Emotional Distractors Research Articles

Unpleasant emotions and task-unrelated thoughts and their associations with amygdala activity during emotional distraction: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Previous emotion regulation studies revealed that emotional distraction decreases unpleasant emotions. This study examined whether distraction tasks decrease unpleasant task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) and unpleasant emotions when recalling stressful daily interpersonal events. Amygdala activity was examined to assess implicit emotional changes using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The behavioral data of 20 university students (mean age: 20.35 ± 1.42 years; range: 18–24 years) and fMRI data of 18 students were examined. As an emotion induction procedure, participants initially freely recalled memories of daily stressful interpersonal events and then responded to a series of questions about their recalled memories presented on a monitor. In the distraction experiment, the questions were re-represented as an emotional stimulation; a distraction task (nonconstant or constant finger tapping) or rest condition was then performed, and ratings were given for attentional state, thought types conceived during the tasks, and emotional state. Decreases in unpleasant emotions and TUTs were defined as distraction effects. We found that unpleasant TUTs decreased in the nonconstant relative to rest condition (p < .05). Furthermore, increased right amygdala activation positively correlated with unpleasant emotions, and bilateral amygdala activation correlated with unpleasant TUTs only in the rest condition, indicating the existence of amygdala activation associated with unpleasant emotions and thoughts. However, such associations were not under nonconstant or constant conditions, indicating distraction effects. Notably, this study showed that emotional distraction can decrease the degree of unpleasant emotions and the occurrence of unpleasant thoughts regarding common daily emotions.

Emotional capture of spatial attention is suppressed in high anxiety but at a non-spatial time cost

ABSTRACT Emotional distractors capture spatial attention delaying target search more than neutral distractors. The current study investigated whether emotional attention capture occurs automatically by utilizing statistical learning to suppress attention capture. Participants searched for a target while an emotional or neutral distractor appeared at high (suppressed) or low distractor probability (not suppressed) locations. Experiment 1 (56 subjects) measured target detection latency with a keyboard and Experiment 2 (90 subjects) used computer mouse tracking for measuring emotional capture at higher spatial and temporal resolutions. Results showed that emotional capture of spatial attention was able to be suppressed, but at the cost of producing non-spatial time delays. Furthermore, emotional capture that occurred at non-suppressed locations occurred at relatively late temporal stages after movement initiation and were more likely to occur in individuals with high trait anxiety. Overall, the study demonstrates that emotional capture of spatial attention is not strictly automatic.

Neural mechanisms for secondary suppression of emotional distractors: Evidence from concurrent electroencephalography-magnetoencephalography data.

Distractor suppression allows us to remain on-task in the presence of distractions by filtering task-irrelevant information from ongoing cognitive processing and responding. Electrophysiological studies have revealed that this key feature of selective attention is a dynamic process that involves at least two distinct stages of processing. Two important aspects of these processing stages remain unclear: Whether the processing of emotional distractors at an earlier stage is automatic, as reflected in the N2/early posterior negativity (EPN) component; and what functional-anatomical brain systems are recruited in each stage. The present study addresses these issues by measuring brain activity with concurrent electroencephalography-magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings while participants performed a combined rapid serial visual presentation and motion tracking task. Event-related potentials (ERP) showed significant effects of attentional capture and attentional modulation during two time windows marked by the N2/EPN and P3b ERP components. Source reconstruction of concurrent MEG measurements revealed activation of the left visual association cortex and anterior cingulate cortex during the N2/EPN time window, activation of the insula during the early phase of the P3b and anterior cingulate cortex activity during the later phase of the P3b. The findings provide novel evidence establishing a connection between the increased N2 response to negative pictures and the activation of the cingulate gyrus, which facilitates the suppression of distractions during demanding cognitive tasks. In addition, distinct activation patterns were observed in the insula and anterior cingulate cortex during the P3b time window, indicating that attentional control mediated by the anterior cingulate cortex operates to suppress the processing of distracting emotional stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

AttentionCARE: replicability of a BCI for the clinical application of augmented reality-guided EEG-based attention modification for adolescents at high risk for depression.

