Non-emotional Information Research Articles

Effects of Cognitive and Physical Load of Acute Exercise on Inhibitory Control and Prefrontal Cortex Hemodynamics in Children.

Evidence suggests that acute exercise benefits inhibitory control, but it remains unclear how physical and cognitive load influence this ability in preadolescent children, when faced with different types of distractors. We examined their moderating effects along with changes in prefrontal cortex hemodynamics. Using a crossover design, 29 participants completed 10 min of exercise (with an interactive training wall) at 1) low physical and low cognitive load, 2) low physical and high cognitive load, 3) high physical and low cognitive load, and 4) high physical and high cognitive load in a randomized order. Before and after each condition, they performed a Standard and Affective Stroop task. During both tasks, the lateral oxygenation difference in the prefrontal cortex was measured by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. For the Standard Stroop task, there was no effect of physical and cognitive load on performance. In contrast, exercise with low compared with high cognitive load was associated with a greater reduction of reaction time and increase in accuracy on the Affective Stroop task. This was accompanied by a decrease in lateral oxygenation difference on trials with low inhibitory control demands. Acute exercise with low compared with high cognitive demand benefits the ability to resolve emotional conflict, but the control over inhibition of nonemotional information remains unaffected. This effect of cognitive load is complemented by an increased efficiency of the left prefrontal cortex, when no emotional conflict resolution is required.

AGE DIFFERENCES IN EMOTION REGULATION AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTION

Abstract Age-related improvements in emotion regulation (ER) are thought to account for the relatively healthy levels of well-being observed in late adulthood. However, extant laboratory-based evidence on age differences in the effective implementation of ER strategies―such as reappraisal (i.e., reframing the meaning of an emotion-eliciting event) and distraction (i.e., redirecting attention away from emotional to non-emotional information)―remains equivocal (Isaacowitz, 2022). Moreover, developmental differences in ER monitoring (i.e., adjusting regulatory approach as needed, such as maintaining or switching strategies), and factors that underpin such age-related differences, are poorly understood. Therefore, we investigated how younger and older adults (N = 335) differ in the implementation and monitoring aspects of ER, and how executive function (EF)―a collection of higher-order control operations that underlie ER processes (Pruessner et al., 2020; Schmeichel & Tang, 2015)―could explain such age-related differences in ER. Using a comprehensive battery of nine EF and two ER tasks, results indicated age-related decline for the implementation of reappraisal but not distraction. For monitoring, advancing age was associated with a less flexible pattern of strategy maintenance and switching (of reappraisal and distraction) across high- and low-intensity emotional contexts. Importantly, these age-related differences in ER implementation and monitoring were significantly mediated by declines in EF (βs = .25‒.29, ps < .007), thereby alluding to the role of EF as a potential mechanism. Our findings suggest that certain ER processes are more cognitively demanding than others, and that EF could be a viable target of intervention to improve such ER processes in late adulthood.

How list composition affects the emotional enhancement of memory in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT Young adults show an immediate emotional enhancement of memory (EEM) when emotional and non-emotional information are presented in mixed lists but not pure lists, but it is unclear whether older adults’ memories also benefit from the cognitive factors producing the list-composition effect. The present study examined whether the list-composition effect extended to older adults (55+), testing the following alternatives: (1) younger and older adults could show the list-composition effect, (2) due to age-related decreases in cognitive resources, older adults may show weaker effects of list-composition, or (3) due to age-related positivity effects, older adults’ list-composition effect may vary by valence. Results supported the first alternative: the list-composition effect occurred for older as well as younger adults, when testing memory for pictures (Experiment 1) or words (Experiment 2). In a third experiment, we explored whether mixing information at only encoding or retrieval (and blocking in the other phase) would suffice for the list composition effect to occur. Results revealed that mixed encoding/blocked retrieval did not elicit the EEM in either age group. Overall, the results suggest age-related stability in the cognitive processes that give rise to the immediate EEM.

Cognitive manipulation of emotional and non-emotional information in working memory of patients with depression: a rigid processing style.

