What is it about?
Goal-directed behavior requires cognitive control, the ability to focus on goal-relevant things and ignore distractors. As emotional stimuli in our environment are signals of importance, we asked, if they enhance cognitive control, so that you can act according to your goals in situations when it really matters. This was exactly what we found in an emotional flanker task. The EEG data showed that the emotion influence on cognitive control was already present 200 ms after stimulus onset, increasing the conflict-sensitive N200 component.
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Why is it important?
It has often been shown and argued that emotions distract from and impair cognitive functions, cognitive control in particular. This study shows that emotion can also enhance cognitive control if the behaviorally relevant target stimuli are emotional. The results are therefore relevant for models of cognitive control and emotion-cognition interaction.
Perspectives
The most impressive aspects of this study for me are (1) how consistently it could be replicated with different emotional valences, in different sensory modalities and with different cognitive control tasks (for an overview see http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnint.2012.00042/full) and (2) that the emotion-cognition interaction correlates so consistently with subclinical markers of depression and anxiety (for an overview see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224916926_Reprint_of_Effortful_control_depression_and_anxiety_correlate_with_the_influence_of_emotion_on_executive_attentional_control).
Philipp Kanske
Technische Universitat Dresden
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Modulation of early conflict processing: N200 responses to emotional words in a flanker task, Neuropsychologia, October 2010, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.07.021.
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