Conflict Processing Research Articles

How do international borders affect conflict processes? Evidence from the end of Mandate Palestine

Rebels can comply with international law during a conflict by not violating international borders, yet strategic goals may incentivize rebels to violate these borders. When do international borders affect the spatial and temporal distribution of rebel activity in a conflict setting? I theorize rebels have an incentive to refrain from violating borders when doing so will reduce their international legitimacy. When international legitimacy is a less important goal, rebels will be more likely to violate borders. I test this claim in the context of the 1948 War in Mandate Palestine by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in how the 1947 UN partition line was drawn. Using an original dataset on over 1,000 Palestinian villages from British colonial documents and an atlas of aerial photographs of Palestine, I use a geographic regression discontinuity design to see how the UN partition line affected the location and timing of depopulated villages during the war. The results show that villages in areas that the UN assigned to the future Israeli state as part of the 1947 partition plan were more likely to be conquered before Israel received recognition. These findings have important implications for understanding where and when rebels target areas and shed new light on important dynamics of the 1948 War in Palestine.

Disentangling the landscape during armed conflicts and postpeace agreements: Clues from Colombia's Andes-Amazon region.

The link between remote sensing and armed conflict processes has been evaluated through discrete landscape representations, deforestation, and static land cover maps. Yet, the landscape is dynamic-not discrete, and recognizing its evolution through armed conflict processes provides better-informed management and a more profound understanding of landscape dynamics. We must create continuous variables that provide compelling landscape representations that account for armed conflict processes as a driver of land cover and land-use change. Here, we present the advancements in monitoring landscape changes in Colombia from subannual forest change and annual land cover maps to elucidate illicit land use and habitat connectivity status. This evolution delivers critical elements to understanding the consequences of armed conflict processes on the environment. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2023;19:355-359. © 2022 SETAC.

Managing buyer-supplier conflict when one party dominates: A process study

This study examines how conflicts develop in buyer-supplier relationships. Specifically, we investigate what drives the use of the dominating (win-lose) conflict management approach by parties in buyer-supplier conflicts, and how the sequence and types of conflict management approaches employed throughout the process affect whether it is managed in a functional or dysfunctional manner. Existing studies often focus on one-sided, one-stage conflicts which may not reflect the true process of conflict management. This qualitative study analyses the historical e-mail correspondences between a small retailer and five of its suppliers, allowing for an exploration of authentic conflict management processes. We develop a two-sided, multi-stage process model that outlines the drivers that promote the use of dominating approaches throughout the conflict, and considers the initial and subsequent actions by both parties that lead to a (dys)functional conflict process. It demonstrates that dysfunctional conflicts are those that end with either party employing a dominating approach. This suggests that even if dominating approaches are employed throughout the conflict process, the conflict may not escalate, and is therefore managed in a functional manner.

Faith, Authenticity, and Pro-Social Values in the Lives of Young People in Germany

Increasing secularization, pluralization, and individualization have done much to weaken denominational identities and traditional religiosity in most Western countries since the 1960s, with the effect that—to echo Niklas Luhmann—being religious requires purely religious reasons. This also applies to young people, for whom religion is still an option, but precisely one option among others, and according to Charles Taylor quite a challenging one. In our article, we want to focus on young people who actively engage with faith and religion, and who take up a different position with regard to religion than their peers during their adolescence. The data are in-depth interviews with families with three generations present. We will explore the ways in which teenagers (aged 12–19) and young adults (aged 22–25) are confronted with religious issues, as well as how they decide upon these issues and justify their decisions. We will argue that both the societal context and the life phase of adolescence or young adulthood make it likely that a person will base decisions regarding religion upon the criterion of authenticity. Our findings demonstrate that especially positioning towards the question of belief can be a lengthy and conflictual process. We identified two main forms of religiosity that are socially accepted in contemporary society: deriving a sense of social responsibility from faith and transforming and translating belief and religious experience into secular contexts.

Strategy and processing speed eclipse individual differences in control ability in conflict tasks.

