Sanda Dolcos

College students often struggle to regulate emotions under changing academic and social stress, highlighting the need for interventions targeting adaptive emotion regulation (ER). Here, we tested a 5-week online intervention designed to enhance ER and cognitive flexibility in college students. Participants (N = 39) were pseudo-randomly assigned to the experimental (N = 20) or control (N = 19) group, with higher distress individuals preferentially assigned to the experimental condition. Behavioral, self-report, eye-tracking, and brain imaging measures were collected before and after the training. Compared to controls, the experimental group participants showed reduced emotional reactivity to negative stimuli and experiences, along with reduced visual attention to emotionally salient regions. They also showed improvements in the use of attention strategies, positive refocusing, and perceived cognitive control. In the imaging subsample (N = 23; Experimental: N = 15; Control: N = 8), these improvements were accompanied by changes in resting-state functional connectivity, including reduced coupling between affective and higher-order systems and increased efficiency of attentional control and self-referential pathways. These results suggest that training promoted more efficient and flexible interactions among emotion, attention, and cognitive control regions, providing a neural mechanism for the observed behavioral benefits. Overall, the findings support the intervention as a promising approach for improving adaptive ER and resilience during emerging adulthood.

This century has witnessed unprecedented increasing interest in the investigation of emotion-cognition interactions and the associated neural mechanisms. The present review emphasizes the need to consider the various factors that can influence enhancing and impairing effects of emotion on cognition, in studies of both healthy and clinical groups. First, we discuss advances in understanding the circumstances in which emotion enhances or impairs cognition at different levels, both within the same processes (e.g., perception, episodic memory) and across different processes (i.e., episodic vs. working memory). Then, we discuss evidence regarding these opposing effects of emotion in a larger context, of the response to stressors, and linked to the role of individual differences (personality, genetic) affecting stress sensitivity. Finally, we also discuss evidence linking these opposing effects of emotion in a clinical group (PTSD), where they are both deleterious, and based on comparisons across groups with opposing affective biases: healthy aging (positive bias) vs. depression (negative bias). These issues have relevance for understanding mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions in healthy functioning and in psychopathology, which can inspire training interventions to increase resilience and well-being.

Emotion regulation (ER) strategies, such as reappraisal and suppression, have been linked to psychological well-being. The available evidence points to the differential impact of ER strategies on resilience and post-traumatic growth (PTG), as factors related to well-being, as well as to sex differences in the link between ER preference and well-being. However, previous studies are mixed regarding these links. To address this issue, college students (N = 1254) recruited between 2020 and 2023 reported their habitual use of ER strategies, resilience and PTG during the COVID-19 pandemic, which, as a global health crisis, has raised not only severe physical health concerns but also mental distress. First, reappraisal was positively associated with both resilience and PTG, whereas suppression was negatively correlated with these measures. Second, female participants had lower suppression scores and higher PTG scores than male participants. Third, a moderation analysis showed that the positive relationship between reappraisal and PTG was stronger in female participants, whereas the negative relationship between suppression and PTG was stronger in male participants. Overall, these findings shed light on the links among ER strategies, resilience, and PTG and have relevance for customized training in the use of reappraisal to increase well-being in women and men.

Cognitive flexibility involves dynamic processes that allow adaptation of our thinking and behavior in response to changing contextual demands. Despite a large consensus about its beneficial effects, cognitive flexibility is still poorly understood. In this mini review, we examined the main conceptualizations and approaches for assessing cognitive flexibility: (1) neuropsychological tasks, (2) self-report questionnaires, and (3) neuroscientific approaches. The reviewed evidence shows that the definition and assessment of cognitive flexibility are not unified within the field and suggests that a more consensual and consistent conceptualization and operationalization of this important concept is needed. We propose that an integrative behavior-brain-context approach can help advance our understanding of cognitive flexibility.

Research targeting emotion's impact on relational episodic memory has largely focused on spatial aspects, but less is known about emotion's impact on memory for an event's temporal associations. The present research investigated this topic. Participants viewed a series of interspersed negative and neutral images with instructions to create stories linking successive images. Later, participants performed a surprise memory test, which measured temporal associations between pairs of consecutive pictures where one picture was negative and one was neutral. Analyses focused on how the order of negative and neutral images during encoding influenced retrieval accuracy. Converging results from a discovery study (N = 72) and pre-registered replication study (N = 150) revealed a "forward-favouring" effect of emotion in temporal memory encoding: Participants encoded associations between negative stimuli and subsequent neutral stimuli more strongly than associations between negative stimuli and preceding neutral stimuli. This finding may reflect a novel trade-off regarding emotion's effects on memory and is relevant for understanding affective disorders, as key clinical symptoms can be conceptualised as maladaptive memory retrieval of temporal details.

