Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: It is a truism of everyday life that anger and fear affect cognition.In high-risk perceptually complex contexts, such as air combat, the effects of negative arousal on performance can be significant and potentially catastrophic.To better understand the interaction between emotion and cognition, we studied the effects of negative emotional stimuli on pre-attentive sensorimotor gating and selective attention in 39 healthy adults, as well as their relationship to neural, cardiac, and endocrine variables associated with the arousal response.Subjects were tested for pre-pulse inhibition under neutral and arousal conditions, as well as on emotionally-valent Flanker and Stroop tasks.Physiological arousal reactivity was measured using functional MRI, 24-hour EKG, electrodermal activity, cortisol testing, and dexamethasone suppression.Subjects were clinically assessed for levels of anger, anxiety, and perceived stress.Affect-valent conditions were induced using the International Affective Picture Scale, the Morphed Eckman Facial Stimuli, and affect-valent words matched for length and frequency.All conditions were counter-balanced for order.Our results indicate that even under relatively mild emotional challenge, the introduction of negative emotion significantly affected nearly all components of our cognitive battery, and correlated with changes in heart rate and electrodermal activity.Pre-attentive sensory gating and habituation were diminished, which may reflect the underlying neural conditions necessary for an increased orienting response.On tasks that required selecting a target in the presence of distractors, such as the Flanker Task, arousal had the effect of reducing both response time and accuracy.Our results were also consistent with our previous research on the higher-order effects of arousal on reasoning, indicating that individuals make decisions with less information under emotional arousal.On tasks such as the Stroop, in which orienting to the source of arousal conflicts with selective attention to a target, response time was lengthened.Importantly, the effects of negative arousal were widely variable across individuals, falling roughly into classes of individuals who showed strong physiological arousal response with strong cognitive effect, individuals who showed little physiological arousal response with little cognitive effect, and individuals who showed strong physiological arousal response with little cognitive effect.It is the third group that we are investigating most closely with fMRI, to determine which limbic feed-back mechanisms produce the most efficient cognitive performance under stress.This information, in turn, will permit more effective screening for high-risk environments to select only those individuals that are "hard-wired" for neural aptitude during fear.
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Office of Naval Research
Award: G8876996369
OpenAlex ID: W2768187231