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A challenge to answering this question is that behavior is multifaceted, with both conflict and nonconflict processes (e.g., strategy, processing speed) contributing to individual differences. Here, we use a cognitive model to dissociate these processes; the diffusion model for conflict tasks (Ulrich et al., 2015). In a meta-analysis of fits to seven empirical datasets containing combinations of the flanker, Simon, color-word Stroop, and spatial Stroop tasks, we observed weak (r < .05) zero-order correlations between tasks in parameters reflecting conflict processing, seemingly challenging a general control construct. However, our meta-analysis showed consistent positive correlations in parameters representing processing speed and strategy. We then use model simulations to evaluate whether correlations in behavioral costs are diagnostic of the presence or absence of common mechanisms of conflict processing. We use the model to impose known correlations for conflict mechanisms across tasks, and we compare the simulated behavior to simulations when there is no conflict correlation across tasks. We find that correlations in strategy and processing speed can produce behavioral correlations equal to, or larger than, those produced by correlated conflict mechanisms. We conclude that correlations between conflict tasks are only weakly informative about common conflict mechanisms if researchers do not control for strategy and processing speed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Intra-Sectarian Tensions in the Muslim Community in Nandom in the Upper West Region of Ghana: Dynamics and Actors

This paper explored the dynamics and actors in the Imamship conflict in Nandom Zongo community. The study was approached qualitatively using a case study design. The researchers interacted with ten (10) participants. Data was drawn through in-depth interviews and observation and analyzed using thematic template analysis. The study unearthed that the ill-health of the Imam and his vice which created a vacancy of the office of Imam is the remote cause of the conflict. The conflict degenerated into fierce struggle over the Imamship and disagreement over a choice of replacement. A ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ rhetoric was introduced into the Imamship contest among the orthodox Muslims in the Nandom Zongo community. The study revealed that the conflict has strong socio-political, economic, security and religious implications on the Zongo community. Apart from the primary conflict parties, there were state actors, traditional actors, group actors and independent actors in the conflict. The dynamics of the conflict were informed by the grievances of the conflict parties, actor interaction and conflict parties’ commitment to the conflict. The study contributes to the understanding of conflict dynamics and actor interaction in conflict processes. Keywords: Conflict Dynamics, Actors, Nandom Zongo, Imamship, Upper West Region, Ghana DOI: 10.7176/JPCR/55-06 Publication date: November 31 st 2022

At Her Age: An Anthropological Analysis of the Construct of Age in the TV Series "Muddy Tires "

&#x0D; This anthropological analysis of the Serbian TV series Muddy Tires (Kaljave Gume), which aired in the spring of 2021 on the Radio Television of Serbia, aims to point out the principal meanings which can be subsumed under the three dominant problems faced by the protagonist Vesna when she finds herself in situations that demand a reexamination of previously accepted norms regarding older members of contemporary Serbian society. The analytical procedure, also applied to film, involved the construction and study of an ethnography which consists of production, content and reception, with primary emphasis on the first two elements. In this way, it was possible to distinguish several of the more important themes that underpin the basic plot structure, which, very briefly, follows the everyday life of a sixty-year-old former pianist who, following the death of her husband with whom she had an unhappy marriage, leaves for California to visit her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Her relocation from the environment in which she has spent her entire life has thus created the conditions for her to embark on a new relationship with an elderly American whom she met online, but also for the process of conflict with and resistance to norms which have typically dictated to her, as a widow, certain emotions, and actions in accordance with them, while challenging others. This process in which her age is foregrounded in contrast to actions which are labelled "out of time" and therefore inappropriate, even unacceptable for those closest to her, also involves actions by opponents dressed up in the specific form of ageism such as the so-called well-meaning ageism, when an older person is forced to accept unwanted expressions of "concern" and "assistance". Finally, a subsidiary but haunting motif is the motif of suicide of older members of society (in the series committed by Vesna’s brother-in-law Jovan), which functions as a reflection of easier acceptance and understanding by one’s community, unlike the decision to continue life in a new, late-life relationship following the death of a spouse. Finally, it should be observed that the attitudes, actions and censure of the adult members of one’s family are dominant.

