Sadness and fear, but not happiness, motivate inhibitory behaviour: the influence of discrete emotions on the executive function of inhibition.

Inhibition, an executive function, is critical for achieving goals that require suppressing unwanted behaviours, thoughts, or distractions. One hypothesis of the emotion and goal compatibility theory is that emotions of sadness and fear enhance inhibitory control. Across Experiments 1-4, we tested this hypothesis by inducing a happy, sad, fearful, and neutral emotional state prior to completing an inhibition task that indexed a specific facet of inhibition (oculomotor, resisting interference, behavioural, and cognitive).

Assessing cognitive impairment in SLE: examining relationships between resting glucose metabolism and anti-NMDAR antibodies with navigational performance.

Objective: Resting Fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) brain imaging and neuropsychological testing were used to investigate the usefulness of a spatial navigation task (SNT) as a performance benchmark for cognitive impairment related to anti-N-methyl D-aspartate (anti-NMDA) receptor antibodies (DNRAb) in SLE.

Methods: Neuropsychological assessments, including a desktop 3-D virtual SNT, were performed on 19 SLE participants and 9 healthy control (HC) subjects. SLE participants had stable disease activity and medication doses and no history of neuropsychiatric illness or current use of mind-altering medications.

Metabolic and microstructural alterations in the SLE brain correlate with cognitive impairment.

To address challenges in the diagnosis of cognitive dysfunction (CD) related to systemic lupus erythematosus-associated (SLE-associated) autoimmune mechanisms rather than confounding factors, we employed an integrated approach, using resting-state functional (FDG-PET) and structural (diffusion tensor imaging [DTI]) neuroimaging techniques and cognitive testing, in adult SLE patients with quiescent disease and no history of neuropsychiatric illness. We identified resting hypermetabolism in the sensorimotor cortex, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe of SLE subjects, in addition to validation of previously published resting hypermetabolism in the hippocampus, orbitofrontal cortex, and putamen/GP/thalamus. Regional hypermetabolism demonstrated abnormal interregional metabolic correlations, associated with impaired cognitive performance, and was stable over 15 months.

Fear and happiness, but not sadness, motivate attentional flexibility: A case for emotion influencing the ability to split foci of attention.

One prominent and consistent effect is that negative emotions with high motivational intensity, such as fear, narrow attention. However, recent data concerning how fear influences vision may suggest that fear could make attention flexible. Thus, the goal of the present study was to examine whether fear, like happiness, enhances attentional flexibility when multiple targets are present in noncontiguous locations.

Once more with feeling: On the explanatory limits of the GANE model and the missing role of subjective experience.

We applaud Mather and colleagues' model, which emphasizes the neurobiological pathways by which affective arousal tunes attention and memory. This commentary offers a friendly discussion of several potential limitations of the theory. We suggest the model is strong when predicting task-driven demands but is limited when predicting the impact of individual biases, interpretations, and experiential feelings.

Selective Impairment of Spatial Cognition Caused by Autoantibodies to the N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor.

Patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) experience cognitive abnormalities in multiple domains including processing speed, executive function, and memory. Here we show that SLE patients carrying antibodies that bind DNA and the GluN2A and GluN2B subunits of the N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor (NMDAR), termed DNRAbs, displayed a selective impairment in spatial recall. Neural recordings in a mouse model of SLE, in which circulating DNRAbs penetrate the hippocampus, revealed that CA1 place cells exhibited a significant expansion in place field size.

Happiness increases verbal and spatial working memory capacity where sadness does not: Emotion, working memory and executive control.

The effects of emotion on working memory and executive control are often studied in isolation. Positive mood enhances verbal and impairs spatial working memory, whereas negative mood enhances spatial and impairs verbal working memory. Moreover, positive mood enhances executive control, whereas negative mood has little influence.

Verbal makes it positive, spatial makes it negative: working memory biases judgments, attention, and moods.

Prior research has suggested that emotion and working memory domains are integrated, such that positive affect enhances verbal working memory, whereas negative affect enhances spatial working memory (Gray, 2004; Storbeck, 2012). Simon (1967) postulated that one feature of emotion and cognition integration would be reciprocal connectedness (i.e.

Conditions under which arousal does and does not elevate height estimates.

We present a series of experiments that explore the boundary conditions for how emotional arousal influences height estimates. Four experiments are presented, which investigated the influence of context, situation-relevance, intensity, and attribution of arousal on height estimates. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the environmental context to signal either danger (viewing a height from above) or safety (viewing a height from below).

Emotion, working memory task demands and individual differences predict behavior, cognitive effort and negative affect.

