What is cognitive control without affect?

Cognitive conflict does not always mean high effort: Task difficulty's moderating effect on cardiac response

This article presents an experiment (N = 127 university students) testing whether the previously found impact of conflict primes on effort-related cardiac response is moderated by objective task difficulty. Recently, it has been shown that primed cognitive conflict increases cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) reactivity-an index of effort intensity-during the performance of relatively easy tasks. This effect could be attributed to conflict-related negative affect. Consequently, as it has been shown for other types of negative affect, we expected conflict primes' effect to be task-context dependent and thus to be moderated by objective task difficulty. In a between-persons design, we manipulated conflict via embedded pictures of conflict-related vs. non-conflict-related Stroop items in a memory task. We expected primed conflict to increase effort in a relatively easy version of the task but to lead to disengagement when task difficulty was objectively high. PEP reactivity corroborated our predictions. Rather than always increasing effort, cognitive conflict's effect on resource mobilization was context-dependent and resulted in weak responses in a difficult task.

Action-orientation shields against primed cognitive conflict effects on effort-related cardiac response

This article presents a quasi-experiment (N = 79 university students) testing whether individual differences in action-state orientation moderate primed cognitive conflict's effects on sympathetically mediated cardiac response during task performance reflecting effort. Action control theory posits that action-oriented individuals are less receptive to distracting affective stimuli during goal pursuit than state-oriented individuals because action-orientation is related to higher volitional skills. Therefore, we expected that action-oriented individuals should be shielded against conflict primes' effect on effort-related responses in the cardiovascular system. By contrast, state-oriented individuals should be more sensitive to irrelevant negative affective stimulation and therefore mobilize higher resources under such conditions. Responses of the cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) during a moderately difficult short-term memory task corroborated these predictions. The present findings provide the first evidence that individual differences in action-state orientation indeed moderate previously demonstrated cognitive conflict priming effects on effort-related cardiac response and extend recent findings on action shielding.

Is cognitive conflict really effortful? Conflict priming and shielding effects on cardiac response

Two experiments with N = 221 university students investigated the impact of primed cognitive conflict on effort assessed as cardiac response in tasks that were not conflict-related themselves. Manifest cognitive conflict in cognitive control tasks is confounded with objective response difficulty (e.g., in incongruent Stroop task trials). This makes conclusions about the effortfulness of cognitive conflict itself difficult. We bypassed this problem by administrating pictures of congruent versus incongruent Stroop task stimuli as conflict primes. As predicted, primed cognitive conflict increased cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) responses in an easy attention task in Experiment 1. Accordingly, cognitive conflict itself is indeed effortful. This effect was replicated in an easy short-term memory task in Experiment 2. Moreover, as further predicted, the primed cognitive conflict effect on PEP reactivity disappeared when participants could personally choose task characteristics. This latter effect corresponds to other recent evidence showing that personal action choice shields against incidental affective influences on action execution and especially on effort-related cardiovascular response.

Interactions between emotion regulation and everyday flexibility in anorexia nervosa: Preliminary evidence of associations with clinical outcomes

The current study explored interactions between emotion regulation (ER) and cognitive-behavioral flexibility in everyday life in individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN). Participants were 97 female adults with current (57%) or past (43%) full or partial AN syndrome diagnosis. Participants completed the Difficulties with Emotion Regulation Scale, Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Eating Disorder Flexibility Index, Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire and Depression Anxiety Stress Scale short form. Lower flexibility was a strong independent predictor of more severe ED-related cognitions and higher frequency of compensatory behaviors beyond individual differences in emotion regulation and mood. ER measures did not predict clinical characteristics. However, two interactions between flexibility and ER measures were observed which suggested there was a stronger association between greater flexibility and higher BMI for individuals with either higher levels of cognitive reappraisal use, or higher levels of global ER difficulties. Interactions between flexibility and emotion regulation provide evidence that co-occurring difficulties may impact clinical outcomes in AN.

Neural correlates of the attentional bias towards pain-related faces in fibromyalgia patients: An ERP study using a dot-probe task

BACKGROUND

One of the major cognitive deficits in fibromyalgia has been linked to the hypervigilance phenomenon. It is mainly reflected as a negative bias for allocating attentional resources towards both threatening and pain-related information. Although the interest in its study has recently grown, the neural temporal dynamics of the attentional bias in fibromyalgia still remains an open question.

METHOD

Fifty participants (25 fibromyalgia patients and 25 healthy control subjects) performed a dot-probe task. Two types of facial expressions (pain-related and neutral) were employed as signal stimuli. Then, as a target stimulus, a single dot replaced the location of one of these two faces. Event-related potentials (ERP) in response to facial expressions and target stimulation (i.e., dot) were recorded. Reaction time (RT) and accuracy measures in the experimental task were collected as behavioural outcomes.

RESULTS

Temporal dynamics of brain electrical activity were analysed on two ERP components (P2 and N2a) sensitive to the facial expressions meaning. Pain-related faces elicited higher frontal P2 amplitudes than neutral faces for the whole sample. Interestingly, an interaction effect between group and facial expressions was also found showing that pain-related faces elicited enhanced P2 amplitudes (at fronto-central regions, in this case) compared to neutral faces only when the group of patients was considered. Furthermore, higher P2 amplitudes were observed in response to pain-related faces in patients with fibromyalgia compared to healthy control participants. Additionally, a shorter latency of P2 (at centro-parietal regions) was also detected for pain-related facial expressions compared to neutral faces. Regarding the amplitude of N2a, it was lower for patients as compared to the control group. Non-relevant effects of the target stimulation on the ERPs were found. However, patients with fibromyalgia exhibited slower RT to locate the single dot for incongruent trials as compared to congruent and neutral trials.

CONCLUSIONS

Data suggest the presence of an attentional bias in fibromyalgia that it would be followed by a deficit in the allocation of attentional resources to further process pain-related information. Altogether the current results suggest that attentional biases in fibromyalgia might be explained by automatic attentional mechanisms, which seem to be accompanied by an alteration of more strategic or controlled attentional components.