Privatization Of The Education Sector In Indonesia: A Review Of Conflict Theory

Privatization of education in Indonesia is legitimized by a number of regulations, for example Law no. 20 of 2003 on the National Education System and Law no. 9 on Education Legal Entities. The existence of this education legal entity makes educational institutions free to seek capital to invest in educational activities. So that the world of education turns into a commercial investment land. This condition, in the view of sociology, will lead to interclass conflicts caused by the inequality of the community in accessing education. This study aims to describe the views of conflict theory regarding the phenomenon of privatization of education. The method used is the study of literature or literature by collecting secondary data from books, news and journal articles. The results of the study show that 1) the conflict theory view of education privatization can be viewed from the community analysis unit and the individual analysis unit; 2) At the level of the community unit of analysis, education privatization can be explained through Karl Marx's conflict theory and Weber's theory of power. 3) Marx's conflict theory emphasizes the two social classes formed due to differences in ownership of capital production factors. Meanwhile, according to Weber, the process of conflict is caused by the existence of authority or power that separates society into superordinate groups and subordinate groups. 4) At the individual unit of analysis level, conflicts due to education privatization can be viewed from Coser's conflict theory, where conflicts do not only have a negative impact, but also a positive impact on society.

COVID-19 and Peace in Conflict-Affected Areas

The relationship between COVID-19 and peace has been considered from a variety of perspectives. In addition, different empirical studies on the link between the pandemic and peace in conflict-affected areas exist. However, little work has been performed on examining these studies to highlight key findings on the theme of COVID-19 and peace in conflict-affected areas. A conflict-affected area is a country, or part of a country, where widespread violence or armed conflict was present when COVID-19 emerged in December 2019, or that was transitioning from recent armed conflict to peace by the time the disease arose. What do we know, so far, about how peace has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in conflict-affected areas? To address this question, this paper begins by recognizing the multidimensionality of peace and clarifying that the main aspects of peace in conflict-affected areas being considered in the article are relations between conflict parties, peace efforts, and peace processes. Afterwards, the paper discusses existing evidence regarding the impact of COVID-19 and state responses to it on these components of peace in conflict-affected areas. The conflict-affected areas considered include Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Libya, Myanmar, Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria, the Philippines, Yemen, and other zones. The central finding of the article is that the existing studies on COVID-19 and peace in conflict-affected areas present mixed findings. On the one hand, the virus generated opportunities for cooperation between conflict parties in some cases, such as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Israel-Palestine. However, on the other hand, it created conditions that enabled conflict and impeded peace efforts and processes in many or most conflict-affected areas. The paper explains that two factors that determined how the disease affected peace in conflict-affected and non-conflict-affected areas are the pre-COVID-19 political and socio-economic conditions in an area, and how state and non-state actors responded to the pandemic. The article closes with a summary of the discussion and identification of its major limitations.

Heroines who are rebuilding their country: State–society circumstances and coping strategies of female leaders in post-genocide Rwanda

The labor arrangement of industrial society makes “production and reproduction” a contradiction that is both separate and interdependent. One of the significant consequences is the re-establishment of the responsibilities and boundaries of production and reproduction between the modern state, market, family, and gender. After the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, Rwanda has made world-renowned achievements in advancing gender equality, especially women's participation in politics. It is the “twofold full-time producers” model that continuously sustains this huge achievement, which means that female leaders not only bear a highly demanding responsibility for production, comparable to men, but also undertake significant labor in social reproduction. The public policy of Rwanda has assumed a dual role in this process: on the one hand, the state has promulgated a series of gender equality bills, policies, and measures from top to bottom that actively promote women's equal rights in various fields, especially their political participation. On the other hand, against the background of a severe labor shortage and insufficient public welfare facilities, the responsibility of private families for social reproduction has been maintained and strengthened, while the traditional family structure and community culture's share of responsibility for reproduction has been irreversibly weakened during the conflict and modernization process. While these female leaders rely on their individual strategies and informal social support systems to cope with the dual burden, they still face scrutiny and doubt from the community culture. The consensus on the destiny of the country's development and the sharing of historical responsibilities demonstrated by Rwanda's female leaders shares many similarities with the Chinese women's liberation movement, which also provides an important inspiration and reference point for rethinking the path of women's liberation characterized by economic independence and “the supremacy of production”.