Affect-biased attention is the phenomenon of prioritizing attention to emotionally salient stimuli and away from goal-directed stimuli. It is thought that affect-biased attention to emotional stimuli is a driving factor in the development of depression. This effect has been well-studied in adults, but research shows that this is also true during adolescence, when the severity of depressive symptoms are correlated with the magnitude of affect-biased attention to negative emotional stimuli. Prior studies have shown that trainings to modify affect-biased attention may ameliorate depression in adults, but this research has also been stymied by concerns about reliability and replicability. This study describes a clinical application of augmented reality-guided EEG-based attention modification ("AttentionCARE") for adolescents who are at highest risk for future depressive disorders (i.e., daughters of depressed mothers). Our results (n = 10) indicated that the AttentionCARE protocol can reliably and accurately provide neurofeedback about adolescent attention to negative emotional distractors that detract from attention to a primary task. Through several within and cross-study replications, our work addresses concerns about the lack of reliability and reproducibility in brain-computer interface applications, offering insights for future interventions to modify affect-biased attention in high-risk adolescents.

Supplemental Material for Neural Mechanisms for Secondary Suppression of Emotional Distractors: Evidence From Concurrent Electroencephalography–Magnetoencephalography Data

Supplemental Material for Neural Mechanisms for Secondary Suppression of Emotional Distractors: Evidence From Concurrent Electroencephalography–Magnetoencephalography Data

The modulation of task relevance on emotion-induced blindness depends on whether targets and distractors belong to the same category

ABSTRACT Previous research on emotion-induced blindness (EIB) argues emotional distractors capture attention in a bottom-up manner due to their physical and emotional salience. However, recent research has shown it is controversial whether EIB will be modulated by top-down factors. The present study further investigated whether the magnitude of EIB would be modulated by top-down factors, specifically the emotional relevance between tasks and distractors. Participants were divided into two groups having the same targets except for different task instructions. The orientation judgment group was asked to judge the orientation of the target (an emotionally irrelevant task), and the emotion judgment group was required to judge the emotional valence of the target (an emotionally relevant task). It was found the emotional relevance between tasks and distractors has no modulation on the magnitudes of EIB in two groups when targets and distractors are from different categories (Experiment 1), but a modulation when they are from the same category (Experiment 2). Consequently, we contend top-down task relevance modulates the EIB effect and distractors’ priority is regulated by the emotional relevance between tasks and distractors. The current study holds attentional capture by stimulus-driven is unconditional in EIB, while attentional capture by goal-driven requires certain conditions.

Neural Substrates of Emotion Processing and Cognitive Control Over Emotion in Youth Anxiety: An RDoC-Informed Study Across the Clinical to Nonclinical Continuum of Severity

Clinically anxious youth are hypervigilant to emotional stimuli and display difficulty shifting attention from emotional to nonemotional stimuli, suggesting impairments in cognitive control over emotion. However, it is unknown whether the neural substrates of such biases vary across the clinical-to-nonclinical range of anxiety or by age. Youth aged 7 to 17 years with clinical anxiety (n= 119) or without an anxiety diagnosis (n= 41) matched emotional faces or matched shapes flanked by emotional face distractors during magnetic resonance imaging, probing emotion processing and cognitive control over emotion, respectively. Building from the National Institute of Mental Health Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework, clinically anxious youth were sampled across diagnostic categories, and non-clinically affected youth were sampled across minimal-to-subclinical severity. Across both conditions, anxiety severity was associated with hyperactivation in the right inferior parietal lobe, a substrate of hypervigilance. Brain-anxiety associations were also differentiated by attentional state; anxiety severity was associated with greater left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activation during emotion processing (face matching) and greater activation in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus and temporoparietal junction (and slower responses) during cognitive control over emotion (shape matching). Age also moderated associations between anxiety and cognitive control over emotion, such that anxiety was associated with greater right thalamus and bilateral posterior cingulate cortex activation for children at younger and mean ages, but not for older youth. Aberrant function in brain regions implicated in stimulus-driven attention to emotional distractors may contribute to anxiety in youth. Results support the potential utility of attention modulation interventions for anxiety that are tailored to developmental stage. Dimensional Brain Behavior Predictors of CBT Outcomes in Pediatric Anxiety; https://clinicaltrials.gov; NCT02810171.

