Centre for Translational Research in Systems Neuroscience and Clinical Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Georg August University, Goettingen, Germany.
Neurosci Res. 2011 Aug;70(4):415-27. doi: 10.1016/j.neures.2011.05.007. Epub 2011 May 23.
In this event-related fMRI study, we sought to investigate the influence of negative affect on the processing of two kinds of cognitive interference: Stroop-interference and oddball interference. For our purpose, we adopted an oddball variant of the Stroop task in which Stroop-interference and oddball interference conditions were created by presenting incongruent and rarely occurring word meanings, respectively. Immediately preceding the target stimuli, we presented pictures of the International Affective Picture System which were either emotionally negative and arousing or emotionally neutral, providing two affective conditions under which the cognitive task was administered. Both the behavioral and the neuroimaging data exhibited an interaction effect between emotional and cognitive condition. First, the emotion induction selectively impaired behavioral performance on interference trials while behavioral measures on non-interference trials were roughly identical in both emotional conditions. Second, in the negative emotional condition there was incremental interference-related activation in control-related regions (fronto-parietal cortices). Taken together, findings suggest that negative affect specifically disturbs the neural control processes that in a neutral affective state allow to select task-relevant information and to shield its processing from task-irrelevant distraction. Accordingly, agents in a negative affective state have to exert enhanced control efforts to resolve cognitive interference. Additional connectivity analyses revealed that a negative coupling between lateral PFC on the one hand and amygdala and OFC on the other is related to enhanced interference resolution which can be tentatively interpreted as evidence that emotional regulation is an integrated part of an agent's efforts to preserve cognitive performance in affective situations.
在这项基于事件的 fMRI 研究中，我们旨在探讨负性情绪对两种认知干扰的影响：Stroop 干扰和异类干扰。为此，我们采用了 Stroop 任务的一种异类变体，通过呈现不一致和很少出现的词义来分别产生 Stroop 干扰和异类干扰条件。在目标刺激之前，我们呈现了国际情感图片系统的图片，这些图片要么是情感上消极和唤起的，要么是情感上中性的，在这两种情绪条件下进行认知任务。行为和神经影像学数据都表现出情绪和认知条件之间的交互作用。首先，情绪诱发选择性地损害了干扰试验中的行为表现，而在两种情绪条件下，非干扰试验的行为测量大致相同。其次，在负性情绪条件下，控制相关区域（额顶叶皮层）的干扰相关激活增加。总之，这些发现表明，负性情绪会特别干扰在中性情绪状态下允许选择任务相关信息并防止其处理受到任务无关干扰的神经控制过程。因此，处于负性情绪状态的个体必须付出更多的控制努力来解决认知干扰。额外的连通性分析表明，外侧前额叶皮层与杏仁核和眶额皮层之间的负性耦合与增强的干扰解决有关，这可以暂时解释为情绪调节是个体在情感情境中保持认知表现的努力的一个组成部分。
