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      Cognitive and affective control

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      Frontiers in Psychology
      Frontiers Media S.A.

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          Abstract

          Traditionally, cognition and emotion are seen as separate domains that are independent at best and in competition at worst. The French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) famously said “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” (The heart has its reasons that reason does not know). Consistent with this quote, many studies in the past have underscored dissociable effects and non-overlapping brain structures of affect and cognition during the control and monitoring of goal-directed behavior (e.g., Bush et al., 2000). Over the last century, however, psychologists and neuroscientists have increasingly appreciated strong reciprocal connections and interactions between cognition and emotion. Initially this was demonstrated in cognitive functions such as perception, attention, learning, memory and decision-making. For instance, an emotional stimulus can alter low-level visual perception (e.g., Bocanegra and Zeelenberg, 2009), and it can capture attention (e.g., Anderson and Phelps, 2001). Likewise, emotional stimuli are better learned and remembered than neutral ones (e.g., McGaugh, 1990) and they can provide strong incentives to bias decision-making (Bechara et al., 1997). Hence, the independent or competitive view is gradually being replaced by an interactive view. Currently, we focus on interactions of emotion and motivation with cognitive control. Empirical articles and review papers included in this Research Topic timely reveal the extent of overlap and synergistic effects between cognitive control and a wide range of affective processes, both in the normal adult brain, as well as in specific (pathological) conditions, best characterized by either poor or unripe prefrontal-based executive functions as well as impaired affective processes. Broadly speaking, the original contributions included in this Research Topic tackle one (or more) out of three possible topics. The first and most represented consists of the influence of emotion on cognitive control. Krypotos et al. (2011) focus on the effect of individual differences in emotion regulation, measured by heart rate variability, on response inhibition. van Steenbergen et al. (2011) demonstrate attentional focusing after the presentation of negative pictures. Stürmer et al. (2011) discuss the effect of reward on conflict adaptation. Ridderinkhof et al. (2012) showed that positive affect restored decision learning in patients with Parkinson's disease. Reeck and Egner (2011) demonstrated that irrelevant emotional information distracts more than non-emotional information, supporting affective prioritization in human information processing. Demanet et al. (2011) study the effect of affective stimuli on voluntary task switching. Cavanagh et al. (2011) show that depression is associated with larger error (ERN) signals, suggesting an influence of motivational state on early error processing. Danielmeier and Ullsperger (2011) study the effect of errors (motivationally salient events) on post-error processing. Finally, Chiew and Braver (2011) review the influences of motivational state on early error processing. In the second category, papers establish a conceptual or anatomical common substrate for cognitive control and emotion. Lowe and Ziemke (2011) endorse a perspective in which emotions are predictions of action tendencies. Aarts et al. (2011) review the literature supporting the hypothesis that (striatal) dopamine regulates the interaction between (appetitive) motivation and cognition. Mushtaq et al. (2011) look at similarities between uncertainty and cognitive control. Mueller (2011) reviews the developmental trajectories of cognitive and emotion control during adolescence. Berggren et al. (2011) emphasize the link between trait-related distractibility in healthy adults and their performance in standard cognitive tasks. Tops and Boksem (2011, 2012) propose that there are two cognitive control systems (one ventral and one dorsal), both of which are partially cognitive and partially affective. Su et al. (2011) propose the glance-look model, specifying how affect and cognitive control interact to produce the attentional blink. In the third category, a relatively modest number of papers look at the influence of cognitive control on emotion. Krämer et al. (2011) demonstrate a correlation between cognitive control and aggression, suggesting an influence of the former on inhibiting the latter. The paper by Schmidt et al. (2011) reviews the effect of cognitive control on inhibition of thoughts for (being able to) sleep. Paret et al. (2011) demonstrate how cognitive control plays an important role in complex affective processes, such as emotion regulation and the reappraisal of our emotional life. Huizenga et al. (2012) investigate how repeated application of cognitive control influences motivational processing. Finally, the paper by Danielmeier and Ullsperger (2011) investigates the aftereffects of making an error. In all, the main contribution of this special issue is to highlight similarities and reciprocal influences between cognitive control and emotion. Rather than separate modules, the papers gathered in this special issue concur in suggesting that emotion and cognitive control are two sides of the same coin, as they both contribute, through synergistic effects, to the optimization of behavior. As such, this special issue emphasizes the need to move beyond the classical division or dichotomy between cognitive control and emotion in order to model and account for human goal-directed behavior across various tasks and situations.