Negative images, regardless of task relevance, distract younger more than older adults.

Older adults, compared to younger adults, tend to prioritize positive information more and negative information less. We recently observed this "positivity effect" pattern in an emotion-induced blindness task, which measures attention allocated to task-irrelevant emotional stimuli in the way participants are distracted by them. Older adults were less distracted by negative images compared to younger adults. This could represent an age-related priority shift away from negative emotions. However, it could also be that older adults simply do not see negative images presented at a fast rate. A similar possibility is that older adults to fail to engage with negative stimuli because of their complex nature, rather than due to age-related changes in emotional preference per se. In the present study, we tested this possibility by manipulating the required degree of engagement with emotional distractors. Participants completed a modified emotion-induced blindness task, with emotional distractors that were either task irrelevant (younger: n = 48; older: n = 46) or task relevant (younger: n = 48; older: n = 45). The task relevance of distractors did not affect performance. Even though older adults could quickly perceive the negative images, they were less distracted by them compared to younger adults. Current theories of the positivity effect fail to fully account for these positivity effect patterns in attention, especially those that propose mechanisms requiring a substantial time to enact. The current results may require rethinking previous accounts of the positivity effect and highlight the benefits of probing the positivity effect in early cognitive processing stages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Brain morphological changes and functional neuroanatomy related to cognitive and emotional distractors during working memory maintenance in post-traumatic stress disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with abnormalities in the processing and regulation of emotion as well as cognitive deficits. This study evaluated the differential brain activation patterns associated with cognitive and emotional distractors during working memory (WM) maintenance for human faces between patients with PTSD and healthy controls (HCs) and assessed the relationship between changes in the activation patterns by the opposing effects of distraction types and gray matter volume (GMV). Twenty-two patients with PTSD and twenty-two HCs underwent T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and event-related functional MRI (fMRI), respectively. Event-related fMRI data were recorded while subjects performed a delayed-response WM task with human face and trauma-related distractors. Compared to the HCs, the patients with PTSD showed significantly reduced GMV of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (p < 0.05, FWE-corrected). For the human face distractor trial, the patients showed significantly decreased activities in the superior frontal gyrus and IFG compared with HCs (p < 0.05, FWE-corrected). The patients showed lower accuracy scores and slower reaction times for the face recognition task with trauma-related distractors compared with HCs as well as significantly increased brain activity in the STG during the trauma-related distractor trial was observed (p < 0.05, FWE-corrected). Such differential brain activation patterns associated with the effects of distraction in PTSD patients may be linked to neural mechanisms associated with impairments in both cognitive control for confusable distractors and the ability to control emotional distraction.

Motivation and emotional distraction interact and affect executive functions

Previous research on cool-hot executive function (EF) interactions has examined the effects of motivation and emotional distraction on cool EF separately, focusing on one EF component at a time. Although both incentives and emotional distractors have been shown to modulate attention, how they interact and affect cool EF processes is still unclear. Here, we used an experimental paradigm that manipulated updating, inhibition, and shifting demands to determine the interactions of motivation and emotional distraction in the context of cool EF. Forty-five young adults (16 males, 29 females) completed the go/no-go (inhibition), two-back (updating), and task-switching (shifting) tasks. Monetary incentives were implemented to manipulate motivation, and task-irrelevant threatening or neutral faces were presented before the target stimulus to manipulate emotional distraction. We found that incentives significantly improved no-go accuracy, two-back accuracy, and reaction time (RT) switch cost. While emotional distractors had no significant effects on overall task performance, they abolished the incentive effects on no-go accuracy and RT switch cost. Altogether, these findings suggest that motivation and emotional distraction interact in the context of cool EF. Specifically, transient emotional distraction disrupts the upregulation of control activated by incentives. The present investigation has advanced knowledge about the relationship between cool and hot EF and highlights the importance of considering motivation–emotion interactions for a fuller understanding of control.

