The Impact of Emotional States on Cognitive Control Circuitry and Function.

Typically in the laboratory, cognitive and emotional processes are studied separately or as a stream of fleeting emotional stimuli embedded within a cognitive task. Yet in life, thoughts and actions often occur in more lasting emotional states of arousal. The current study examines the impact of emotions on actions using a novel behavioral paradigm and functional neuroimaging to assess cognitive control under sustained states of threat (anticipation of an aversive noise) and excitement (anticipation of winning money). Thirty-eight healthy adult participants were scanned while performing an emotional go/no-go task with positive (happy faces), negative (fearful faces), and neutral (calm faces) emotional cues, under threat or excitement. Cognitive control performance was enhanced during the excited state relative to a nonarousing control condition. This enhanced performance was paralleled by heightened activity of frontoparietal and frontostriatal circuitry. In contrast, under persistent threat, cognitive control was diminished when the valence of the emotional cue conflicted with the emotional state. Successful task performance in this conflicting emotional condition was associated with increased activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, a default mode network region implicated in complex processes such as processing emotions in the context of self and monitoring performance. This region showed positive coupling with frontoparietal circuitry implicated in cognitive control, providing support for a role of the posterior cingulate cortex in mobilizing cognitive resources to improve performance. These findings suggest that emotional states of arousal differentially modulate cognitive control and point to the potential utility of this paradigm for understanding effects of situational and pathological states of arousal on behavior.

The cognitive and neurobiological effects of daily stress in adolescents.

Increased stress reactivity during adolescence coincides with maturation of cognitive abilities and development of the prefrontal cortex. Although the effects of early-life, chronic, and pervasive stress on cognition have been extensively explored across development, very little is known about the effects of naturalistic, daily stress on adolescent cognition. In this study, our goal was to use a naturalistic approach to determine whether participants' own stressful experiences from daily life impacted cognitive performance and associated neural correlates. Adolescent and adult participants provided daily ratings of stress and underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) twice: once under a self-reported "high-stress" state and once under a self-reported "low-stress" state. While in the scanner, participants performed a response inhibition task. Behaviorally, all participants exhibited worse response inhibition under high, versus low, stress states, an effect that was significantly stronger in adolescents. At the neural level, there was a significant age by stress interaction, such that adolescents exhibited less recruitment of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during inhibition under high-stress versus low-stress; adults evinced the opposite activation pattern in DLPFC. These data suggest that the developing brain may be a more vulnerable target to the cognitive and neurobiological effects of daily stress.

Adult Recollections of Peer Victimization during Middle School: Forms and Consequences.

This study examined memories of peer victimization by eliciting narratives from university students (N = 210) about one previous experience of peer maltreatment during middle school, and investigating how these recollections related to current levels of adjustment. The majority of participants described an experience of social victimization (70.0%) or physical victimization (16.7%), and analyses examining form of victimization were limited to these participants (n = 182). Previous experiences of peer maltreatment during middle school were associated with negative indices of adjustment in early adulthood. The implications of our findings for school intervention programs are discussed.

Persistent versus periodic experiences of social victimization: predictors of adjustment.

This study examined self-reports of social victimization and parent reports of adjustment for a sample followed from fourth through seventh grades. Different patterns of social victimization experiences were identified; of the 153 students (79 girls) with complete data, 24% reported chronic social victimization, 23% reported transient experiences of social victimization, and 53% reported being socially victimized at no more than one time point. We examined whether students who experienced persistent and periodic social victimization were at greater risk for internalizing problems than nonvictims. Persistently victimized children demonstrated continuously elevated levels of internalizing problems. Children who were not originally victimized by social aggression but became victimized with time did not demonstrate higher levels of internalizing problems than did nonvictims. Findings were mixed for those who escaped social victimization during this period.