Presence Of Emotional Distractors Research Articles

Revisiting the prioritization of emotional information in iconic memory.

In this replication study, the previously reported prioritization of emotional stimuli in iconic memory (Kuhbandner et al. 2011. Psychol. Sci. 22, 695–700. (doi:10.1177/0956797611406445)) was reinvestigated. Therefore, recall from iconic memory was measured for sets of visual images that were briefly presented in the periphery of the visual field. Using a partial-report technique, a central arrow presented at varying delays after the images was pointing to the location of the to-be-recalled target. In the direct replication (experiment 1, n = 41), participants were asked to verbally report the cued image (note that the entire planned sample size could not be reached owing to the COVID-19 pandemic), and in an extension experiment (experiment 2, n = 55), iconic memory was tested using a visual recognition test. Both experiments demonstrated prioritized selection of emotional targets from iconic memory, with higher verbal recall and visual recognition accuracy for negative and positive targets compared to neutral targets. In addition, we found that the presence of emotional distractors in the set interfered with the selection of neutral targets, thus confirming a trend that was observed in the original study. Exponential decay curves further revealed that both target and distractor valence primarily affected initial availability (in case of verbal recall) and attentional selection, whereas the decay of iconic memory with increasing cue delay was less sensitive to the emotional meaning.

Enhanced insular/prefrontal connectivity when resisting from emotional distraction during visual search

Previous literature demonstrated that the processing of emotional stimuli can interfere with goal-directed behavior. This has been shown primarily in the context of working memory tasks, but “emotional distraction” may affect also other processes, such as the orienting of visuo-spatial attention. During fMRI, we presented human subjects with emotional stimuli embedded within complex everyday life visual scenes. Emotional stimuli could be either the current target to be searched for or task-irrelevant distractors. Behavioral and eye-movement data revealed faster detection of emotional than neutral targets. Emotional distractors were found to be fixated later and for a shorter duration than emotional targets, suggesting efficient top-down control in avoiding emotional distraction. The fMRI data demonstrated that negative (but not positive) stimuli were mandatorily processed by limbic/para-limbic regions (namely, the right amygdala and the left insula), irrespective of current task relevance: that is, these regions activated for both emotional targets and distractors. However, analyses of inter-regional connectivity revealed a functional coupling between the left insula and the right prefrontal cortex that increased specifically during search in the presence of emotional distractors. This indicates that increased functional coupling between affective limbic/para-limbic regions and control regions in the frontal cortex can attenuate emotional distraction, permitting the allocation of spatial attentional resources toward task-relevant neutral targets in the presence of distracting emotional signals.

Control of attention in bipolar disorder: Effects of perceptual load in processing task-irrelevant facial expressions

Bipolar disorder (BD), along with schizophrenia, is one of the most severe psychiatric conditions and is correlated with attentional deficits and emotion dysregulation. Bipolar patients appear to be highly sensitive to the presence of emotional distractors. Yet, no study has investigated whether perceptual load modulates the interference of emotionally distracting information. Our main goal was to test whether bipolar patients are more sensitive to task-irrelevant emotional stimulus, even when the task demands a high amount of attentional resources.Fourteen participants with BD I or BD II and 14 controls, age- and gender-matched, performed a target-letter discrimination task with emotional task-irrelevant stimulus (angry, happy and neutral facial expressions). Target-letters were presented among five distractor-letters, which could be the same (low perceptual load) or different (high perceptual load). Participants should discriminate the target-letter and ignore the facial expression. Response time and accuracy rate were analyzed.Resultsshowed a greater interference of facial stimuli at high load than low load, confirming the effectiveness of perceptual load manipulation. More importantly, patients tarried significantly longer at high load. This is consistent with deficits in control of attention, showing that bipolar patients are more prone to distraction by task-irrelevant stimulus only when the task is more demanding. Moreover, for bipolar patients neutral and angry faces resulted in a higher interference with the task (longer response time), compared to controls, suggesting an attentional bias for neutral and threating social cues. Nevertheless, a more detailed investigation regarding the attentional impairments in social context in BD is needed.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Neural response during attentional control and emotion processing predicts improvement after cognitive behavioral therapy in generalized social anxiety disorder.