Frequency of filler items does not modulate the emotional attentional blink

ABSTRACT In the emotional attentional blink (EAB; emotion-induced blindness), emotional distractors impair report of subsequent targets in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams of fillers. Recent research demonstrated that the EAB is surprisingly weak. Because RSVP includes serial abrupt onset fillers which otherwise might capture attention, we hypothesized that participants might broadly suppress stimulus-driven attention and enhance goal-driven control to allow for target detection. Such suppression could in turn reduce emotional capture and the EAB. The present study thus compared the EAB in typical RSVP tasks to that in “skeletal” tasks with most fillers omitted, reasoning that reducing the number of fillers would reduce the likelihood of broad suppression of capture, thus enhancing the EAB in skeletal tasks. However, similar EABs were observed in both tasks within-participants, ruling out this hypothesis. This research is also, to the best of our knowledge, the first demonstration of an EAB using a skeletal paradigm.

Hearing fearful prosody impairs visual working memory maintenance

Interference by distractors has been associated multiple times with diminished visual and auditory working memory (WM) performance. Negative emotional distractors in particular lead to detrimental effects on WM. However, these associations have only been seen when distractors and items to maintain in WM are from the same sensory modality. In this study, we investigate cross-modal interference on WM. We invited 20 participants to complete a visual change-detection task, assessing visual WM (VWM), while hearing emotional (fearful) and neutral auditory distractors. Electrophysiological activity was recorded to measure contralateral delay activity (CDA) and auditory P2 event-related potentials (ERP), indexing WM maintenance and distractor salience respectively. At the behavioral level, fearful prosody didn't decrease significantly working memory accuracy, compared to neutral prosody. Regarding ERPs, fearful distractors evoked a greater P2 amplitude than neutral distractors. Correlations between the two ERP potentials indicated that P2 amplitude difference between the two types of prosody was associated with the difference in CDA amplitude for fearful and neutral trials. This association suggests that cognitive resources required to process fearful prosody detrimentally impact VWM maintenance. That result provides a piece of additional evidence that negative emotional stimuli produce greater interference than neutral stimuli and that the cognitive resources used to process stimuli from different modalities come from a common pool.

See no evil: Effects of trait dissociation on psychomotor vigilance

Inattention to external stimuli is common, particularly under stressful or emotional conditions. However, the literature on dissociation has debated whether it represents simple inattention (Giesbrecht, Lynn, Lilienfeld & Merckelbach, 2008) or inattention motivated by emotion (Cavicchioli et al., 2021). Here, we considered whether trait features of dissociation (i.e., the disruption of normally integrated processes of attention, cognition, and perception) might mediate this phenomenon. Specifically, we examined whether trait dissociation, as well as associated measures of anxiety, depression, and PTSD, were related to poor performance on an emotional distractor variant of the common psychomotor vigilance task in a non-clinical sample. Results suggested that individuals high in trait dissociation were characterized by high proportions of lapses (reaction times >500 ms), in which they were not attentive to changes in their external environment, particularly following the presentation of fearful faces. Our primary implication is that dissociation, even in nonclinical populations, has measurable behavioral effects that are distinct from the deficits associated with other attention-interfering psychological symptoms.

Altered Lateral Prefrontal Cortex Functioning During Emotional Interference Resistance Is Associated With Affect Lability in Adults With Persisting Symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder From Childhood

