Hostility, forgiveness, and cognitive impairment over 10 years in a national sample of American adults.

OBJECTIVE: We examined the extent to which self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others moderated the association of hostility with changes in cognitive impairment over 10 years in a nationally representative sample of adults in the United States. METHOD: Participants were 1,084 respondents to the Americans' Changing Lives survey, a longitudinal study of American adults. Hostility, self-forgiveness, forgiveness of others, and cognitive impairment were measured at baseline, and cognitive impairment was assessed again at follow-up. Moderated multiple regression analyses tested whether self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others moderated the association of hostility with changes in cognitive impairment over time, controlling for baseline cognitive impairment and relevant sociodemographic and clinical factors. RESULTS: As hypothesized, greater hostility levels at baseline predicted more cognitive impairment 10 years later, ß = .08, p < .01. In addition, self-forgiveness at baseline moderated the association between baseline hostility and cognitive impairment at follow-up, ß = -.07, p < .01. Decomposing this interaction revealed that hostility significantly predicted increased cognitive impairment at follow-up for individuals with low, ß = .15, p < .001, and average, ß = .08, p = .001, levels of self-forgiveness but not for persons with high levels of self-forgiveness, ß = .03, p = .34. In contrast, forgiveness of others was not a significant moderator. CONCLUSIONS: Greater hostility is associated with the development of more cognitive impairment over 10 years, and being more self-forgiving appears to mitigate these hostility-related effects on cognition. Enhancing self-forgiveness may thus represent one possible strategy for promoting cognitive resilience in adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The influence of negative affect on the neural correlates of cognitive control.

Negative affect can be associated with the disruption of processes supporting cognitive control. The current study investigated the hypothesis that chronic negative affect is associated with a decrease in the utilization of proactive control and an increase in reliance on reactive control. Individuals performed the counting Stroop task while event-related brain potentials were recorded. Negative affect, as measured with the Beck Depression Inventory II, was associated with a decrease in the amplitude of a pre-stimulus slow wave and an increase in the amplitude of the medial frontal negativity, and was weakly related to the amplitude of the conflict sustained potential. These findings lead to the suggestion that negative affect may attenuate the engagement of processes associated with both proactive and reactive cognitive control.

Differential effects of aging on processes underlying task switching.

In this study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine the effects of aging on processes underlying task switching. The response time data revealed an age-related increase in mixing costs before controlling for general slowing and no effect of aging on switching costs. In the cue-locked epoch, the ERP data revealed little effect of age on the parietal P3 related to cue encoding, an age-related decrease in parietal activity related to cue retrieval, and an age-related increase in the amplitude of the parietal and frontal activity related to task set configuration and rule mapping. In the target-locked epoch, there was differential neural recruitment in younger and older adults in response to task mixing. These data are consistent with the idea that older adults may not fully implement task set before onset of the target stimulus.

Neural correlates of cue retrieval, task set reconfiguration, and rule mapping in the explicit cue task switching paradigm.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used in two experiments to examine the neural correlates of processes underlying task switching in the information-reduction task switching paradigm. Each experiment included 22 participants. The paradigm included two cues for each task. This element of the design allowed us to differentiate the ERP correlates of cue retrieval, task set reconfiguration, and rule mapping. The ERP data revealed a parietal slow wave that was sensitive to processes associated with cue retrieval and task set reconfiguration and a frontal-polar slow wave that was sensitive to processes associated with rule mapping. These findings further the proposal that an endogenous act of control supporting processes related to task set reconfiguration and rule mapping may facilitate performance of the explicit cue task switching paradigm.

Tracking the temporal dynamics of updating cognitive control: an examination of error processing.

In 2 experiments, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine the temporal dynamics of neural processes related to adjustments of cognitive control following errors in the counting Stroop task. The ERPs elicited by errors revealed the error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity consistent with a large body of literature. In addition, errors were associated with a frontal slow wave between 200 and 2000 ms after the response that was consistent with the activity of neural generators in the lateral frontal cortex. The ERN and frontal slow wave were correlated with posterror slowing of response time and positive affect (i.e., happiness and calmness) during task performance. These data are consistent with the idea that interactions between anterior cingulate cortex and lateral frontal cortex support adjustments of cognitive control and that this neural network is sensitive to the influence of affect experienced during task performance.

Gone but not forgotten: the effects of cancelled intentions on the neural correlates of prospective memory.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the neural correlates of the prospective interference effect and the effects of canceling an intention on the neural correlates of prospective memory. The response time data revealed a prospective interference effect that was associated with the engagement of prospective retrieval mode and item checking. The ERP data revealed that item checking was associated with sustained activity over the frontal and occipital-parietal regions of the scalp beginning at around 300 ms after stimulus onset. The ERP data also revealed that canceling an intention may have blocked the retrieval of the intention from memory when the prospective cue was encountered and led to a significant attenuation in the degree that the neural correlates of cue detection and post-retrieval processes were expressed.