Brain Imaging Investigation of the Impairing Effect of Emotion on Cognition

Summary

We present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural mechanisms mediating the detrimental impact of emotion on cognition, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This protocol can be used with both healthy and clinical participants.

Abstract

Emotions can impact cognition by exerting both enhancing (e.g., better memory for emotional events) and impairing (e.g., increased emotional distractibility) effects (reviewed in ¹). Complementing our recent protocol ² describing a method that allows investigation of the neural correlates of the memory-enhancing effect of emotion (see also ^{1, 3-5}), here we present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural correlates of the detrimental impact of emotion on cognition. The main feature of this method is that it allows identification of reciprocal modulations between activity in a ventral neural system, involved in 'hot' emotion processing (HotEmo system), and a dorsal system, involved in higher-level 'cold' cognitive/executive processing (ColdEx system), which are linked to cognitive performance and to individual variations in behavior (reviewed in ¹). Since its initial introduction ⁶, this design has proven particularly versatile and influential in the elucidation of various aspects concerning the neural correlates of the detrimental impact of emotional distraction on cognition, with a focus on working memory (WM), and of coping with such distraction ^7,11, in both healthy ^8-11 and clinical participants ^12-14.

Protocol

I. Task Design, Stimuli, and Experimental Protocol

1. The basic task of this protocol is a delayed-response WM task, where novel task-irrelevant emotional and neutral distracters are presented during the delay interval between the memoranda and probes (see Figure 1 for diagram illustrating the original task). Event-related fMRI data are recorded while participants perform this task. Scrambled versions of the actual distracters can also be used as perceptual controls, which have identical basic properties (e.g., spatial frequency and luminance).

Discussion

This experimental design provided initial brain imaging evidence that the detrimental effect of emotional distraction on the ongoing cognitive processes entails reciprocal modulations between the HotEmo ventral neural system and the ColdEx dorsal system. This dorso-ventral dissociation was linked to impaired WM performance in the presence of emotional distraction ⁶, has been systematically replicated in normal ^8-11, clinical ^12-14, and other altered conditions, such as s.......