Cognitive psychology is one of the important perspectives to understand depression. Compared with previous studies, recent researchers increasingly focused on the exploration of the comprehensive cognitive process of patients with depression. The cognitive operation ability of working memory is an important comprehensive cognitive process, which reflects how individuals establish representations. This is the basis for the formation of experience and schema. The purpose of this study is to explore whether there are abnormalities in cognitive manipulation in patients with depression, and to analyze its possible role in the pathogenesis and maintenance of depression. In this cross-sectional study, depressed patients was enrolled in the clinical psychology department of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital as the case group, while healthy individuals were recruited in the hospital and social meetings as the control group. Hamilton Depression Scale (HAMD)-17, Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAMA) and rumination thinking scale (RRS) were adopted as measurement tools, and working memory operation tasks were adopted to test each subject, so as to measure their cognitive operation ability. A total of 78 depressed patients and 81 healthy individuals completed the study. The results showed that the rumination level of the case group was higher than that of the control group, and the difference was significant first; Second, in the "inconsistent" condition, the case group under different stimulus conditions when the response was significantly higher than the control group; Thirdly, the "cognitive operation consumption" value of the case group was significantly higher than that of the control group under the three stimulus conditions, among which, the operational cost value of sadness-neutral stimulus was significantly higher than that of the other two stimulus conditions. Patients with depression had obvious difficulties in cognitive manipulation of information with different values in working memory, which reflected in the fact that it took them longer time to adjust the relationship between information and established new representations. Among them, patients with depression had a higher degree of cognitive manipulation of sad stimuli, indicating that their abnormal cognitive manipulation had certain emotion specificity. Finally, the difficulty of cognitive operation was closely related to the level of rumination.

Implicit angry faces interfere with response inhibition and response adjustment

ABSTRACT Cognitive control enables people to adjust their thoughts and actions according to the current task demands. Response inhibition and response adjustment are two key aspects of cognitive control. Here, we examined how the implicit processing of emotional information influences these two functions with the help of the double-step saccade task. Each trial had either a single target or two sequential targets. Upon a single target onset, participants were required to make a quick saccade, but upon two target onsets, participants were instructed to inhibit their initial saccades and redirect their gaze to the second target. In three experiments, we manipulated the emotional information of the first and second targets. We found that irrelevant emotional information of the first target impaired response inhibition compared to non-emotional information (geometric shapes) of the first target. When non-emotional information (geometric shape) came as the first target, irrelevant angry emotional faces as the second target interfered with both response inhibition and response adjustment compared to irrelevant happy and neutral faces. We explain these results with previous findings that processing faces with irrelevant angry facial expressions take up many attentional resources, leaving fewer resources available for ongoing activities such as response inhibition and response adjustment.

Associations between implicit and explicit affective inhibitory control, trait rumination and depressive symptoms

IntroductionInhibitory control is the executive function component which underlies one’s ability to maintain goal-directed behavior by inhibiting prepotent responses or ignoring irrelevant information. Recent models suggest that impaired inhibition of negative information may contribute to depressive symptoms, and that this association is mediated by rumination. However, the exact nature of this association, particularly in non-clinical samples, is unclear.ObjectivesThe goal of the current study was to assess the relationship between inhibitory control over emotional vs. non-emotional information, rumination and depressive symptoms.MethodsA non-clinical sample of 119 participants (mean age: 36.44 ± 11.74) with various levels of depressive symptoms completed three variations of a Go/No-Go task online; two of the task variations required either explicit or implicit processing of emotional expressions, and a third variation contained no emotional expressions (i.e., neutral condition).Results We found that for participants who reported elevated depressive symptoms, their inhibitory control ability was reduced for all three task variations, relative to less depressed participants. However, for the task variation that required implicit emotion processing (rather than explicit), depressive symptoms were associated with inhibitory deficits for sad and neutral, but not for happy facial expressions. An exploratory analysis showed that the relationship between inhibition and depressive symptoms occurs in part through trait rumination for all three tasks, regardless of emotional content.Conclusions Collectively, these results indicate that elevated depressive symptoms are associated with both a general inhibitory control deficit, as well as affective interference from negative emotions, with implications for the assessment and treatment of mood disorders.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

