the experiment, prior to the intermission. These effects were reversed in the second half of the experiment, in which the interference effects in accuracy and in RTs in the presence of threat distracters decreased below the interference effects seen in other distracter conditions, to the level observed when no distracters were present
Summary
The ability to successfully carry out a task despite interference from task-irrelevant stimuli is a crucial requirement for goal-directed behavior. If neutral distracters impair task performance, threatrelated distracters should be even more effective in high-jacking attention and interfering with the task at hand due to the preferential processing of threat stimuli over non-threat stimuli in the brain This rapid and automatic processing of threat signals is possible because the amygdala receives threat-related information through a fast subcortical pathway as well as through a slower cortical route (Romanski and LeDoux, 1992; Morris et al, 1999), a finding supported by functional neuroimaging studies showing that the amygdala responds to threat stimuli that are outside of attentional focus or conscious awareness (Whalen et al, 1998; Vuilleumier et al, 2001). Supported by some studies (Vuilleumier et al, 2001; Dolcos and McCarthy, 2006; Blair et al, 2007; Mitchell et al, 2008), such increased distractability by threat-related distracters relative to neutral distracters in behavioral measures has not been consistently demonstrated in healthy subjects (Bar-Haim et al, 2007), suggesting that additional modulatory factors may be at play
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