Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Section of Psychology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Emotion. 2012 Apr;12(2):384-93. doi: 10.1037/a0027305.
The effects of emotional stimulus content on attention are well-known. In contrast, the impact of emotional information on higher executive control functions is undetermined. To elucidate the role of negative emotion in cognitive control, 56 adult female participants performed a combined working memory and response inhibition task, with threat-relevant (spider and snake) and neutral (flower and mushroom) stimuli. Threat-relevant stimuli impaired performance, by causing prolonged response times to working memory items and increased response inhibition error rate relative to neutral stimuli. The impaired response inhibition was only evident when threat-relevant stimuli co-occurred with working memory matches, in line with a common resource pool view of executive functions and emotion processing. Individual differences in reported fear of spiders were associated with differences of inhibitory control, while fear of snakes was associated with impaired overall accuracy on working memory trials. The results are discussed in relation to the dual-competition framework for interaction between executive functions and emotion (Pessoa, 2009).
情绪刺激内容对注意力的影响是众所周知的。相比之下，情绪信息对更高阶的执行控制功能的影响还不确定。为了阐明负性情绪在认知控制中的作用，56 名成年女性参与者执行了一个结合工作记忆和反应抑制任务的实验，其中包含与威胁相关的（蜘蛛和蛇）和中性（花和蘑菇）刺激。与中性刺激相比，与威胁相关的刺激会导致工作记忆项目的反应时间延长，并增加反应抑制错误率，从而损害表现。只有当与工作记忆匹配的刺激同时出现威胁相关的刺激时，才会出现反应抑制受损的情况，这与执行功能和情绪处理的共同资源池观点一致。对蜘蛛的恐惧报告的个体差异与抑制控制的差异有关，而对蛇的恐惧与工作记忆试验的整体准确性受损有关。研究结果与执行功能和情绪相互作用的双重竞争框架（Pessoa，2009）进行了讨论。