The association between implicit and explicit affective inhibitory control, rumination and depressive symptoms

Inhibitory control underlies one’s ability to maintain goal-directed behavior by inhibiting prepotent responses or ignoring irrelevant information. Recent models suggest that impaired inhibition of negative information may contribute to depressive symptoms, and that this association is mediated by rumination. However, the exact nature of this association, particularly in non-clinical samples, is unclear. The current study assessed the relationship between inhibitory control over emotional vs. non-emotional information, rumination and depressive symptoms. A non-clinical sample of 119 participants (mean age: 36.44 ± 11.74) with various levels of depressive symptoms completed three variations of a Go/No-Go task online; two of the task variations required either explicit or implicit processing of emotional expressions, and a third variation contained no emotional expressions (i.e., neutral condition). We found reductions in inhibitory control for participants reporting elevated symptoms of depression on all three task variations, relative to less depressed participants. However, for the task variation that required implicit emotion processing, depressive symptoms were associated with inhibitory deficits for sad and neutral, but not for happy expressions. An exploratory analysis showed that the relationship between inhibition and depressive symptoms occurs in part through trait rumination for all three tasks, regardless of emotional content. Collectively, these results indicate that elevated depressive symptoms are associated with both a general inhibitory control deficit, as well as affective interference from negative emotions, with implications for the assessment and treatment of mood disorders.

The role of emotional valence in learning novel abstract concepts.

A recent study by Ponari, Norbury, and Vigliocco (2018), showed that emotional valence (i.e. whether a word evokes positive, negative, or no affect) predicts age-of-acquisition ratings and that up to the age of 8-9, children know abstract emotional words better than neutral ones. On the basis of these findings, emotional valence has been argued to provide a bootstrapping mechanism for the acquisition of abstract concepts. However, no previous work has directly assessed whether words' valence, or valence of the context in which words are used, facilitates learning of unknown abstract words. Here, we investigate whether valence supports acquisition of novel abstract concepts. Seven to 10 year old children were taught novel abstract words and concepts (words typically learned at an older age that the children did not know); words were either valenced (positive or negative) or neutral. We also manipulated the context in which words were presented: For 1 group of children, the teaching strategy emphasized emotional information; for the other, it emphasized encyclopedic, nonemotional information. Abstract words with emotional valence were learned better than neutral abstract words by children up to the age of 8-9, replicating previous findings; no effect of teaching strategy was found. These results indicate that emotional valence supports abstract concepts acquisition and further suggest that it is the valence information intrinsic to the word's meaning to have a role, rather than the valence of the context in which the word is learned. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Using early changes in cold cognition to predict response to vortioxetine in major depressive disorder

Antidepressant pharmacotherapy dominates current treatment in psychiatry, including treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD). However, the current trial-and-error process of medication selection contributes to treatment failure and unnecessarily exposes patients to lengthy and insufficient treatment trials. Notably, improvements in measures of cognition have been demonstrated to occur early during treatment and prior to improvements in clinical state. Cognitions have been categorized based on emotional valence (i.e., cold versus hot cognitions). Cold cognitions describe cognitive operations that are relevant to the processing of non-emotional information. The current analysis investigates whether early changes in cold cognition can predict response after 8 weeks of vortioxetine treatment in adults with MDD. This was secondary analysis of an 8-week, open-label study. Cognition was assessed at week 0 and week 2 to measure early cognitive change. Depressive symptom severity was assessed at week 0 and week 8 to measure treatment response. Eighty-one subjects were analyzed using binomial logistic regression models. Early change in cognition was a non-significant predictor of response (p = 0.845, SE = 0.599, OR = 1.124), which may have resulted from high data variability. The overall predictive accuracy of the model was low (sensitivity = 37.5%, specificity = 89.8%, PPV = 70.6%, NPV = 68.8%). Future studies should include larger samples and stratify patients based on potentially moderating variables, such as baseline cognitive impairment and occupation. Stratification would likely produce more homogenous samples, reducing the amount of variability observed for early cognitive change.