Individuals with generalized social anxiety disorder (gSAD) exhibit attentional bias to salient stimuli, which is reduced in patients whose symptoms improve after treatment, indicating that mechanisms of bias mediate treatment success. Therefore, pre-treatment activity in regions implicated in attentional control over socio-emotional signals (e.g. anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) may predict response to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), evidence-based psychotherapy for gSAD. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, 21 participants with gSAD viewed images comprising a trio of geometric shapes (circles, rectangles or triangles) alongside a trio of faces (angry, fearful or happy) within the same field of view. Attentional control was evaluated with the instruction to 'match shapes', directing attention away from faces, which was contrasted with 'match faces', whereby attention was directed to emotional faces. Whole-brain voxel-wise analyses showed that symptom improvement was predicted by enhanced pre-treatment activity in the presence of emotional face distractors in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. Additionally, CBT success was foretold by less activity in the amygdala and/or increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal gyrus during emotion processing. CBT response was predicted by pre-treatment activity in prefrontal regions and the amygdala. The direction of activity suggests that individuals with intact attentional control in the presence of emotional distractors, regulatory capacity over emotional faces and/or less reactivity to such faces are more likely to benefit from CBT. Findings indicate that baseline neural activity in the context of attentional control and emotion processing may serve as a step towards delineating mechanisms by which CBT exerts its effects.

Emotional Distractors Can Enhance Attention

The deleterious effects of emotional distractors on attention have been well demonstrated. However, it is unclear whether emotional distractors inevitably disrupt task-relevant attention. In the research reported here, the impact of the valence and arousal of distracting emotional stimuli and individual differences in anxiety on task-relevant processing were examined using multilevel modeling. Consistent with prior literature, results showed that high-arousal negative distractors, compared with positive and neutral distractors, were associated with poorer task-relevant attention. However, low-arousal negative distractors were associated with better task-relevant performance than were positive and neutral distractors. Furthermore, these effects were accentuated by individual differences in worry. These findings challenge assumptions that distraction and worry must be minimized for augmented attentional performance. Overall, these results emphasize the importance of taking into account emotional dimensions of arousal and valence as well as individual differences in anxiety when examining attention in the presence of emotional distractors.

Effects of Adult Attachment and Emotional Distractors on Brain Mechanisms of Cognitive Control

Using data from 34 participants who completed an emotion-word Stroop task during functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the effects of adult attachment on neural activity associated with top-down cognitive control in the presence of emotional distractors. Individuals with lower levels of secure-base-script knowledge—reflected in an adult’s inability to generate narratives in which attachment-related threats are recognized, competent help is provided, and the problem is resolved—demonstrated more activity in prefrontal cortical regions associated with emotion regulation (e.g., right orbitofrontal cortex) and with top-down cognitive control (left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and superior frontal gyrus). Less efficient performance and related increases in brain activity suggest that insecure attachment involves a vulnerability to distraction by attachment-relevant emotional information and that greater cognitive control is required to attend to task-relevant, nonemotional information. These results contribute to the understanding of mechanisms through which attachment-related experiences may influence developmental adaptation.

Emotional-stimulus processing in trait anxiety is modulated by stimulus valence during neuroimaging of a working-memory task

Recent neuroimaging studies have examined the effects of anxiety on cognitive processing in the presence of emotional distractors. However, when the target stimuli themselves are emotional, it is unclear whether emotion acts as a distracting or enhancing influence. We predicted that anxiety levels would modulate the effect of emotion on neural activity in a valence-specific manner. In the current experiment, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine activity in brain regions associated with cognitive and affective control. Twenty-nine healthy adults, rated for trait anxiety, performed blocks of a 2-back working-memory task (using faces) in which facial expressions were either entirely neutral, mixed neutral and fearful, or mixed neutral and happy. Behavioural results showed no effects of anxiety on either accuracy or response time for any stimulus type. In event-related analyses, dorsal prefrontal regions tended to show reduced activation for emotional faces relative to neutral, suggesting possible neural facilitation, while the amygdala and ventrolateral regions linked to affective-interference showed increased activation to emotional faces. Moreover, in the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann area 45), anxiety discriminated between the response to happy trials and fear trials. The higher the anxiety score, the greater the increase in activation for fear faces versus neutral. By contrast, the lower the anxiety score, the greater the increase in activation to happy faces. These results suggest that emotional content in target stimuli can both enhance and interfere with neural processing, and these effects may depend on emotional valence and participants' anxiety levels.