ARTICLE UPDATE - Emotions in Go/NoGo conflicts.

Schacht A, Nigbur R, Sommer W.

Psychological Research, in press

On the basis of current emotion theories and functional and neurophysiological ties between the processing of conflicts and errors on the one hand and errors and emotions on the other hand we predicted that conflicts between prepotent Go responses and occasional NoGo trials in the Go/NoGo task would induce emotions. Skin conductance responses (SCRs), corrugator muscle activity, and startle blink responses were measured in three experiments requiring speeded Go responses intermixed with NoGo trials of different relative probability and in a choice reaction experiment serving as a control. NoGo trials affected several of these emotion-sensitive indicators as SCRs and startle blinks were reduced whereas corrugator activity was prolonged as compared to Go trials. From the pattern of findings we suggest that NoGo conflicts are not aversive. Instead, they appear to be appraised as obstructive for the response goal and as less action relevant than Go trials.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Neural substrates of the interaction of emotional stimulus processing and motor inhibitory control: An emotional linguistic go/no-go

Martin Goldsteina et al.

NeuroImage, in press

Neural substrates of behavioral inhibitory control have been probed in a variety of animal model, physiologic, behavioral, and imaging studies, many emphasizing the role of prefrontal circuits. Likewise, the neurocircuitry of emotion has been investigated from a variety of perspectives. Recently, neural mechanisms mediating the interaction of emotion and behavioral regulation have become the focus of intense study. To further define neurocircuitry specifically underlying the interaction between emotional processing and response inhibition, we developed an emotional linguistic go/no-go fMRI paradigm with a factorial block design which joins explicit inhibitory task demand (i.e., go or no-go) with task-unrelated incidental emotional stimulus valence manipulation, to probe the modulation of the former by the latter. In this study of normal subjects focusing on negative emotional processing, we hypothesized activity changes in specific frontal neocortical and limbic regions reflecting modulation of response inhibition by negative stimulus processing. We observed common fronto-limbic activations (including orbitofrontal cortical and amygdalar components) associated with the interaction of emotional stimulus processing and response suppression. Further, we found a distributed cortico-limbic network to be a candidate neural substrate for the interaction of negative valence-specific processing and inhibitory task demand. These findings have implications for elucidating neural mechanisms of emotional modulation of behavioral control, with relevance to a variety of neuropsychiatric disease states marked by behavioral dysregulation within the context of negative emotional processing.