Reflective pondering is associated with executive control for emotional information: An adolescent prospective study

Background and objectivesIn adult populations, rumination and executive control impairments have been highlighted as vulnerability factors for later depression and rumination as a whole construct has recently been linked to lower executive control. However, research with adolescent populations is limited and little is known developmentally of the association between rumination and executive control. A prospective design was used to investigate the relationship between brooding rumination and reflective pondering and executive control for emotional and non-emotional material in adolescence, whilst controlling for the effects of depression and anxiety symptoms. MethodsThe present study examined the relationship between the subcomponents of rumination and executive control for emotional and non-emotional information, within an adolescent development. A total of 149 adolescents (13–16 years) were tested at two time points, approximately six months between sessions. At each time point, participants completed a computerised, valenced measure of executive control and measures of brooding rumination, reflective pondering, depression symptoms and anxiety symptoms. ResultsFindings indicate that reflective pondering was predictive of greater executive control for processing emotional information over time. Contrary to research with adults, brooding rumination was not associated with executive control. LimitationsThis study, conducted across two time points 6 months apart, awaits confirmation from further research across multiple time points and different intervals. ConclusionsReflective pondering may act as a protective factor against later impairment in executive control.

Emotional Response Inhibition Is Greater in Older Than Younger Adults.

Emotional information rapidly captures our attention and also often invokes automatic response tendencies, whereby positive information motivates approach, while negative information encourages avoidance. However, many circumstances require the need to override or inhibit these automatic responses. Control over responses to emotional information remains largely intact in late life, in spite of age-related declines in cognitive control and inhibition of responses to non-emotional information. The goal of this behavioral study was to understand how the aging process influences emotional response inhibition for positive and negative information in older adults. We examined emotional response inhibition in 36 healthy older adults (ages 60–89) and 44 younger adults (ages 18–22) using an emotional Go/No-Go task presenting happy (positive), fearful (negative), and neutral faces. In both younger and older adults, happy faces produced more approach-related behavior (i.e., fewer misses), while fearful faces produced more avoidance-related behavior, in keeping with theories of approach/avoidance-motivated responses. Calculation of speed/accuracy trade-offs between response times and false alarm rates revealed that younger and older adults both favored speed at the expense of accuracy, most robustly within blocks with fearful faces. However, there was no indication that the strength of the speed/accuracy trade-off differed between younger and older adults. The key finding was that although younger adults were faster to respond to all types of faces, older adults had greater emotional response inhibition (i.e., fewer false alarms). Moreover, younger adults were particularly prone to false alarms for happy faces. This is the first study to directly test effects of aging on emotional response inhibition. Complementing previous literature in the domains of attention and memory, these results provide new evidence that in the domain of response inhibition older adults may more effectively employ emotion regulatory ability, albeit on a slower time course, compared to younger adults. Older adults’ enhanced adaptive emotion regulation strategies may facilitate resistance to emotional distraction. The present study extends the literature of emotional response inhibition in younger adulthood into late life, and in doing so further elucidates how cognitive aging interacts with affective control processes.

Assessing hot and cool executive functions in preschoolers: affective flexibility predicts emotion regulation

ABSTRACT Affective flexibility (AF) is the ability to alternate between processing emotional and non-emotional information. This hot executive function has been understudied during early development. The first aim of our investigation was to generate preliminary construct validity evidence for a new measure of AF: the Emotional Flexible Item Selection Task (EM-FIST). Second, to investigate if AF represented a better predictor of preschoolers’ emotion regulation (ER) compared to, cognitive flexibility (CF). Preschoolers (N = 56; 48.2% girls) completed AF and CF measures (also working memory and inhibitory control). ER was measured through maternal report. We found evidence of EM-FIST’s validity, as an appropriate measure of AF for preschoolers, by showing that it is related to cool executive functions’ measures and to children’s ER. Both AF and maternal level of education predicted children’s ER while CF did not. Our investigation highlights a stronger relation between ER and AF in preschoolers than with CF.

