Processing of Emotional Distraction Is Both Automatic and Modulated by Attention: Evidence from an Event-related fMRI Investigation

Abstract

Traditionally, emotional stimuli have been thought to be automatically processed via a bottom-up automatic “capture of attention” mechanism. Recently, this view has been challenged by evidence that emotion processing depends on the availability of attentional resources. Although these two views are not mutually exclusive, direct evidence reconciling them is lacking. One limitation of previous investigations supporting the traditional or competing views is that they have not systematically investigated the impact of emotional charge of task-irrelevant distraction in conjunction with manipulations of attentional demands. Using event-related fMRI, we investigated the nature of emotion-cognition interactions in a perceptual discrimination task with emotional distraction, by manipulating both the emotional charge of the distracting information and the demands of the main task. Findings suggest that emotion processing is both automatic and modulated by attention, but emotion and attention were only found to interact when finer assessments of emotional charge (comparison of most vs. least emotional conditions) were considered along with an effective manipulation of processing load (high vs. low). The study also identified brain regions reflecting the detrimental impact of emotional distraction on performance as well as regions involved in helping with such distraction. Activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and ventrolateral PFC was linked to a detrimental impact of emotional distraction, whereas the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and lateral occiptal cortex were involved in helping with emotional distraction. These findings demonstrate that task-irrelevant emotion processing is subjective to both the emotional content of distraction and the level of attentional demand.

Cardiorespiratory concerns shape brain responses during automatic panic-related scene processing in patients with panic disorder

“…64,65 For the resolution of conflict caused by task-irrelevant panic-related stimuli, which closely links emotion and cognition, the cingulate cortex has been proposed as a major neural structure. 66,67 The dorsal cingulate cortex plays an important role in overcoming interference due to emotional distraction, 68 which is relevant to understanding the co-occurrence of elevated emotion effects in the fear network of patients with panic disorder in the absence of significant differences on the behavioural level. Heightened cingulate cortex activation has also been linked to enhanced sensory sensitivity, including exaggerated scanning for threats (i.e., hypervigilance).…”

Mid-adolescent neurocognitive development of ignoring and attending emotional stimuli

“…Both interpretations of core affect and motivational salience as well as cognitive control for competing responses may fit to current task demands. The ACC may function as a top-down region to minimize emotional interference in order to focus on the main task, here comparing stimuli (Shafer et al, 2012).…”

Sensitivity to emotional scene content outside the focus of attention

“…As a result, as long as motivationally relevant cues (e.g., emotional scene contents) activate appetitive or aversive reactions or goals, such cues will have priority in recruiting the limited processing resources, and this attentional engagement will result in a reduction of available resources for concurrent stimuli. From a neurophysiological view, this trade-off can be conceptualized as reflecting competition in dedicated neural circuits (Shafer et al, 2012), with motivationally relevant cues having dominance. As a consequence, the processing of concurrent or immediately following motivationally non-relevant cues should be impaired when competing with emotionally significant stimuli (see Bradley et al, 2012;Carretié, 2014).…”