Emotional foundations of cognitive control

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2015.01.004

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 19, Issue 3, March 2015, Pages 126-132

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.01.004 Get rights and content

Highlights

•
Cognitive control can be understood as an emotional process.
•
Negative affect is an integral, instantiating aspect of cognitive control.
•
Cognitive conflict has an emotional cost, evoking a host of emotional primitives.
•
Emotion is not an inert byproduct of conflict, but helps in recruiting control.

Often seen as the paragon of higher cognition, here we suggest that cognitive control is dependent on emotion. Rather than asking whether control is influenced by emotion, we ask whether control itself can be understood as an emotional process. Reviewing converging evidence from cybernetics, animal research, cognitive neuroscience, and social and personality psychology, we suggest that cognitive control is initiated when goal conflicts evoke phasic changes to emotional primitives that both focus attention on the presence of goal conflicts and energize conflict resolution to support goal-directed behavior. Critically, we propose that emotion is not an inert byproduct of conflict but is instrumental in recruiting control. Appreciating the emotional foundations of control leads to testable predictions that can spur future research.

Section snippets

Does cognitive control depend on emotion?

Cognitive control refers to mental processes that allow behavior to vary adaptively depending on current goals. It is multifaceted, with one of its core functions being to override, restrain, or inhibit unwanted yet dominant response tendencies [1]. Cognitive control is recruited during low-level reaction time tasks, but also during complex self-regulatory behaviors [2]. For example, cognitive control could involve inhibiting habitual reading responses on the Stroop task (see Glossary) [3],

Emotion–cognition interactions

Historically, emotion has been cast as an enemy of cognitive control, undermining any attempts to exercise restraint [11]. However, most contemporary theorists view emotion and cognition as fully integrated, only minimally decomposable, and without clear demarcation in the human brain 12, 13.

To be sure, there is a rich tradition of research on the topic of emotion–cognition interactions [14], with specific research on the impact of emotion on control [15]. However, unlike past treatments, which

What is emotion?

According to a poll of 35 distinguished emotion researchers [21], emotion can be described as consisting of ‘neural circuits (that are at least partially dedicated), response systems, and a feeling state/process that motivates and organizes cognition and action’ (p. 367). This description maps onto the common view that emotion is characterized by an organic mix of subjective experience, changes in physiological arousal, and behavioral expression [22]. It also maps onto the view that emotion

Cognitive control begins with conflict

Converging evidence suggests that cognitive conflict instigates control efforts. We define conflict as any disagreement or discrepancy between mental representations, response tendencies, or actual behavior. Cybernetic models, based on simple feedback loops, have been very successful in modeling control 25, 26, 27, identifying three main components: (i) goals/set points that act as desired standards with motivational value (Box 1); (ii) comparators/monitors that scan the current state of the

Conflict is aversive

Conflict is thus at the heart of control. Conflict, however, is not affectively neutral. According to some cybernetic theorists, the detection of conflict is accompanied by various affective states, including negative affect when the rate of conflict reduction is too slow 27, 41. According to revised reinforcement sensitivity theory [28], the system that detects conflict not only inhibits ongoing behavior and enhances risk assessment but also produces feelings of worry, caution, and uncertainty

Variation in conflict-related emotion predicts variation in control

Considerable evidence indicates that the experience of conflict is aversive 54, 58, 68, and that conflict instigates control 36, 73. Does this mean that the affective quality of conflict impels control? Or, is negative affect merely epiphenomenal – a mechanistically inert byproduct of the neural activities that control behavior [74]?

There are many reasons why emotion would play an important role in the engagement of cognitive and behavioral resources to resolve conflicts. Most notably, emotion

Emotion is necessary but not sufficient for recruiting control

It is important to note that although conflict-related emotion may be a necessary precursor for control, it is likely to be not sufficient. People high in trait anxiety (Box 2), for example, respond to conflict with heightened emotion but may ruminate and worry about the significance of that emotion instead of using it to motivate corrective behavior 70, 88. There are a variety of ways to regulate affective states, only some of which focus on the source of the emotion, with other solutions

Concluding remarks

Interest in cognitive control has blossomed in the past decade, perhaps unsurprisingly given that it is predictive of so many important life outcomes [6]. Despite this interest, however, answers to basic questions of what control is and how it is initiated remain elusive. The main contribution of this opinion article is to suggest that cognitive control can be understood as an emotional process; emotion, in our view, is an essential component of control, alerting organisms to its need and

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation to M.I., and by grant R21 AA017282 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to B.D.B. We thank Blair Saunders, Elliot Berkman, Greg Hajcak Proudfit, Nathaniel Elkins-Brown, Elizabeth Page-Gould, William Cunningham, Rimma Teper, and Naomi Sarah Ball for valuable insights and help along the way.