Cyclical jihadist governance: the Islamic State governance cycle in Iraq and Syria

ABSTRACT The rise and decline of the Islamic State’s (IS) caliphate between 2014 and 2018 have garnered significant policy and academic attention. Explanations for the group’s territorial demise have focussed on its internal group dynamics and external conflict processes. Although both explanations are valid, I adopt a historical approach to show that IS’s caliphate was just one cycle in a two-decade history of governance activity. IS has undertaken three governance cycles composed of phases of insurgency, gaining territory, establishing institutions, and losing territory. After each governance cycle, IS engaged in a process of critical self-reflection and adapted its governance strategy significantly. This resulted in a progressive history in which, with each cycle, IS governed greater amounts of territory, through more complex institutions, for a longer period of time. This article is based on fieldwork interviews conducted with both IS members and civilians who lived under IS control in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, as well as archival research on IS historical and contemporary governing documents.

Electrophysiological measures of conflict and reward processing are associated with decisions to engage in physical effort.

Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a key brain region involved in cognitive control and decision making, is suggested to mediate effort- and value-based decision making, but the specific role of ACC in this process remains debated. Here we used frontal midline theta (FMT) and the reward positivity (RewP) to examine ACC function in a value-based decision making task requiring physical effort. We investigated whether (1) FMT power is sensitive to the difficulty of the decision or to selecting effortful actions, and (2) RewP is sensitive to the subjective value of reward outcomes as a function of effort investment. On each trial, participants chose to execute a low-effort or a high-effort behavior (that required squeezing a hand-dynamometer) to obtain smaller or larger rewards, respectively, while their brainwaves were recorded. We replicated prior findings that tonic FMT increased over the course of the hour-long task, which suggests increased application of control in the face of growing fatigue. RewP amplitude also increased following execution of high-effort compared to low-effort behavior, consistent with increased valuation of reward outcomes by ACC. Although neither phasic nor tonic FMT were associated with decision difficulty or effort selection per se, an exploratory analysis revealed that the interaction of phasic FMT and expected value of choice predicted effort choice. This interaction suggests that phasic FMT increases specifically under situations of decision difficulty when participants ultimately select a high-effort choice. These results point to a unique role for ACC in motivating and persisting at effortful behavior when decision conflict is high.

Midfrontal Theta Activity Is Sensitive to Approach-Avoidance Conflict.

Midfrontal theta (FMθ) in the human EEG is commonly viewed as a generic and homogeneous mechanism of cognitive control in general and conflict processing in particular. However, the role of FMθ in approach-avoidance conflicts and its cross-task relationship to simpler stimulus-response conflicts remain to be examined more closely. Therefore, we recorded EEG data while 59 healthy participants (49 female, 10 male) completed both an approach-avoidance task and a flanker task. Participants showed significant increases in FMθ power in response to conflicts in both tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show a direct relationship between FMθ and approach-avoidance conflicts. Crucially, FMθ activity was task dependent and showed no cross-task correlation. To assess the possibility of multiple FMθ sources, we applied source separation [generalized eigendecomposition (GED)] to distinguish independent FMθ generators. The activity of the components showed a similar pattern and was again task specific. However, our results did not yield a clear differentiation between task-specific FMθ sources for each of the participants. Overall, our results show FMθ increases in approach-avoidance conflicts, as has been established only for more simple response conflict paradigms so far. The independence of task-specific FMθ increases suggests differential sensitivity of FMθ to different forms of behavioral conflict.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT FMθ is well established as an indicator for cognitive conflict in tasks involving simple stimulus-response conflicts. However, we do not yet know about its role in more complex forms of goal ambivalence, such as approach-avoidance conflicts. Thus, we implemented an approach-avoidance task and a flanker task to investigate FMθ in response to simple as well as more complex response conflicts. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show a direct relationship between FMθ and approach-avoidance conflicts. Although the transient FMθ increase is similar to that induced in a simple response conflict task, individual FMθ responsiveness to these two forms of conflict were independent of each other, suggesting intraindividual differences in the sensitivity of FMθ to different forms of behavioral conflict.

The role of informational content of visual speech in an audiovisual cocktail party: Evidence from cortical oscillations in young and old participants.