Emotional well-being depends on the ability to successfully engage a variety of coping strategies to regulate affective responses. Most studies have investigated the effectiveness of emotion regulation (ER) strategies that are deployed relatively later in the timing of processing that leads to full emotional experiences (i.e. reappraisal and suppression). Strategies engaged in earlier stages of emotion processing, such as those involved in attentional deployment, have also been investigated, but relatively less is known about their mechanisms. Here, we investigate the effectiveness of self-guided focused attention (FA) in reducing the impact of unpleasant pictures on the experienced negative affect. Participants viewed a series of composite images with distinguishable foreground (FG, either negative or neutral) and background (BG, always neutral) areas and were asked to focus on the FG or BG content. Eye-tracking data were recorded while performing the FA task, along with participants' ratings of their experienced emotional response following the presentation of each image. First, proving the effectiveness of self-guided FA in down-regulating negative affect, focusing away from the emotional content of pictures (BG focus) was associated with lower emotional ratings. Second, trial-based eye-tracking data corroborated these results, showing that spending less time gazing within the negative FG predicted reductions in emotional ratings. Third, this reduction was largest among subjects who habitually use suppression to regulate their emotions. Overall, the present findings expand the evidence regarding the FA's effectiveness in controlling the impact of emotional stimuli and inform the development of training interventions emphasizing attentional control to improve emotional well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Over the last decades, the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences has seen proliferation rather than integration of theoretical perspectives. This is due to differences in metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions about human affective phenomena (what they are and how they work) which, shaped by academic motivations and values, have determined the affective constructs and operationalizations. An assumption on the purpose of affective phenomenacan be used as a teleological principle to guide the construction of a common set of metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions—a framework for human affective research. In this capstone paper for the special issue “Towards an Integrated Understanding of the Human Affectome”, we gather the tiered purpose of human affective phenomena to synthesize assumptions that account for human affective phenomenacollectively. This teleologically-grounded framework offers a principled agenda and launchpad for both organizing existing perspectives and generating new ones. Ultimately, we hope Human Affectome brings us a step closer to not only an integrated understanding of human affective phenomena, but an integrated field for affective research.

Our behavior is shaped by multiple factors, including direct feedback (seeing the outcomes of our past actions) and social observation (in part, via a drive to conform to other peoples' behaviors). However, it remains unclear how these two processes are linked in the context of behavioral change. This is important to investigate, as behavioral change is associated with distinct neural correlates that reflect specific aspects of processing, such as information integration and rule updating. To clarify whether these processes characterize both direct learning and conformity, we elicited the two within the same task, using a role‐swapping version of the Ultimatum Game—a fairness paradigm where subjects decide how to share a pot of money with other players—while electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded. Behavioral results showed that subjects decided how to divide the pot based on both direct feedback (seeing whether their past proposals were accepted or rejected) and social observation (copying the splits that others just proposed). Converging EEG evidence revealed that increased centroparietal positivity (P2, P3b, and late positivity) indexed behavioral changes motivated by direct feedback and those motivated by drives to conform. However, exploratory analyses also suggest that these two motivating factors may also be dissociable, and that frontal midline theta oscillations may predict behavioral changes linked to direct feedback but not conformity. Overall, this study provides novel electrophysiological evidence regarding the different forms of behavioral change. These findings are also relevant for understanding the mechanisms of social information processing that underlie successful cooperation.

Cooperation behaviors during social decision-making have been shown to be sensitive to manipulations of context. However, it remains unclear how aspects of context in dynamic social interactions, such as observed nonverbal behaviors, may modulate cooperation decisions and the associated neural mechanisms. In this study, participants responded to offers from proposers to split $10 in an Ultimatum Game following observation of proposer approach (friendly) or avoidance (nonfriendly) behaviors, displayed by dynamic whole-body animated avatars, or following a nonsocial interaction control condition. As expected, behavioral results showed that participants tended to have greater acceptance rates for unfair offers following observed nonverbal social interactions with proposers compared with control, suggesting an enhancing effect of social interactions on cooperative decisions. ERP results showed greater N1 and N2 responses at the beginning of social interaction conditions compared with control, and greater sustained and late positivity responses for observed approach and avoidance proposer behaviors compared with control. Event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) results showed differential sensitivity within theta, alpha, and beta bands during observation of social interactions and offers that was associated with subsequent decision behaviors. Together, these results point to the impact of proposers' nonverbal behaviors on subsequent cooperation decisions at both behavioral and neural levels. The ERP and ERSP findings suggest modulated attention, monitoring, and processing of biological motion during the observed nonverbal social interactions, influencing the participants' responses to offers. These findings shed light on electrophysiological correlates of response to observed social interactions that predict subsequent social decisions.

Available evidence highlights the importance of emotion regulation (ER) in psychological well-being. However, translation of the beneficial effects of ER from laboratory to real-life remains scarce. Here, we present proof-of-principle evidence from a novel cognitive-emotional training intervention targeting the development of ER skills aimed at increasing resilience against emotional distress. This pilot intervention involved training military veterans over 5–8 weeks in applying two effective ER strategies [Focused Attention (FA) and Cognitive Reappraisal (CR)] to scenarios presenting emotional conflicts (constructed with both external and internal cues). Training was preceded and followed by neuropsychological, personality, and clinical assessments, and resting-state functional MRI data were also collected from a subsample of the participants. Results show enhanced executive function and psychological well-being following training, reflected in increased working memory (WM), post-traumatic growth (PTG), and general self-efficacy (GSE). Brain imaging results showed evidence of diminished bottom-up influences from emotional and perceptual brain regions, along with evidence of normalized functional connectivity in the large-scale functional networks following training. The latter was reflected in increased connectivity among cognitive and emotion control regions and across regions of self-referential and control networks. Overall, our results provide proof-of-concept evidence that resilience and well-being can be learned through ER training, and that training-related improvements manifested in both behavioral change and neuroplasticity can translate into real-life benefits.