We examined whether positive and negative affect motivates verbal and spatial working memory processes, respectively, which have implications for the expenditure of mental effort. We argue that when emotion promotes cognitive tendencies that are goal incompatible with task demands, greater cognitive effort is required to perform well. We sought to investigate whether this increase in cognitive effort impairs behavioural control over a broad domain of self-control tasks.

Negative affect promotes encoding of and memory for details at the expense of the gist: affect, encoding, and false memories.

I investigated whether negative affective states enhance encoding of and memory for item-specific information reducing false memories. Positive, negative, and neutral moods were induced, and participants then completed a Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false-memory task. List items were presented in unique spatial locations or unique fonts to serve as measures for item-specific encoding.

Cognitive and emotional abnormalities in systemic lupus erythematosus: evidence for amygdala dysfunction.

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a multi-system autoimmune disorder characterized by the production of autoantibodies. Approximately 30-50 % of patients produce autoantibodies directed against N-Methyl-D-aspartic acid receptors (NMDARs). Once they have gained access to brain tissue, these autoantibodies bind to the NR2A subunit of the NMDARs and synergize with glutamate to cause excitatory, non-inflammatory cell death or alter neuron function.

Performance costs when emotion tunes inappropriate cognitive abilities: implications for mental resources and behavior.

Emotion tunes cognition, such that approach-motivated positive states promote verbal cognition, whereas withdrawal-motivated negative states promote spatial cognition (Gray, 2001). The current research examined whether self-control resources become depleted and influence subsequent behavior when emotion tunes an inappropriate cognitive tendency. In 2 experiments, either an approach-motivated positive state or a withdrawal-motivated negative state was induced, and then participants completed a verbal or a spatial working memory task creating conditions of emotion-cognition alignment (e.

Affect influences false memories at encoding: evidence from recognition data.

Memory is susceptible to illusions in the form of false memories. Prior research found, however, that sad moods reduce false memories. The current experiment had two goals: (1) to determine whether affect influences retrieval processes, and (2) to determine whether affect influences the strength and the persistence of false memories.

Don't look down: emotional arousal elevates height perception.

In a series of experiments, it was found that emotional arousal can influence height perception. In Experiment 1, participants viewed either arousing or nonarousing images before estimating the height of a 2-story balcony and the size of a target on the ground below the balcony. People who viewed arousing images overestimated height and target size more than did those who viewed nonarousing images.

Affective Arousal as Information: How Affective Arousal Influences Judgments, Learning, and Memory.

The affect-as-information framework posits that affect is embodied information about value and importance. The valence dimension of affect provides evaluative information about stimulus objects, which plays a role in judgment and decisionmaking. Affect can also provide evaluative information about one's own cognitions and response inclinations, information that guides thinking and reasoning.

On the interdependence of cognition and emotion.

Affect and cognition have long been treated as independent entities, but in the current review we suggest that affect and cognition are in fact highly interdependent. We open the article by discussing three classic views for the independence of affect. These are (i) the affective independence hypothesis, that emotion is processed independently from cognition, (ii) the affective primacy hypothesis, that evaluative processing precedes semantic processing, and (iii) the affective automaticity hypothesis, that affectively potent stimuli commandeer attention and evaluation is automatic.

The affective regulation of cognitive priming.

Semantic and affective priming are classic effects observed in cognitive and social psychology, respectively. The authors discovered that affect regulates such priming effects. In Experiment 1, positive and negative moods were induced before one of three priming tasks; evaluation, categorization, or lexical decision.

With sadness comes accuracy; with happiness, false memory: mood and the false memory effect.

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm lures people to produce false memories. Two experiments examined whether induced positive or negative moods would influence this false memory effect. The affect-as-information hypothesis predicts that, on the one hand, positive affective cues experienced as task-relevant feedback encourage relational processing during encoding, which should enhance false memory effects.

Watch out! That could be dangerous: valence-arousal interactions in evaluative processing.

Seven studies involving 146 undergraduates examined the effects of stimulus valence and arousal on direct and indirect measures of evaluative processing. Stimuli were emotional slides (Studies 1 to 6) or words (Study 7) that systematically varied in valence and arousal. Evaluative categorization was measured by reaction times to evaluate the stimuli (Studies 2, 3, and 7), latencies related to emotional feelings (Study 3), and incidental effects on motor performance (Studies 4 and 5).

Preferences and inferences in encoding visual objects: a systematic comparison of semantic and affective priming.

The authors systematically compared semantic and affective priming in five studies involving words and pictures. In Studies 1 (lexical decision task) and 2 (evaluation task), irrelevant short duration (200 ms) primes were briefly flashed before relevant targets. The authors orthogonally varied both the semantic and affective relations between primes and targets.