BackgroundAttention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention and/or impulsivity/hyperactivity. ADHD, especially when persisting into adulthood, often includes emotional dysregulation, such as affect lability; however, the neural correlates of emotionality in adults with heterogeneous ADHD symptom persistence remain unclear. MethodsThe present study sought to determine shared and distinct functional neuroanatomical profiles of neural circuitry during emotional interference resistance using the emotional face n-back task in adult participants with persisting (n = 47), desisting (n = 93), or no (n = 42) childhood ADHD symptoms while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. ResultsParticipants without any lifetime ADHD diagnosis performed significantly better (faster and more accurately) than participants with ADHD diagnoses on trials with high cognitive loads (2-back) that included task-irrelevant emotional distractors, tapping into executive functioning and emotion regulatory processes. In participants with persisting ADHD symptoms, more severe emotional symptoms were related to worse task performance. Heightened dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activation was associated with more accurate and faster performance on 2-back emotional faces trials, respectively. Reduced activation was associated with greater affect lability in adults with persisting ADHD, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation mediated the relationship between affect lability and task accuracy. ConclusionsThese findings suggest that alterations in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex function associated with greater interference in cognitive processes from emotion could represent a marker of risk for problems with emotional dysregulation in individuals with persisting ADHD and thus represent a potential therapeutic target for those with greater emotional symptoms of ADHD.

Sustained training with novel distractors attenuates the behavioral interference of emotional pictures but does not affect the electrocortical markers of emotional processing.

Research has recently shown that behavioral interference prompted by emotional distractors is subject to habituation when the same exemplars are repeated, but promptly recovers in response to novel stimuli. The present study investigated whether prolonged experience with distractors that were all novel was effective in shaping the attentional filter, favoring stable and generalizable inhibition effects. To test this, the impact of emotional distractors was measured before and after a sustained training phase with only novel distractor pictures, and that for a group of participants depicted only a variety of neutral contents, whereas a different group was exposed only to emotional contents. Results showed that emotional interference on reaction times was attenuated after the training phase (compared to the pre-test), but emotional distractors continued to interfere more than neutral ones in the post-test. The two groups did not differ in terms of training effect, suggesting that the distractor suppression mechanism developed during training was not sensitive to the affective category of natural scenes with which one had had experience. The affective modulation of neither the LPP or Alpha-ERD showed any effect of training. Altogether, these findings suggest that sustained experience with novel distractors may attenuate attention allocation toward task irrelevant emotional stimuli, but the evaluative processes and the engagement of motivational systems are always needed to support the monitoring of the environment for significant cues.

Crisis-related stimuli do not increase the emotional attentional blink in a general university student population

Crises such as natural disasters or pandemics negatively impact the mental health of the affected community, increasing rates of depression, anxiety, or stress. It has been proposed that this stems in part from crisis-related stimuli triggering negative reactions that interrupt daily life. Given the frequency and prominence of crisis events, it is crucial to understand when crisis-related stimuli involuntarily capture attention and trigger increased stress and distraction from obligations. The emotional attentional blink (EAB) paradigm—in which emotional distractors hinder report of subsequent targets in streams of rapidly displayed stimuli—allows examination of such attentional capture in a rapidly changing dynamic environment. EABs are typically observed with generally disturbing stimuli, but stimuli related to personal traumas yield similar or greater effects, indicating strong attentional capture by stimuli related to individual trauma history. The current study investigated whether a similar comparable or increased crisis-related EAB exists within a community affected by large-scale crisis. Specifically, effects of conventional emotional distractors and distractors related to recent crises were compared using EABs in university students without a mental health diagnosis. Experiment 1 used images related to Hurricane Harvey, evaluating a crisis 4 years prior to data collection. Experiment 2 used words related to the COVID pandemic, evaluating an ongoing crisis at the time of data collection. In both experiments, the conventional EAB distractors yielded strong EABs, while the crisis-related distractors yielded absent or weak EABs in the same participants. This suggests that crisis-related stimuli do not have special potency for capturing attention in the general university student population. More generally, crises affecting communities do not necessarily yield widespread, strong reactivity to crisis-related stimuli.

