Reactive and effortful processes in the organization of temperament.

Self-organization can be approached in terms of developmental processes occurring within and between component systems of temperament. Within-system organization involves progressive shaping of cortical representations by subcortical motivational systems. As cortical representations develop, they feed back to provide motivational systems with enhanced detection and guidance capabilities. These reciprocal influences may amplify the underlying motivational functions and promote excessive impulsivity or anxiety. However, these processes also depend upon interactions arising between motivational and attentional systems. We discuss these between-system effects by considering the regulation of approach motivation by reactive attentional processes related to fear and by more voluntary processes related to effortful control. It is suggested than anxious and impulsive psychopathology may reflect limitations in these dual means of control, which can take the form of overregulation as well as underregulation.

Temperament and attention: orienting toward and away from positive and negative signals.

Two studies used a target detection task to examine temperament-related attentional biases toward and away from significant stimuli. Pretarget cues were used to orient attention to locations carrying a positive incentive value (where points could be gained) or a negative value (where points could be lost). Under both involuntary and voluntary conditions, extraverts were slow to shift attention away from positive locations, whereas introverts were slow to shift from negative locations. These biases were enhanced on trials following negative feedback and tended to be strongest in Ss high in Neuroticism. The findings support models proposing that Extraversion reflects the combined activity of positive (strongest in extraverts) and negative (strongest in introverts) incentive motivational processes. They further suggest that incentive processes regulate the ability to shift attention away from, rather than toward, significant stimuli.

Neural mechanisms of emotion.

When viewed from an evolutionary perspective, the neural mechanisms of emotion can be seen to be distributed across the brainstem, limbic, paralimbic, and neocortical regions. Descending and ascending connections among these levels are discussed in relation to three types of emotional processes: peripheral effects on patterned bodily responses, central effects on cognitive processing, and subjective emotional experience. Descending influences from the higher to the lower levels allow for an increasing coordination and flexibility of emotional responses, culminating in patterned activity across the peripheral endocrine, autonomic, and motor systems. Ascending influences from lower to higher levels provide preparatory modulation of cortical pathways, thus enabling perceptual and cognitive processing that is adaptive given the current emotional state. The bodily feelings of emotion are a function of cortical interoceptive sensory fields, activated by centrally generated signals or peripheral inputs from the body.

The immediate effects of positive and negative feedback signals.

Reaction time priming techniques were used in 4 experiments to assess the effects of feedback signals on arousal, response, and attentional processes. The letter A, C, or F served as a priming signal presented 100 ms before a target letter. Emotional value was manipulated by using A, C, and F to reflect good, average, and poor performance on the previous trial. The positive (A), neutral (C), and negative (F) primes did not differ in their effects on arousal. At the response level, positive and neutral primes exerted similar effects, and negative primes led to response inhibition. Regarding attention, positive and negative primes attracted greater attention than neutral primes, with the effect stronger for positive than for negative primes. These effects disappeared when the emotional value of the stimuli was removed, and the effects were not a consequence of expectancies or performance factors extending across trials.

Right hemisphere sensitivity to feedback.

The present studies sought to determine whether feedback-related emotional states influence perceptual and/or response processes within the right hemisphere. The task involved the presentation of a positive, neutral or negative feedback signal followed by a target in the left (LVF) or right (RVF) visual field which was spatially compatible or incompatible with its assigned response. The first two studies demonstrated that when a LVF target required a left-hand response, RTs were delayed following negative feedback and facilitated following positive feedback. These effects occurred when the target followed the feedback signal by either 100 or 500 msec, and were evident when the response selection was based on either the target's spatial location or its form. Experiment 3 showed that these feedback effects disappeared when verbal information conveyed the appropriate response. These findings indicate that feedback-related emotional processes modulate sensory-response translation processes within the right hemisphere.

The adaptive base of the neural hierarchy: elementary motivational controls on network function.