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          Most cited references23

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          Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy.

          Deciding advantageously in a complex situation is thought to require overt reasoning on declarative knowledge, namely, on facts pertaining to premises, options for action, and outcomes of actions that embody the pertinent previous experience. An alternative possibility was investigated: that overt reasoning is preceded by a nonconscious biasing step that uses neural systems other than those that support declarative knowledge. Normal participants and patients with prefrontal damage and decision-making defects performed a gambling task in which behavioral, psychophysiological, and self-account measures were obtained in parallel. Normals began to choose advantageously before they realized which strategy worked best, whereas prefrontal patients continued to choose disadvantageously even after they knew the correct strategy. Moreover, normals began to generate anticipatory skin conductance responses (SCRs) whenever they pondered a choice that turned out to be risky, before they knew explicitly that it was a risky choice, whereas patients never developed anticipatory SCRs, although some eventually realized which choices were risky. The results suggest that, in normal individuals, nonconscious biases guide behavior before conscious knowledge does. Without the help of such biases, overt knowledge may be insufficient to ensure advantageous behavior.
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            Cognitive and emotional influences in anterior cingulate cortex.

            Bush, Luu, Posner (2000)
            Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a part of the brain's limbic system. Classically, this region has been related to affect, on the basis of lesion studies in humans and in animals. In the late 1980s, neuroimaging research indicated that ACC was active in many studies of cognition. The findings from EEG studies of a focal area of negativity in scalp electrodes following an error response led to the idea that ACC might be the brain's error detection and correction device. In this article, these various findings are reviewed in relation to the idea that ACC is a part of a circuit involved in a form of attention that serves to regulate both cognitive and emotional processing. Neuroimaging studies showing that separate areas of ACC are involved in cognition and emotion are discussed and related to results showing that the error negativity is influenced by affect and motivation. In addition, the development of the emotional and cognitive roles of ACC are discussed, and how the success of this regulation in controlling responses might be correlated with cingulate size. Finally, some theories are considered about how the different subdivisions of ACC might interact with other cortical structures as a part of the circuits involved in the regulation of mental and emotional activity.
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              Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events.

              Commensurate with the importance of rapidly and efficiently evaluating motivationally significant stimuli, humans are probably endowed with distinct faculties and maintain specialized neural structures to enhance their detection. Here we consider that a critical function of the human amygdala is to enhance the perception of stimuli that have emotional significance. Under conditions of limited attention for normal perceptual awareness-that is, the attentional blink-we show that healthy observers demonstrate robust benefits for the perception of verbal stimuli of aversive content compared with stimuli of neutral content. In contrast, a patient with bilateral amygdala damage has no enhanced perception for such aversive stimulus events. Examination of patients with either left or right amygdala resections shows that the enhanced perception of aversive words depends specifically on the left amygdala. All patients comprehend normally the affective meaning of the stimulus events, despite the lack of evidence for enhanced perceptual encoding of these events in patients with left amygdala lesions. Our results reveal a neural substrate for affective influences on perception, indicating that similar neural mechanisms may underlie the affective modulation of both recollective and perceptual experience.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychology
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                02 November 2012
                2012
                : 3
                : 477
                Affiliations
                Department of Psychology, Ghent University Ghent, Belgium
                Author notes

                This article was submitted to Frontiers in Cognition, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.

                Edited by: Lorenza S. Colzato, Leiden University, Netherlands

                Reviewed by: Lorenza S. Colzato, Leiden University, Netherlands

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00477
                3487426
                23130014
                fedecb7f-29a3-43eb-bedd-5b3c718da3be
                Copyright © 2012 Pourtois, Notebaert and Verguts.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.

                History
                : 11 October 2012
                : 17 October 2012
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 26, Pages: 2, Words: 1562
                Categories
                Psychology
                Editorial Article

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry

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