Effects of task switching and emotional stimuli on memory selectivity

ABSTRACT It is not always easy to attend to task-relevant information and ignore task-irrelevant distractions. We investigated the impact of task switching and emotional stimuli on goal-oriented selective attention and subsequent recognition memory. Results from two experiments with different stimulus materials (words and images) found that the memory advantage of task-relevant information over task-irrelevant information (i.e. memory selectivity) was attenuated on task switch trials and emotional distractor trials. In contrast, task repetitions and emotional targets improved memory selectivity. These results suggest that both task switching and emotional distractors divert limited cognitive resources needed for selective attention and selective encoding. Emotional targets likely supported selective encoding through the process of attentional prioritisation of emotional stimuli. The effects of task switching and emotional stimuli did not interact, suggesting distinct mechanisms, although this conclusion remains tentative.

Aberrant Neurofunctional Responses During Emotional and Attentional Processing Differentiate ADHD Youth With and Without a Family History of Bipolar I Disorder

Objective: To compare neurofunctional responses in emotional and attentional networks of psychostimulant-free ADHD youth with and without familial risk for bipolar I disorder (BD). Methods: ADHD youth with (high-risk, HR, n = 48) and without (low-risk, LR, n = 50) a first-degree relative with BD and healthy controls (n = 46) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing a continuous performance task with emotional distracters. Region-of-interest analyses were performed for bilateral amygdala (AMY), ventrolateral (VLPFC) and dorsolateral (DLPFC) prefrontal cortex, and anterior (ACC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Results: Compared with HC, HR, but not LR, exhibited predominantly left-lateralized AMY, VLPFC, DLPFC, PCC, and rostral ACC hyperactivation to emotional distractors, whereas LR exhibited right VLPFC and bilateral dorsal ACC hypoactivation to attentional targets. Regional responses correlated with emotional and attention symptoms. Conclusion: Aberrant neurofunctional responses during emotional and attentional processing differentiate ADHD youth with and without a family history of BD and correlate with relevant symptoms ratings.

Direct evidence for proactive suppression of salient-but-irrelevant emotional information inputs.

It has long been debated whether emotional information inherently captures attention. The mainstream view suggests that the attentional processing of emotional information is automatic and difficult to be controlled. Here, we provide direct evidence that salient-but-irrelevant emotional information inputs can be proactively suppressed. First, we demonstrated that both negative and positive emotional distractors (fearful and happy faces) induced attentional capture effects (i.e., more attention allocated to emotional distractors than neutral distractors) in the singleton-detection mode (Experiment 1), but attentional suppression effects (i.e., less attention allocated to emotional distractors than neutral distractors) in the feature-search mode that strengthened task motivation (Experiment 2). The suppression effects in the feature-search mode disappeared when emotional information was disrupted through face inversion, showing that the suppression effects were driven by emotional information rather than low-level visual factors (Experiment 3). Furthermore, the suppression effects also disappeared when the identity of emotional faces became unpredictable (Experiment 4), suggesting that the suppression was highly dependent on the predictability of emotional distractors. Importantly, we reproduced the suppression effects using eye-tracking methods and found that there was no attentional capture by emotional distractors before the appearance of the attentional suppression effects (Experiment 5). These findings suggest that irrelevant emotional stimuli that have the potential to cause distraction can be proactively suppressed by the attention system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Gone for good: Lack of priming suggests early perceptual interference in emotion-induced blindness with negative stimuli.

Emotionally negative stimuli are perceptually prioritized to such a degree that they can cause people to miss seeing subsequent targets that appear in front of their eyes. It is unclear whether this effect (known as emotion-induced blindness) reflects postperceptual interference, in which case unseen targets might still impact later responses, as in the seemingly similar "attentional blink". An alternative is that emotional distractors prevent target encoding, and so leave no residual trace of target information. In this study, we used a priming task to assess these alternative possibilities. Each emotion-induced blindness trial was immediately followed by a speeded arrow judgment task, in which the arrow's orientation could be congruent or incongruent with the orientation of an emotion-induced blindness target. Analyses revealed strong evidence that seen targets primed the arrow judgment, but there was moderate to strong evidence that unseen targets elicited no priming whatsoever. These results lend support to claims that emotion-induced blindness reflects failure to perceptually encode target information, and may reflect a different mechanism from the phenomenally similar attentional blink. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).