Hemispheric dominance for non-emotional information? An autonomic approach

Hemispheric dominance for non-emotional information? An autonomic approach

Development of body emotion perception in infancy: From discrimination to recognition

Research suggests that infants progress from discrimination to recognition of emotions in faces during the first half year of life. It is unknown whether the perception of emotions from bodies develops in a similar manner. In the current study, when presented with happy and angry body videos and voices, 5-month-olds looked longer at the matching video when they were presented upright but not when they were inverted. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to match even with upright videos. Thus, 5-month-olds but not 3.5-month-olds exhibited evidence of recognition of emotions from bodies by demonstrating intermodal matching. In a subsequent experiment, younger infants did discriminate between body emotion videos but failed to exhibit an inversion effect, suggesting that discrimination may be based on low-level stimulus features. These results document a developmental change from discrimination based on non-emotional information at 3.5 months to recognition of body emotions at 5 months. This pattern of development is similar to face emotion knowledge development and suggests that both the face and body emotion perception systems develop rapidly during the first half year of life.

Internal shifting impairments in response to emotional information in dysphoric adolescents

Background and ObjectivesPrevious studies have suggested that internal cognitive control impairments may play an important role in the development of depression. Despite a growing body of research in adults, the ability to shift internal attention between mental representations in working memory has received little attention in younger populations. This study investigated internal shifting capacity between emotional and non-emotional information in dysphoric and non-dysphoric adolescents. MethodsTwenty dysphoric and 34 non-dysphoric adolescents (10–17 years) completed an Internal Shifting Task, with pictures of angry and neutral faces, to measure the ability to shift attention between information held in working memory. ResultsDysphoric adolescents showed specific shifting impairments when processing emotional material relative to non-dysphoric adolescents. Valence-specific analyses revealed that shifting was particularly impaired when shifting from negative to neutral information. By comparison, relative to non-dysphoric adolescents, dysphoric adolescents did not show shifting impairments when non-emotional features of the pictures had to be processed. LimitationsThe study is limited by the absence of a structured clinical interview as dysphoria was determined dimensionally. Furthermore, a comparison of the effects of different negative stimuli on shifting could not be made since sad stimuli were not included in the stimulus set. ConclusionsThe results confirm the link between depressive symptoms and emotion-specific shifting impairments in adolescents and indicate that targeting shifting ability in response to emotional stimuli may be a promising avenue for prevention programs. Longitudinal research is needed to replicate results and to explore the role of internal shifting impairments in the etiology and maintenance of depression.

Impact of emotional and cognitive saliency on visual search in post-traumatic stress disorder

IntroductionPatients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have shown disturbances in visual information treatment. However, most of studies demonstrated attentional bias towards emotional stimuli by using non-ecological paradigm. The paradigm of change blindness offers the possibility of studying sensitivity to the sudden irruption of visual information with ecological stimuli.Objectives/AimsTo compare the explicit detection with the implicit detection by using respectively motor response and eye tracking in patients with PSTD and controls.MethodsFifteen patients with PTSD and fifteen healthy controls had to detect changes in 96 scenes with (1) no change, (2) one neutral change or (3) one emotional pleasant or unpleasant change. We measured the participant's speed and accuracy in explicitly reporting the changes via motor responses, and their capacity to implicitly detect changes via eye movements.ResultsThe patients showed a trend towards slower explicit detection for the emotional change (P = 0.06) and more specifically for unpleasant change (P = 0.054). The two groups did not differ for implicit detection.ConclusionPatients tend to explicitly detect more slowly emotional change (but not neutral), especially for unpleasant change. This could be the result of a lack of access to consciousness of the emotional information. The emotional visual information treatment in PSTD could require more attentional processes than the non-emotional visual information and then lead to a decrease of the available attentional resources for the explicit task.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Emotional memory: No source memory without old-new recognition.

