The neural mechanisms able to predict future emotion regulation decisions

Emotion regulation is crucial in maintaining healthy psychological wellbeing, and its dysregulation is often linked to a range of neuropsychiatric disorders including depression. The neurobiological underpinnings of cognitive reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy, have been shown to include the amygdala and regions of the prefrontal cortex. A novel study by Doré, Weber, and Ochsner (2017) has demonstrated that neural activity in these regions during uninstructed visualization of affective stimuli can successfully predict which individuals are more likely to subsequently employ emotion regulation, and under what circumstances

Decentering mediates the relationship between vmPFC activation during a stressor and positive emotion during stress recovery

The stress response has profound implications on health and behaviour and stress is considered a risk factor for the development of psychopathologies including depression. The neural mechanisms supporting successful stress recovery are not fully understood, however a novel study by Yang et al. demonstrates that vmPFC activation during a stressor is related to improved stress recovery, and that decentering is able to mediate this relationship, suggesting a role during stress recovery. It was also revealed that vmPFC activation at different time points during the stressor predicts altering aspects of stress recovery, an observation that was only possible due to the adoption of change-point analysis

Emotional real-world scenes impact visual search

Research shows that emotional stimuli can capture attention, and this can benefit or impair performance, depending on the characteristics of a task. Additionally, whilst some findings show that attention expands under positive conditions, others show that emotion has no influence on the broadening of attention. The current study investigated whether emotional real-world scenes influence attention in a visual search task. Participants were asked to identify a target letter embedded in the centre or periphery of emotional images. Identification accuracy was lower in positive images compared to neutral images, and response times were slower in negative images. This suggests that real-world emotional stimuli have a distracting effect on visual attention and search. There was no evidence that emotional images influenced the spatial spread of attention. Instead, it is suggested that findings may provide support for the argument that positive emotion encourages a global processing style and negative emotion promotes local processing

Affective influences on top-down visual attention

The mechanisms supporting emotional processing and the allocation of visual attention share common neural substrates and both draw upon limited top-down resources. Attention is biased towards emotional stimuli and these biases are suggested to be a key mechanism in the development of psychopathology. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the impact of affective influences on visual attention. This was achieved using three different approaches: exploring the impact of emotion, the effects of stimuli valence, and the contribution of inter-individual differences in affective traits. Across five experiments, two experimental paradigms incorporating real-world scenes were utilised: a change detection flicker task, and a visual search task. In two experiments prefrontal cortex activity was recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Overall, when considered in isolation, induced emotion had no impact on attention. However, negative emotion did influence prefrontal cortex activation. Moreover, induced emotion was shown to interact with extraversion and cognitive reappraisal to influence attention. In addition, when considering stimuli valence, accuracy to identify targets was reduced in task-irrelevant positively-valenced real-world scenes, and target identification was slower in negatively-valenced real-world scenes, suggesting that negative and positive emotional valence impact attention in different ways. Moreover, higher trait levels of extraversion, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression were shown to improve visual search performance. These findings suggest that emotion may not have a direct influence upon attention conflicting with theoretical models that argue for the impact of emotion on attention. Additionally, the findings reveal direct and interactive effects of affective traits on visual search, supporting the argument that inter-individual differences influence the competition between emotion and attention for top-down resources. These findings are discussed in relation to models of emotion-attention interactions. They provide novel insights into the attentional processing of healthy individuals and have implications for clinically focussed research investigating the psychopathology of affective disorders

Psychophysiological indices of cognitive style : a triangulated study incorporating neuroimaging, eye-tracking, psychometric and behavioral measures

Employing a triangulated design to explore psychophysiological indices of cognitive style, the study investigated the validity of the intuition-analysis dimension of cognitive style and its associated construct measure, the Cognitive Style Index (CSI). Participants completed a comparative visual search (CVS) task whilst changes in hemodynamic concentrations in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) were monitored using functional near-infrared spectroscopy and eye movements were recorded together with task performance measures of response time and accuracy. Results revealed significant style-related differences in response time and number of saccades. Analysts were characterized by fewer saccadic eye movements and quicker response times - but with comparable accuracy scores - compared to intuitives, suggesting a more efficient visual search strategy and decision-making style on the experimental task. No style-related differences in neural activation were found, suggesting that differences were not mediated by style-specific variations in brain activation or hemispheric lateralization. Task-evoked neural activation - compared with baseline resting state - represented the value of PFC-based neural activation measures in studies of cognitive processing. Findings demonstrated style-related differences supporting the intuition-analysis dimension of cognitive style and the validity of the CSI as a psychometric measure of style. The potential value of valid psychometric measures of cognitive style in applied areas is highlighted. Key words: cognitive style, information processing, Cognitive Style Index, functional near-infrared 21 spectroscopy, eye-tracking, neuroimaging, Bayesian statistic