Differential impact of emotional task relevance on three indices of prioritised processing for fearful and angry facial expressions

An online browser-based attentional blink replication using visual objects

The complex relationship between attention and visual perception can be exemplified and investigated through the Attentional Blink. The attentional blink is characterised by impaired attention to the second of two target stimuli, when both occur within 200 - 500ms. The attentional blink has been well studied in experimental lab settings. However, despite the rise of online methods for behavioural research, their suitability for studying the attentional blink has not been fully addressed yet, the main concern being the lack of control and timing variability for stimulus presentation. Here, we investigated the suitability of online testing for studying the attentional blink with visual objects. Our results show a clear attentional blink effect between 200 to 400ms following the distractor including a Lag 1 sparing effect in line with previous research despite significant inter-subject and timing variability. This work demonstrates the suitability of online methods for studying the attentional blink with visual objects, opening new avenues to explore its underlying processes.

Individual differences in resilience to stress are associated with affective flexibility

Cognitive flexibility is frequently linked to resilience because of its important contribution to stress regulation. In this context, particularly affective flexibility, defined as the ability to flexibly attend and disengage from affective information, may play a significant role. In the present study, the relationship of cognitive and affective flexibility and resilience was examined in 100 healthy participants. Resilience was measured with three self-report questionnaires, two defining resilience as a personality trait and one focusing on resilience as an outcome in the sense of stress coping abilities. Cognitive and affective flexibility were assessed in two experimental task switching paradigms with non-affective and affective materials and tasks, respectively. The cognitive flexibility paradigm additionally included measures of cognitive stability and spontaneous switching in ambiguous situations. In the affective flexibility paradigm, we explicitly considered the affective valence of the stimuli. Response time switch costs in the affective flexibility paradigm were significantly correlated to all three measures of resilience. The correlation was not specific for particular valences of the stimuli before or during switching. For cognitive (non-affective) flexibility, a significant correlation of response time switch costs was found with only one resilience measure. A regression analysis including both affective and cognitive switch costs as predictors of resilience indicated that only affective, but not cognitive switch costs, explained unique variance components. Furthermore, the experimental measures of cognitive stability and the rate of spontaneous switching in ambiguous situations did not correlate with resilience scores. These findings suggest that specifically the efficiency of flexibly switching between affective and non-affective information is related to resilience.

Expectation modulates the preferential processing of task-irrelevant fear in the attentional blink: evidence from event-related potentials

Background

Reporting the second of the two targets is impaired when it occurs 200–500 ms after the first, the phenomenon in the study of consciousness is the attentional blink (AB). In the AB task, both the emotional salience and the expectation of the second target increase the likelihood of that target being consciously reported. Yet, little is known about how expectations modulate the prioritized processing of affective stimuli. We examined the role of expecting fearful expression when processing fear in an AB task. Participants were presented with an AB task where the 2nd target (T2) is either a fearful face or a neutral face, and had to report the target's gender. The frequency of fearful to neutral faces on a given block was manipulated, such that participants could either expect more or less fearful faces.

Results

In the Experiment 1, we found that fearful faces were more likely to be recognized than neutral faces during the blink period (lag3) when participants were not expecting a fearful face (low fear-expectation); however, high fear-expectation increased the discrimination of fearful T2 than neutral T2 outside the blink period (lag8). In the Experiment 2, we assessed ERP brain activity in response to perceived T2 during the blink period. The results revealed that fearful faces elicited larger P300 amplitudes compared to neutral faces, but only in the low fear-expectation condition, suggesting that expecting a fearful expression can suppress the processing of task-irrelevant facial expression and unexpected fearful expression can break through this suppression. Fearful T2 elicited larger vertex positive potential (VPP) amplitudes than neutral T2, and this affective effect was independent of fear-expectation. Since no effect of expectation was found on the VPP amplitude while P300 exhibited significant interaction between expectation and expression, this suggests that expectations modulate emotional processing at a later stage, after the fearful face has been differentially processed.

Conclusions

These results provided clear evidence for the contribution of the expectation to the prioritized processing of second affective stimuli in the AB.

