Yang Qian, Pourtois Gilles
a Cognitive & Affective Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology , Ghent University , Ghent , Belgium.
Cogn Emot. 2018 Dec;32(8):1637-1653. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2018.1434132. Epub 2018 Feb 5.
Negative emotion influences cognitive control, and more specifically conflict adaptation. However, discrepant results have often been reported in the literature. In this study, we broke down negative emotion into integral and incidental components using a modern motivation-based framework, and assessed whether the former could change conflict adaptation. In the first experiment, we manipulated the duration of the inter-trial-interval (ITI) to assess the actual time-scale of this effect. Integral negative emotion was induced by using loss-related feedback contingent on task performance, and measured at the subjective and physiological levels. Results showed that conflict-driven adaptive control was enhanced when integral negative emotion was elicited, compared to a control condition without changes in defensive motivation. Importantly, this effect was only found when a short, as opposed to long ITI was used, suggesting that it had a short time scale. In the second experiment, we controlled for effects of feature repetition and contingency learning, and replicated an enhanced conflict adaptation effect when integral negative emotion was elicited and a short ITI was used. We interpret these new results against a standard cognitive control framework assuming that integral negative emotion amplifies specific control signals transiently, and in turn enhances conflict adaptation.
负面情绪会影响认知控制，更具体地说是冲突适应。然而，文献中经常报道不一致的结果。在本研究中，我们使用基于现代动机的框架将负面情绪分解为整体和附带成分，并评估前者是否会改变冲突适应。在第一个实验中，我们操纵了试次间隔（ITI）的持续时间，以评估这种效应的实际时间尺度。通过根据任务表现给予与损失相关的反馈来诱发整体负面情绪，并在主观和生理水平上进行测量。结果表明，与防御动机无变化的对照条件相比，诱发整体负面情绪时，冲突驱动的适应性控制得到增强。重要的是，只有在使用短ITI而非长ITI时才发现这种效应，这表明它具有较短的时间尺度。在第二个实验中，我们控制了特征重复和偶然学习的影响，并在诱发整体负面情绪且使用短ITI时重复了增强的冲突适应效应。我们对照标准认知控制框架来解释这些新结果，假设整体负面情绪会短暂放大特定的控制信号，进而增强冲突适应。