Age-related differences in the processing of audiovisual speech in a multi-talker environment were investigated analysing event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs), focusing on theta, alpha and beta oscillations that are assumed to reflect conflict processing, multisensory integration and attentional mechanisms, respectively. Eighteen older and 21 younger healthy adults completed a two-alternative forced-choice word discrimination task, responding to audiovisual speech stimuli. In a cocktail-party scenario with two competing talkers (located at -15° and 15° azimuth), target words (/yes/or/no/) appeared at a pre-defined (attended) position, distractor words at the other position. In two audiovisual conditions, acoustic speech was combined either with informative or uninformative visual speech. While a behavioural benefit for informative visual speech occurred for both age groups, differences between audiovisual conditions in the theta and beta band were only present for older adults. A stronger increase in theta perturbations for stimuli containing uninformative visual speech could be associated with early conflict processing, while a stronger suppression in beta perturbations for informative visual speech could be associated to audiovisual integration. Compared to the younger group, the older group showed generally stronger beta perturbations. No condition differences in the alpha band were found. Overall, the findings suggest age-related differences in audiovisual speech integration in a multi-talker environment. While the behavioural benefit of informative visual speech was unaffected by age, older adults had a stronger need for cognitive control when processing conflicting audiovisual speech input. Furthermore, mechanisms of audiovisual integration are differently activated depending on the informational content of the visual information.

Concurrent working memory task increases or decreases the flanker-related N2 amplitude.

Concurrent working memory (WM) task reduces available attentional control resources to perform the flanker task. However, controversy exists as to whether concurrent WM task increases or decreases flanker-related N2 amplitude. In a flanker task experiment, individuals were confronted with a low, middle, or high WM load task, while electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded. The ERP results showed a larger flanker-related N2 amplitude while completing a middle or high WM load task compared to a low one. However, completing an additional high WM load task could not increase flanker-related N2 amplitude versus completing an additional middle WM load task. In sum, these results suggest that WM load can impair top-down cognitive control processes, thereby hampering flanker task performance. Importantly, the present study supports the account of flanker-related N2 processes linked to top-down attentional control resource allocation, but challenges the account of flanker-related N2 reflecting response conflict processes.

Forging the Juba Peace Agreement: The Role of National, Regional, and International Actors

Apart from national contestations, there has been some form of third-party involvement in the conflict and peace process in Sudan. Actors in the immediate region and internationally played the role of mediators in the peace efforts in Sudan. The international community played a role in negotiating the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan and other agreements. The Sudan government and armed groups are key actors in conflict and peace but there was hardly any negotiated peace that was reached without the involvement of regional and international actors. IGAD, the AU, and the UN were among key actors in the Juba Peace Agreement. Through the analysis of existing material, this contribution looks critically at the roles played by different actors in the process and how regional and international actors brought the interlocutors around the table. A key argument in the article is that mediators succeed in having parties sign agreements but play no significant role beyond that.

A neurocognitive psychometrics account of individual differences in attentional control.

Attention control processes play an important role in many substantial psychological theories but are hard to reliably and validly measure on the subject-level. Therefore, associations between individual differences in attentional control and other variables are often inconsistent. Here we propose a novel neurocognitive psychometrics account of attentional control that integrates model parameters from the dual-stage two-phase model (Hübner et al., 2010), a mathematical model of selective attention, with neural correlates of conflict processing (i.e., latencies of the stimulus-locked lateralized readiness potential) in a multilayer structural equation model framework. We analyzed data from 150 participants who completed the Eriksen Flanker task while their EEG was recorded and used the neurocognitive psychometric approach to distinguish between two sequential stages of information-processing-target selection and response selection. Model parameters and neural correlates showed convergent validity and could be meaningfully related to each other. Together, these neurocognitive process parameters jointly explained 37 % of the variance in individual differences in higher-order cognitive abilities that were assessed with a battery of intelligence tests and working memory tasks. Individuals with greater cognitive abilities were not only better at focusing their attention on the target stimulus but also at subsequent response-selection. All in all, our results support the idea that individual differences in attentional control processes are related to individual differences in cognitive abilities. Moreover, they provide hope that the measurement crisis of individual differences in attentional control can be overcome by integrating measurement approaches from related disciplines such as mathematical psychology and cognitive neuroscience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