Effects of emotion and semantic relatedness on recognition memory: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Some aspects of our memory are enhanced by emotion, whereas others can be unaffected or even hindered. Previous studies reported impaired associative memory of emotional content, an effect termed associative "emotional interference". The current study used EEG and an associative recognition paradigm to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with this effect. In two experiments, participants studied negative and neutral stimulus-pairs that were either semantically related or unrelated. In Experiment 1 emotions were relevant to the encoding task (valence judgment) whereas in Experiment 2 emotions were irrelevant (familiarity judgment). In a subsequent associative recognition test, EEG was recorded while participants discriminated between intact, rearranged, and new pairs. An associative emotional interference effect was observed in both experiments, but was attenuated for semantically related pairs in Experiment 1, where valence was relevant to the task. Moreover, a modulation of an early associative memory ERP component (300-550 ms) occurred for negative pairs when valence was task-relevant (Experiment 1), but for semantically related pairs when valence was irrelevant (Experiment 2). A later ERP component (550-800 ms) showed a more general pattern, and was observed in all experimental conditions. These results suggest that both valence and semantic relations can act as an organizing principle that promotes associative binding. Their ability to contribute to successful retrieval depends on specific task demands.

The effect of fearful faces on the attentional blink is modulated by emotional task relevance: An event-related potential study

A fearful face as second visual target (T2) was detected better than a neutral T2 in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task. The advantage of fear over neutral emotion was originally attributed to a limited-capacity mechanism, in which fearful stimuli are prioritized for attention over neutral stimuli. However, more recent studies have shown that the prioritization of the processing of fear is strongly dependent on the emotional task relevance. Combining the RSVP task and Garner's paradigm, by varying the expression (fearful and neutral faces) and the emotional task relevance of the T2 (relevance: emotion classification task; irrelevance: gender classification task), this study aims to investigate the role of emotional task relevance on the advantage of fear during an RSVP task in which participants have to identify two visual targets in a stream of distractors. The behavioral results revealed that there was no significant effect of the expression on the task performance in the gender classification task. Fearful faces were easier to detect than neutral faces, but the T2 accuracy of fearful faces was lower than that of neutral faces in the emotion classification task. Furthermore, we found that the vertex positive potential and P100 components were enhanced for fearful faces compared to neutral faces independent of the emotional task relevance. For the P300 component, there was no significant difference in the gender classification task, but fearful faces elicited enhanced P300 amplitudes compared to neutral faces in the emotion classification task. These results indicated that the early processing of fear is automatic, while the late processing of fear is dependent on the emotional task relevance under limited attentional resources.

Working Memory Capacity For Faces With Different Levels of Emotional Valence

Abstract The capacity of visual working memory (VWM) depends on the complexity of the stimuli being processed. Emotional characteristics increase stimulus complexity and can interfere with the competition for cognitive resources. Studies involving emotional information processing are scarce and still produce contradicting results. In the present study, we investigated the capacity of VWM for faces with positive, negative, and neutral expressions. A modified change-detection task was used in two experiments, in which the number of faces and the emotional valence were manipulated. The results showed that VWM has a storage capacity of approximately two faces, which is fewer than the storage capacity identified for simpler stimuli. Our results reinforce the evidence that working memory can dynamically distribute its storage resources depending on both the amount and the emotional nature of the stimuli.

Threatening Facial Expressions Impact Goal-Directed Actions Only if Task-Relevant

Facial emotional expressions are a salient source of information for nonverbal social interactions. However, their impact on action planning and execution is highly controversial. In this vein, the effect of the two threatening facial expressions, i.e., angry and fearful faces, is still unclear. Frequently, fear and anger are used interchangeably as negative emotions. However, they convey different social signals. Unlike fear, anger indicates a direct threat toward the observer. To provide new evidence on this issue, we exploited a novel design based on two versions of a Go/No-go task. In the emotional version, healthy participants had to perform the same movement for pictures of fearful, angry, or happy faces and withhold it when neutral expressions were presented. The same pictures were shown in the control version, but participants had to move or suppress the movement, according to the actor’s gender. This experimental design allows us to test task relevance’s impact on emotional stimuli without conflating movement planning with target detection and task switching. We found that the emotional content of faces interferes with actions only when task-relevant, i.e., the effect of emotions is context-dependent. We also showed that angry faces qualitatively had the same effect as fearful faces, i.e., both negative emotions decreased response readiness with respect to happy expressions. However, anger has a much greater impact than fear, as it increases both the rates of mistakes and the time of movement execution. We interpreted these results, suggesting that participants have to exploit more cognitive resources to appraise threatening than positive facial expressions, and angry than fearful faces before acting.

