Neural substrates of the emotion-word and emotional counting Stroop tasks in healthy and clinical populations: A meta-analysis of functional brain imaging studies

Abstract

The emotional Stroop task (EST) is among the most influential paradigms used to probe attention-related or cognitive control-related emotional processing in healthy subjects and clinical populations. The neuropsychological mechanism underlying the emotional Stroop effect has attracted extensive and long-lasting attention in both cognitive and clinical psychology and neuroscience; however, a precise characterization of the neural substrates underlying the EST in healthy and clinical populations remains elusive. Here, we implemented a coordinate-based meta-analysis covering functional imaging studies that employed the emotion-word or emotional counting Stroop paradigms to determine the underlying neural networks in healthy subjects and the trans-diagnostic alterations across clinical populations. Forty-six publications were identified that reported relevant contrasts (negative > neutral; positive > neutral) for healthy or clinical populations as well as for hyper- or hypo-activation of patients compared to controls. We demonstrate consistent involvement of the vlPFC and dmPFC in healthy subjects and consistent involvement of the vlPFC in patients. We further identify a trans-diagnostic pattern of hyper-activation in the prefrontal and parietal regions. These findings underscore the critical roles of cognitive control processes in the EST and implicate trans-diagnostic cognitive control deficits. Unlike the current models that emphasize the roles of the amygdala and rACC, our findings implicate novel mechanisms underlying the EST for both healthy and clinical populations.

Gender Differences in Large-Scale and Small-Scale Spatial Ability: A Systematic Review Based on Behavioral and Neuroimaging Research

“…The resulting p- value maps were thresholded using the false discovery rate (FDR) correction at p < 0.05 with 5,000 threshold permutations (Genovese et al, 2002; Laird et al, 2005), and all clusters were set to a minimum volume of 600 mm 3 (Lamm et al, 2011). The results were overlaid onto an anatomical template (Colin27 T1 seg MNI.nii; Luo et al, 2018) and displayed using the Mango software (http://rii.uthscsa.edu/mango; Feng et al, 2018).…”

Investigating the psychometric properties of the Suicide Stroop Task.

“…While the specific cognitive processes assessed by ESTs has been a subject of ongoing debate (e.g., Algom et al, 2004, McKenna and Sharma, 2004, Williams et al, 1996, recent evidence suggests that increased response latency on ESTs among patient populations is driven by deficits in the top-down modulation of attention in the context of salient affective stimuli (Feng, Becker, Huang, Wu, Eickhoff, & Chen, 2018;Zimmerman et al, 2017). Within this framework, increased response latencies on the Suicide Stroop task reflect increased salience of suiciderelated information, coupled with impairments in regulating attention away from emotional stimuli and toward the external environment (Kaiser et al, 2015).…”

The Stroop Effect Occurs at Multiple Points Along a Cascade of Control: Evidence From Cognitive Neuroscience Approaches

“…Yet, at the same time, simply examining which regions of the brain become active during performance of the Stroop task is not likely to yield critical information with regard to the potential loci of the Stroop effect. While there have been a number of meta-analyses to isolate brain regions consistently engaged during performance of Stroop-related paradigms with regard to both the more traditional Stroop tasks (e.g., Derrfuss et al, 2005) and variants (Feng et al, 2018), they do not necessarily provide insight into the locus of the Stroop effect. The reasons are that such meta-analyses aggregate findings across different variants of the Stroop task (discussed in more detail below) that may differ in the specific locus or loci that are most engaged by that variant (e.g., a vocal response vs. manual response Stroop task).…”