Findings reported in the memory literature suggest that the emotional components of an encoding episode can be dissociated from nonemotional memory. In particular, it has been found that the previous association with threatening events can be retrieved in aversive conditioning even in the absence of item identification. In the present study, we test whether emotional source memory can be independent of item recognition. Participants saw pictures of snakes paired with threatening and nonthreatening context information (poisonousness or nonpoisonousness). In the source memory test, participants were required to remember whether a snake was associated with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness. A simple extension of a well-established multinomial source monitoring model was used to measure source memory for unrecognized items. By using this model, it was possible to assess directly whether participants were able to associate a previously seen snake with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness even if the snake itself was not recognized as having been presented during the experiment. In 3 experiments, emotional source memory was only found for recognized items. While source memory for recognized items differed between emotional and nonemotional information, source memory for unrecognized items was equally absent for emotional and nonemotional information. We conclude that emotional context information is bound to item representations and cannot be retrieved in the absence of item recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record

Top-Down Dysregulation-From ADHD to Emotional Instability.

Deficient cognitive top-down executive control has long been hypothesized to underlie inattention and impulsivity in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, top-down cognitive dysfunction explains a modest proportion of the ADHD phenotype whereas the salience of emotional dysregulation is being noted increasingly. Together, these two types of dysfunction have the potential to account for more of the phenotypic variance in patients diagnosed with ADHD. We develop this idea and suggest that top-down dysregulation constitutes a gradient extending from mostly non-emotional top-down control processes (i.e., “cool” executive functions) to mainly emotional regulatory processes (including “hot” executive functions). While ADHD has been classically linked primarily to the former, conditions involving emotional instability such as borderline and antisocial personality disorder are closer to the other. In this model, emotional subtypes of ADHD are located at intermediate levels of this gradient. Neuroanatomically, gradations in “cool” processing appear to be related to prefrontal dysfunction involving dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and caudal anterior cingulate cortex (cACC), while “hot” processing entails orbitofrontal cortex and rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). A similar distinction between systems related to non-emotional and emotional processing appears to hold for the basal ganglia (BG) and the neuromodulatory effects of the dopamine system. Overall we suggest that these two systems could be divided according to whether they process non-emotional information related to the exteroceptive environment (associated with “cool” regulatory circuits) or emotional information related to the interoceptive environment (associated with “hot” regulatory circuits). We propose that this framework can integrate ADHD, emotional traits in ADHD, borderline and antisocial personality disorder into a related cluster of mental conditions.

Commentary: Spacing as the friend of both memory and induction in young and older adults.

Commentary: Spacing as the friend of both memory and induction in young and older adults.

Attentional Control Theory in Childhood: Enhanced Attentional Capture by Non-Emotional and Emotional Distractors in Anxiety and Depression.

Attentional control theory (ACT) proposes that anxiety is associated with executive functioning deficits. The theory has been widely investigated in adults. The current study tested whether symptoms of childhood anxiety and depression were associated with experimentally measured attentional control in the context of non-emotional and emotional stimuli. Sixty-one children (mean age = 9.23 years, range = 8.39–10.41) reported their trait anxiety and depression symptoms and completed three visual search tasks. The tasks used a variant of an irrelevant singleton paradigm and measured attentional capture by task-irrelevant non-emotional (color) and emotional (facial expressions) distractors. Significant attentional capture by both non-emotional and emotional distractors was observed, and was significantly correlated with trait anxiety and symptoms of depression. The strength of relationship between attentional capture and the symptoms did not differ significantly for non-emotional and emotional distractors. The results suggest that symptoms of childhood anxiety and depression are associated with poorer attentional control both in the presence of emotional and non-emotional stimuli, supporting ACT in younger populations. This attentional deficit in the context of non-emotional information might be as central to childhood internalizing symptoms as attentional biases often observed on tasks investigating processing of emotional stimuli.