This chapter has explored a hierarchical approach to motivation, based on the idea of a vertical integration among brainstem, limbic, paralimbic, and neocortical systems. When viewed in the traditional manner, this hierarchy has been seen in terms of top-down control, with the neocortical regions exerting higher-level, converging influences over the lower regions. When viewed from an evolutionary perspective, the hierarchy proves to be balanced by a complementary pattern of divergent projections ascending from the lower to the higher levels. These ascending systems respond first to the adaptively significant properties of a stimulus, including its novelty, conspicuousness, and need relatedness. By means of their increasingly specific projection patterns, the elementary motivational mechanisms support a progressive narrowing of activity within the cortex. Selection begins with activity in ascending brainstem systems, organizing the primordial states of tonic activation and phasic arousal. Although these states are relatively general, they bias information processing in specific ways by modulating both the spatial and temporal span of attention. As limbic circuits are recruited, certain classes of adaptive response and perceptual processes are potentiated, bringing into play postural orientations and global perceptions of the environment. This response and perceptual processing promotes activity within the interoceptive fields of the paralimbic cortices, leading to primitive hedonic and energetic representations. Back-projections from paralimbic to successive neocortical fields allow these affective representations to aid further in narrowing sensory and response options. Multiple levels of representation thus work together in gradually focusing and articulating the representations forming within the hierarchical networks of the neocortex. The recent evidence on neocortical architecture shows that cortical areas tend to be most closely connected with other regions of the same level of architectonic differentiation. Thus the functional units of the cortex may be not lobes or even hemispheres but the growth rings sharing a specific laminar architecture and dense horizontal interconnections. Functional binding--the integration of the distributed representations of the cortex--may take place across these horizontal lines. Furthermore, the density of horizontal interconnections decreases for the more recently evolved neocortical growth rings, such that the primary and sensory and motor cortices are relatively isolated from all but the adjacent architectonic ring. This suggests that the most important functional binding in the cortex occurs at the more primitive, paralimbic network levels.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Effects of goal-related motivational states on the orienting of spatial attention.

Three experiments are presented indicating that motivational processes arising from incentive and feedback signals exert specific effects on the orienting of visual spatial attention. Subjects played a video game in which targets were presented in one of two peripheral locations. Pre-target cues were employed to orient attention to a location where points could be gained (positive incentive cue), to a location where points could be lost (negative incentive cue) or to neither location (neutral cue). Cost-benefit analyses were used to assess the consequences of such orienting. Although there was no evidence of general attentional biases favoring positive over negative incentives, all three experiments demonstrated an interaction between the incentive value of the current trial and the outcome of the previous trial. Following unsuccessful outcomes, attentional costs were greater for positive than negative incentives, whereas following successful outcomes, costs were larger for negative than positive cues. This pattern was evident for tasks involving detection, perceptual discrimination and memory scanning. These findings are discussed in light of contemporary models of motivation and the control of attention.

Hemispheric consequences of success-related emotional states: roles of arousal and attention.

Three experiments employed a video game technique to investigate the influence of success-related emotional states on the detection of lateralized visual targets. Emotion was manipulated by means of success and failure feedback, while central and peripheral pretarget cues were used to assess arousal and attentional processes. Under neutral conditions involving no feedback, subjects showed a right visual field (RVF) advantage along with a phasic alerting effect (i.e., reaction times were faster to targets following cues at intermediate stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs]. When emotional value was added to the task, the RVF advantage increased following failure and decreased following success feedback. This effect peaked at intermediate SOAs, corresponding with the buildup of phasic arousal initiated by the cues. It was not influenced by the location of the pretarget cues, suggesting that attentional processes are not directly involved. These results are discussed in terms of recent models of hemispheric functioning during positive and negative emotional states.

Arousal, affect, and attention as components of temperament.

Contemporary models of human temperament have been based on the general constructs of arousal, emotion, and self-regulation. In order to more precisely investigate these constructs, they were theoretically decomposed into 19 subconstructs, and homogeneous scales were developed to assess them. The scales were constructed through an item-selection technique that maximized internal consistency and minimized conceptual overlap. Correlational and factor analyses suggested that arousal can be usefully assessed in terms of its central, autonomic, and motor components. The emotions of sadness, relief, and low-intensity pleasure were most closely related to the measures of central arousal. Emotions of fear, frustration, discomfort, and high-intensity pleasure were more closely related to measures of attentional control. We discuss these findings in terms of the functional relations between arousal, emotion, and attention.