Emotional interference-based forgetting in short-term memory. Cognitive inhibition of pleasant but not unpleasant biologically relevant distractors

Abstract

Emotional stimuli automatically recruit attentional resources. Although this usually brings more adaptive responses, it may suppose a disadvantage when emotional information is task-irrelevant and should be ignored. Previous studies have shown how emotional stimuli with a negative content exert a greater interference than neutral stimuli during a concurrent working memory (WM) task. However, the impact of positively valenced stimuli as interference has not been addressed to date. In three experiments and one re-analysis we explore the impact of pleasant and unpleasant emotional distractors during WM maintenance. The results suggest that our cognitive control can cope with the interference posed by pleasant distractors as well as with the interference posed by neutral stimuli. However, unpleasant distractors are harder to control in the context of WM maintenance. As unpleasant stimuli usually convey relevant information that we should not to ignore, our executive control seems to be less able to reallocate cognitive resources after unpleasant distraction.

Tracking the effect of emotional distraction in working memory brain networks: Evidence from an MEG study

“…To prevent any potential habituation effect, the two presentations of the same interfering picture were separated by a minimum of 30 trials. Once the WM paradigm was completed, participants were asked to rate the emotional valence and arousal in all the pictures used as interference, using the Self‐Assessment Manikin (SAM) self‐report scale (Lang, ) in order to confirm that they perceived them as expected (see García‐Pacios, Garcés, et al, for a detailed description of the procedure).…”

“…Source activity was reconstructed around three time intervals of interest which were previously proven to be relevant in the cognitive control of emotional distraction using the present WM task (García‐Pacios, Garcés, et al, ): 70–130 ms, 280–320 ms, and 360–455 ms. As we used Mutual Information (MI) as our estimate of functional brain connectivity (see below) and longer time series generate more robust entropy and MI estimates (Knuth, ), temporal windows were enlarged to 100 ms, so that the final temporal windows of interest for source reconstruction and further functional connectivity analysis were 50–150 ms, 250–350 ms, and 360–460 ms.…”

“…Based on existing literature showing an interference‐based disruption of those functional connections (Clapp et al, ; Yoon et al, ), we expect that the frontoposterior network would be more disrupted by emotional distractors than by neutral ones, especially around 100 ms after the distractor presentation, when the detection of biologically relevant information takes place (Bar, ; Kawabata et al, ). Given the emotional nature of our distractors and according with the extensive literature that links the VLPFC to the successful coping with emotional distraction (Denkova et al, ; Dolcos et al, ; Dolcos & McCarthy, ; García‐Pacios, Garcés, et al, ; Iordan, Dolcos, & Dolcos, ), we also hypothesize that at later latencies of the processing (250–500 ms) this prefrontal region would be highly functionally coupled with posterior areas as a mechanism to restrain the interfering effect of emotional stimuli on the maintenance of nonemotional information.…”

“…The disruptive role of emotional distracting stimuli for WM seems well established, specifically for emotional distraction of negative valence (hereinafter, unpleasant distraction) (Anticevic, Repovs, & Barch, ; Chuah et al, ; Denkova et al, ; Dolcos, Diaz‐Granados, Wang, & McCarthy, ; Dolcos & McCarthy, ; García‐Pacios, Del Río, Villalobos, Ruiz‐Vargas, & Maestú, ; García‐Pacios, Garcés, Del Río, & Maestú, ). While the role of emotionally positive distraction (i.e., pleasant distraction) has been less studied, evidence suggests that it is similarly easy to ignore as nonemotional (i.e., neutral) distraction is (García‐Pacios, Del Río, et al, ; García‐Pacios, Garcés, et al, ). To the best of our knowledge, all previous studies addressing the effect of emotional distraction on brain functional connectivity have focused on frontolimbic connections while coping with emotionally negative distraction (Chuah et al, ; Dolcos, Kragel, Wang, & McCarthy, ).…”

“…In a recently published study by our group, we explored the temporal dynamics of the cognitive and brain mechanisms that allow people to cope with emotional distraction (García‐Pacios, Garcés, et al, ). Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we identified three time intervals of interest that appeared to be related to different mechanisms involved in the cognitive control of biologically relevant distractors.…”