Enhanced insular/prefrontal connectivity when resisting from emotional distraction during visual search

Previous literature demonstrated that the processing of emotional stimuli can interfere with goal-directed behavior. This has been shown primarily in the context of working memory tasks, but “emotional distraction” may affect also other processes, such as the orienting of visuo-spatial attention. During fMRI, we presented human subjects with emotional stimuli embedded within complex everyday life visual scenes. Emotional stimuli could be either the current target to be searched for or task-irrelevant distractors. Behavioral and eye-movement data revealed faster detection of emotional than neutral targets. Emotional distractors were found to be fixated later and for a shorter duration than emotional targets, suggesting efficient top-down control in avoiding emotional distraction. The fMRI data demonstrated that negative (but not positive) stimuli were mandatorily processed by limbic/para-limbic regions (namely, the right amygdala and the left insula), irrespective of current task relevance: that is, these regions activated for both emotional targets and distractors. However, analyses of inter-regional connectivity revealed a functional coupling between the left insula and the right prefrontal cortex that increased specifically during search in the presence of emotional distractors. This indicates that increased functional coupling between affective limbic/para-limbic regions and control regions in the frontal cortex can attenuate emotional distraction, permitting the allocation of spatial attentional resources toward task-relevant neutral targets in the presence of distracting emotional signals.

Angry and Fearful Face Conflict Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

In the presence of threatening stimuli, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can manifest as hypervigilance for threat and disrupted attentional control. PTSD patients have shown exaggerated interference effects on tasks using trauma-related or threat stimuli. In studies of PTSD, faces with negative expressions are often used as threat stimuli, yet angry and fearful facial expressions may elicit different responses. The modified Eriksen flanker task, or the emotional face flanker, has been used to examine response interference. We compared 23 PTSD patients and 23 military controls on an emotional face flanker task using angry, fearful and neutral expressions. Participants identified the emotion of a central target face flanked by faces with either congruent or incongruent emotions. As expected, both groups showed slower reaction times (RTs) and decreased accuracy on emotional target faces, relative to neutral. Unexpectedly, both groups showed nearly identical interference effects on fearful and neutral target trials. However, post hoc testing suggested that PTSD patients showed faster RTs than controls on congruent angry faces (target and flanker faces both angry) relative to incongruent, although this finding should be interpreted with caution. This possible RT facilitation effect with angry, but not fearful faces, also correlated positively with self-report measures of PTSD symptoms. These results suggest that PTSD patients may be more vigilant for, or primed to respond to, the appearance of angry faces, relative to fearful, but further study is needed.

The cost of facing fear: Visual working memory is impaired for faces expressing fear

Previous research has identified numerous factors affecting the capacity and accuracy of visual working memory (VWM). One potentially important factor is the emotionality of the stimuli to be encoded and held in VWM. We often must hold in VWM information that is emotionally charged, but much is still unknown about how the emotionality of stimuli impacts VWM performance. In the current research, we performed four studies examining the impact of fearful facial expressions on VWM for faces. Fearful expressions were found to produce a consistent cost to VWM performance. This cost was modulated by encoding time, but not set size. This cost was only present for faces in an upright orientation consistent with this cost being a product of the emotionality of the faces rather than lower-level perceptual differences between neutral and fearful faces. These findings are discussed in the context of existing theoretical accounts of the impact of emotion on information processing. We suggest that a number of competing effects drive both costs and benefits and are at play when emotional information must be stored in VWM, with the task context determining the balance between them.

Coping, emotion regulation, and psychopathology in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analysis and narrative review

In this meta-analytic and narrative review, we examine several overarching issues related to the study of coping, emotion regulation, and internalizing and externalizing symptoms of psychopathology in childhood and adolescence, including the conceptualization and measurement of these constructs. We report a quantitative meta-analysis of 212 studies (N = 80,850 participants) that measured the associations between coping and emotion regulation with symptoms of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. Within the meta-analysis we address the association of broad domains of coping and emotion regulation (e.g., total coping, emotion regulation), intermediate factors of coping and emotion regulation (e.g., primary control coping, secondary control coping), and specific coping and emotion regulation strategies (e.g., emotional expression, cognitive reappraisal) with internalizing and externalizing symptoms. For cross-sectional studies, which made up the majority of studies included, we examine 3 potential moderators: age, measure quality, and single versus multiple informants. Finally, we separately consider findings from longitudinal studies as these provide stronger tests of the effects. After accounting for publication bias, findings indicate that the broad domain of emotion regulation and adaptive coping and the factors of primary control coping and secondary control coping are related to lower levels of symptoms of psychopathology. Further, the domain of maladaptive coping, the factor of disengagement coping, and the strategies of emotional suppression, avoidance, and denial are related to higher levels of symptoms of psychopathology. Finally, we offer a critique of the current state of the field and outline an agenda for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record