예비놀이치료자의 문제중심학습(PBL) 기반 놀이평가교육 참여경험에 대한 질적사례연구

Objectives This study was conducted to explore its potential as the training method by implementing PBL-based play evaluation practice training for preparatory play therapists, and to discover the significance of the play therapy training process to provide basic data on the training direction of preparatory therapists. Methods In this study, three first-year students participated, a master's program in child counseling and play therapy. A PBL-based play evaluation practice training was conducted for a total of 12 sessions, all training was recorded, and two focus group and individual interviews were conducted before and after the training. The collected data were analyzed within and between cases according to the framework of multi-case study analysis proposed by Creswell(2013). Results 5 in-case topics reflecting their experiences were derived through PBL-based play evaluation practice training by prospective play therapists, and 4 topics, 9 categories, and 38 subcategories were identified in the case-to-case analysis. First, the research participants were lost and continued to wander through a process of questioning that had no correct answers. Second, the role of the professor differed in the learning experience of the research participants. Third, there was a difference in the team learning experience of the research participants. Fourth, the PBL-based training allowed participants to practice play evaluation interpretation and case conceptualization before beginning their play therapy practice and supervision practice. Conclusions This study is significant in that it conducted play evaluation training using PBL as a pre-practice training method for preparatory play therapists and explored in detail the confusion, conflict, and change processes experienced by the participants. In addition, from a reflective practice perspective, we affirmed the importance of the educational expertise of professor and play therapy supervisors.

Dissociable effects of music and white noise on conflict-induced behavioral adjustments.

Auditory stimuli, encompassing a continually expanding collection of musical genres and sonic hues, present a safe and easily administrable therapeutic option for alleviating cognitive deficits associated with neuropsychological disorders, but their effects on executive control are yet to be completely understood. To better understand how the processing of certain acoustic properties can influence conflict processing, we had a large of cohort of undergraduate students complete the Stroop colour and word test in three different background conditions: classical music, white noise, and silence. Because of pandemic guidelines and the necessity to run the experiment remotely, participants also completed the Wisconsin card sorting test (WCST), so that the reliability and consistency of acquired data could be assessed. We found that white noise, but not classical music increased the response time difference between congruent (low conflict) and incongruent (high conflict) trials (conflict cost), hence impairing performance. Results from the WCST indicated that home-based data collection was reliable, replicating a performance bias reported in our previous laboratory-based experiments. Both the auditory stimuli were played at a similar intensity, thus their dissociable effects may have resulted from differing emotional responses within participants, where white noise, but not music elicited a negative response. Integrated with previous literature, our findings indicate that outside of changes in tempo and valence, classical music does not affect cognitive functions associated with conflict processing, whilst white noise impairs these functions in a manner similar to other stressors, and hence requires further research before its implementation into neuropsychiatric care.

Simultaneous EEG + fMRI study of brain activity during an emotional Stroop task in individuals in remission from depression

Individuals in remission from depression (MDDR) tend to experience lingering cognitive and emotional processing alterations. However, little is known about the neural profiles underlying these features. Using simultaneous EEG+fMRI, we assessed neural profiles during the emotional word Stroop task (eStroop) in people with MDDR and healthy volunteers (HVs).Event-related potentials (ERPs) were extracted (N450, N2 & P3). Assessments of brain activation, as modulated by ERPs, were carried out, as were fMRI-informed ERP analyses. A trend for greater P3 amplitudes in MDDR versus HV groups existed. HV versus MDDR groups had greater brain activation to emotional versus neutral words in various regions, including the left amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG); this appeared to be driven by elevated activity to neutral words in the MDDR group (neutral > emotional). HVs showed greater activation (emotional > neutral) modulated by N450 amplitude in various regions, while MDDRs showed greater neutral > emotional activation modulated by N450 amplitude in the left IFG and left precuneus.Our EEG+fMRI findings indicate that people with MDDR appear to have blunted neural differentiation to emotional versus neutral stimuli or elevated neural responses to neutral information processing. This might represent altered neuronal processing (i.e., underlying attention and conflict processing) during a cognitive task with an emotional component in individuals remitted from depression, or elevated neural responses to ambiguous or neutral information. In sum, subtle lingering neuronal features not accompanied by performance differences appear to exist in people with MDDR.