The Impact of Anxiety-Inducing Distraction on Cognitive Performance: A Combined Brain Imaging and Personality Investigation

Emotions can impact cognition by exerting both enhancing (e.g., better memory for emotional events) and impairing (e.g., increased emotional distractibility) effects (reviewed in 1 ). Complementing our recent protocol 2 describing a method that allows investigation of the neural correlates of the memory-enhancing effect of emotion (see also 1, 3-5 ), here we present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural correlates of the detrimental impact of emotion on cognition. The main feature of this method is that it allows identification of reciprocal modulations between activity in a ventral neural system, involved in 'hot' emotion processing (HotEmo system), and a dorsal system, involved in higher-level 'cold' cognitive/executive processing (ColdEx system), which are linked to cognitive performance and to individual variations in behavior (reviewed in 1 ). Since its initial introduction 6 , this design has proven particularly versatile and influential in the elucidation of various aspects concerning the neural correlates of the detrimental impact of emotional distraction on cognition, with a focus on working memory (WM), and of coping with such distraction 7,11 , in both healthy [8][9][10][11] and clinical participants 12-14 . Video LinkThe video component of this article can be found at http://www.jove.com/video/2434/ The basic task of this protocol is a delayed-response WM task, where novel task-irrelevant emotional and neutral distracters are presented during the delay interval between the memoranda and probes (see Figure 1 for diagram illustrating the original task). Event-related fMRI data are recorded while participants perform this task. Scrambled versions of the actual distracters can also be used as perceptual controls, which have identical basic properties (e.g., spatial frequency and luminance). Protocol

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The link between spatial (where) and temporal (when) aspects of the neural correlates of most psychological phenomena is not clear. Elucidation of this relation, which is crucial to fully understand human brain function, requires integration across multiple brain imaging modalities and cognitive tasks that reliably modulate the engagement of the brain systems of interest. By overcoming the methodological challenges posed by simultaneous recordings, the present report provides proof‐of‐concept evidence for a novel approach using three complementary imaging modalities: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), event‐related potentials (ERPs), and event‐related optical signals (EROS). Using the emotional oddball task, a paradigm that taps into both cognitive and affective aspects of processing, we show the feasibility of capturing converging and complementary measures of brain function that are not currently attainable using traditional unimodal or other multimodal approaches. This opens up unprecedented possibilities to clarify spatiotemporal integration of brain function.