Emotional distraction unbalances visual processing

Abstract

Brain mechanisms used to control nonemotional aspects of cognition may be distinct from those regulating responses to emotional stimuli, with activity of the latter being detrimental to the former. Previous studies have shown that suppression of irrelevant emotional stimuli produces a largely right-lateralized pattern of frontal brain activation, thus predicting that emotional stimuli may invoke temporary, lateralized costs to performance on nonemotional cognitive tasks. To test this, we briefly (85 ms) presented a central, irrelevant, expressive (angry, happy, sad, or fearful) or neutral face 100 ms prior to a letter search task. The presentation of emotional versus neutral faces slowed subsequent search for targets appearing in the left, but not the right, hemifield, supporting the notion of a right-lateralized, emotional response mechanism that competes for control with nonemotional cognitive processes. Presentation of neutral, scrambled, or inverted neutral faces produced no such laterality effects on visual search response times.

Low attentional engagement makes attention network activity susceptible to emotional interference

“…Competition between bottom-up emotional distractors and attention-demanding task-related targets may lead to diminished activity in the frontoparietal network subserving task performance 5,6. This competition is supported by our previous findings of task-irrelevant emotional stimuli interfering with right hemisphere-dependent processes such as global level visual processing 7 and left visual field stimulus attention 8,9, accompanied by diminished event-related brain potentials to targets in the context of emotional distractors 6,10. This reduction was the greatest over the right frontoparietal region 6.…”

Isolating the Effects of Word’s Emotional Valence on Subsequent Morphosyntactic Processing: An Event-Related Brain Potentials Study

“…Thus, evidence supports that emotional information influences subsequent non-emotional tasks, including language processing (e.g., Gupta and Raymond, 2012 ) and, particularly, sentence-morphosyntactic processing (e.g., Jiménez-Ortega et al, 2012 , 2017 ; Verhees et al, 2015 ). This has been a highly relevant finding, given that syntax has been traditionally described as automatic, modular and encapsulated, blind to other processes ( Hauser et al, 2002 ; Friederici, 2004 ).…”

“…Several experiments explored how emotional response mechanisms compete for resources with non-emotional cognitive processes, as shown by an increase of the brain activity in right frontal areas versus neutral stimuli ( Gupta and Raymond, 2012 ; and so do motivational mechanisms: Gupta et al, 2018 ). Further, the time course of visual attention would depend on the emotional content ( Srivastava and Srinivasan, 2010 ), suggesting that positive stimuli are more related to broad scope attention, which needs less attentional resources ( Srinivasan and Gupta, 2011 ), than negative stimuli, more related to focused attention ( Srinivasan and Gupta, 2010 ; Srinivasan and Hanif, 2010 ; Srivastava and Srinivasan, 2010 ; Gupta and Srinivasan, 2015 ; Gupta et al, 2016 ).…”

Executive Control of Emotional Conflict

“…Finally, in the resolution of emotional conflict also the hemispheric asymmetry plays a role. Right-lateralized emotional and motivational mechanisms compete for the control of non-emotional cognitive processes (Gupta and Raymond, 2012; Gupta et al, 2018).…”