Glossary

Affect: is an umbrella term for psychological states that involve valuation, or a ‘good-for-me’ versus ‘bad-for-me’ judgment. Affective states include transient states, full-blown emotional states with clear instigators, and more diffuse mood states where the instigator in unclear.
Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC): is a thick belt of cortex that surrounds the corpus callosum. Although early research segregated functions of the ACC into a more emotional rostral part and a more cognitive dorsal part,

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The congruency judgments in action understanding helps individuals make timely adjustments to unexpected occurrence, and this process may be influenced by emotion. Previous research has showed contradictory effect of emotion on conflict processing, possibly due to the degree of relevance between emotion and task. However, to date, no study has systematically manipulated the relevance to explore how emotion affects congruency judgments in action understanding. We employed a cue-target paradigm and controlled the way emotional stimuli were presented on the target interface, setting up three experiments: emotion served as task-irrelevant distractor, task-irrelevant target and task-relevant target. The results showed that when emotion was irrelevant to the task, it impaired congruency judgements performance, regardless of a distractor or a target, while task-relevant emotion facilitated this process. These findings indicate that the impact of emotion on congruency judgements during action understanding depends on the degree of emotion-task relevance.
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Trends in Cognitive Sciences

OpinionEmotional foundations of cognitive control

Highlights

Section snippets

Does cognitive control depend on emotion?

Emotion–cognition interactions

What is emotion?

Cognitive control begins with conflict

Conflict is aversive

Variation in conflict-related emotion predicts variation in control

Emotion is necessary but not sufficient for recruiting control

Concluding remarks

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Cogn. Psychol.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Int. J. Psychophysiol.

J. Exp. Soc. Psychol.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Brain Cogn.

Neuron

Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev.

J. Affect. Disord.

Pers. Individ. Dif.

Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol.

Biol. Psychol.

Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: an integrative review

Psychol. Bull.

Control yourself or just eat what you like? Weight gain over a year is predicted by an interactive effect of response inhibition and implicit preference for snack foods

Heal. Psychol.

Conceptualizing control in social cognition: how executive functioning modulates the expression of automatic stereotyping

J. Pers. Soc. Psychol.

A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents

Psychol. Sci.

Conscientiousness versus executive function as predictors of health behaviors and health trajectories

Ann. Behav. Med.

Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion

Psychol. Rev.

Are emotions natural kinds?

Perspect. Psychol. Sci.

A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: dynamics of willpower

Psychol. Rev.

On the relationship between emotion and cognition

Nat. Rev. Neurosci.

Handbook of Cognition and Emotion

Incidental and integral effects of emotions on self-control

Integration of emotion and cognitive control

Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci.

Anxiety and error monitoring: the importance of motivation and emotion

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

The many meanings/aspects of emotion: definitions, functions, activation, and regulation

Emot. Rev.

Human emotion: a functional view

The laws of emotion

Am. Psychol.

Natural selective attention: orienting and emotion

Psychophysiology

Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Exploring the mechanisms of self-control improvement

Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci.

On the Self-Regulation of Behavior

The Neuropsychology of Anxiety: An Enquiry Into the Functions of the Septo-hippocampal System

The Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of Personality

Time-inconsistent preferences and consumer self-control

J. Consum. Res.

Delay of gratification in children

Science

Conflict monitoring and cognitive control

Psychol. Rev.

The neural basis of human error processing: reinforcement learning, dopamine, and the error-related negativity

Psychol. Rev.

The neural basis of error detection: conflict monitoring and the error-related negativity

Psychol. Rev.

Anterior cingulate conflict monitoring and adjustments in control

Science

Opinion
Emotional foundations of cognitive control