Interactions between negative emotional and higher cognitive processes in humans

This dissertation examines behavior and the neural mechanisms and processes that underlie the orientation of attention, the allocation of mental resources and decision-making behavior when people experience negative emotions during challenging cognitive activity. Chapter 1 presents an overview of the theory and research that has addressed how negative emotion and cognition interact. Chapter 2 explores how people's emotional responses to disturbing pictures affect electrophysiological indices of attention and cognitive responses to numeric stimuli from a concurrent cognitive task. Chapter 3 discusses the relative salience of emotional vs. cognitive factors in modulating response-monitoring functions during cognitive task performance. Chapter 4 presents evidence of lateralized prefrontal and limbic regional involvement in mediating the interplay between negative emotional and higher cognitive processes. Experimental data from Chapters 2--4 show that negative emotion affects cognitive processing in bidirectional and hemispherically specific manners, which begins to reveal the dynamic, multifaceted influence that negative emotions can have on thinking. This information provides useful insight for approaches to promoting psychological wellness and intellectual integrity in healthy and clinical populations.; An additional study that investigated electrophysiological indices of the integration of spatial and form-related visual features is presented in Appendix A. Though this experiment did not involve emotion elicitation, its inquiry into mechanisms that underlie parallel processing and integration of divergent information is germane to the preceding chapters that focus on this process with respect to emotion and cognition. Finally, Appendix B presents several graphs depicting task performance measures for male vs. female subjects that participated in the experiments presented in Chapters 2 & 3. Currently, there is controversy over whether there are important and significant differences between males and females in how emotion affects cognition. Several studies show that females show greater emotion-related memory than males, social anecdote suggests that females are more emotionally labile than males, and other research highlights sex-related differences in various cognitive functions like spatial and verbal processing, but there are no systematic findings that reveal sex-differences in how emotion affects cognition. In the studies presented here, sex-related differences in performance did not interact with the experimental variables of interest (picture valence, visual field, task difficulty), so sex was not included as a variable during analysis of the physiological data.