51. Proactive Control of Emotional Distraction: Evidence From EEG Alpha Suppression
- Author
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Christel Devue, Paul M. Corballis, Gina M. Grimshaw, and Justin Murphy
- Subjects
genetic structures ,emotion ,Electroencephalography ,behavioral disciplines and activities ,050105 experimental psychology ,lcsh:RC321-571 ,03 medical and health sciences ,Behavioral Neuroscience ,0302 clinical medicine ,Distraction ,medicine ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,cognitive control ,EEG ,Valence (psychology) ,lcsh:Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry ,Biological Psychiatry ,Original Research ,medicine.diagnostic_test ,05 social sciences ,Attentional control ,Emotional stimuli ,Human Neuroscience ,attention ,Psychiatry and Mental health ,Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology ,Behavioral data ,Neurology ,alpha suppression ,Psychology ,Alpha power ,psychological phenomena and processes ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Eeg alpha ,Cognitive psychology - Abstract
Biased attention towards emotional stimuli is adaptive, as it facilitates responses to important threats and rewards. An unfortunate consequence is that emotional stimuli can become potent distractors when they are irrelevant to current goals. How can this distraction be overcome despite the bias to attend to emotional stimuli? Recent studies show that distraction by irrelevant flankers is reduced when distractor frequency is high, even if they are emotional. A parsimonious explanation is that the expectation of frequent distractors promotes the use of proactive control, whereby attentional control settings can be altered to minimize distraction before it occurs. It is difficult, however, to infer proactive control on the basis of behavioral data alone. We therefore measured neural indices of proactive control while participants performed a target-detection task in which irrelevant peripheral distractors (either emotional or neutral) could appear either frequently (on 75% of trials) or rarely (on 25% of trials). We measured alpha power during the pre-stimulus period to assess proactive control and during the post-stimulus period to determine the consequences of control for subsequent processing. Pre-stimulus alpha power was tonically suppressed in the high, compared to low, distractor frequency condition, regardless of expected distractor valence, indicating sustained use of proactive control. In contrast, post-stimulus alpha suppression was reduced in the high-frequency condition, suggesting that proactive control reduced the need for post-stimulus adjustments. Our findings indicate that a sustained proactive control strategy accounts for the reduction in both emotional and non-emotional distraction when distractors are expected to appear frequently.
- Published
- 2020