The emotive nature of conflict monitoring in the medial prefrontal cortex

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2017.01.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Conflicts during cognitive control trigger observable negative affect.

  • The valence of conflict is tracked by the anterior midcingulate cortex.

  • Negative evaluations of conflict motivate increased control implementation.

  • Openness and acceptance can aid the adaptive use of conflict-related affect.

  • These ideas generate new questions for the fields of learning and decision making.

Abstract

The detection of conflict between incompatible impulses, thoughts, and actions is a ubiquitous source of motivation across theories of goal-directed action. In this overview, we explore the hypothesis that conflict is emotive, integrating perspectives from affective science and cognitive neuroscience. Initially, we review evidence suggesting that the mental and biological processes that monitor for information processing conflict—particularly those generated by the anterior midcingulate cortex—track the affective significance of conflict and use this signal to motivate increased control. In this sense, variation in control resembles a form of affect regulation in which control implementation counteracts the aversive experience of conflict. We also highlight emerging evidence proposing that states and dispositions associated with acceptance facilitate control by tuning individuals to the emotive nature of conflict, before proposing avenues for future research, including investigating the role of affect in reinforcement learning and decision making.

Introduction

Monitoring performance for goal conflicting thoughts, feelings, and behaviours underlies flexible responding in complex, unpredictable environments. During smoking cessation, for example, quickly detecting impulses (e.g., the desire to smoke) or actions (e.g., picking up a cigarette) that conflict with the goal to quit can signal the need to control behaviour, safeguarding goal progress. Beyond unwanted temptations, conflict is evoked across diverse explanatory frameworks, ranging from high-level dissonant states that emerge when individual's hold multiple inconsistent ideologies, to seemingly lower-level conflicts that occur when stimulus dimensions cue mutually incompatible responses (e.g., Stroop conflict). Underscoring the theoretical ubiquity of conflict, detecting and overcoming some internal conflict or discord is fundamental to multiple seminal perspectives in western philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience (e.g., Baumeister et al., 2007, Botvinick et al., 2001, Carver and Scheier, 1990, Descartes, 1647; Dollard and Miller, 1950; Jung, 1939, Festinger, 1962, Freud, 1913, Proulx et al., 2012). Here, conflict is typically viewed as a crucial motivational signal, stimulating the organism to engage remedial control processes (e.g., focusing attention, becoming more cautious).

In these traditions, emotion and control are often conceptualised as parallel processes that are at odds with each other, creating states of inner turmoil that must be resolved to achieve our goals (see also Heatherton and Wagner, 2011, Kahneman, 2011, Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999). Contrasting this dualism, the present overview synthesizes evidence from multiple psychological and physiological perspectives indicating that conflict is emotive. By using the portmanteau emotive, we emphasize our view that conflict has both emotional and motivational properties. That is, conflict triggers a negatively valenced affective state, and the degree of this aversive experience motivates the upregulation of cognitive control to avoid further negative experiences.

Drawing from multiple levels of analysis, we focus on conflict monitoring signals that are putatively generated in the brain's anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC), exploring the hypothesis that this region tracks the affective valence of conflicts as they arise. We then highlight evidence suggesting that this neural response acts as a motivational input to control, with the behavioural expression of control varying systematically with the extent to which the aMCC tracks the aversiveness of conflict. For the sake of brevity, the current overview specifically emphasises research exploring the relationship between transient negative evaluations of conflict and the immediate upregulation of cognitive control. Conversely, we do not explicitly address how control might be related to positive affect (cf., Chiew and Braver, 2011); how negative task experiences (e.g., fatigue) can promote task disengagement and the shifting of priorities (cf., Carver, 2015; Inzlicht, Schmeichel, and Macrae, 2014); or how the interplay between motivation and task engagement might be critically moderated by difficulty (Gendolla, 2000).

In addition to providing an up-to-date view on the integration of conflict monitoring and negative affect, however, we intend this overview to be generative. In latter sections we discuss promising research arising from social and affective neuroscience exploring processes through which cognitive control might be improved, and end by highlighting less investigated areas. In these later sections, we focus on three areas specifically, including the coupling between physiological responses to conflict; the role of negative affect in conflict-driven reinforcement learning; and conflicts that arise during value-guided decision making. In each section, we present our view that the field psychophysiology is well poised to comprehensively address the functional integration of negative affect, motivation, and cognitive control.

Section snippets

Neural conflict monitoring and cognitive control

Cognitive control allows us to flexibly calibrate attention, cognition, and action in a goal-directed manner, particularly in novel and unpredictable environments (Banich, 2009, Botvinick et al., 2001). Behaviourally, control is often investigated using conflict paradigms (e.g., the Stroop task) that require habitual, pre-potent responses to be overridden (Cohen et al., 1990, Kerns et al., 2004) or by studying remedial control processes that occur after mistakes (i.e., post-error slowing;

The emotive nature of conflict monitoring

Before specifically addressing the emotive nature of conflict, any integrative account requires a clear working definition of emotion. While no universal gold-standard definition of emotion exists, consensus among theorists suggests that emotional episodes comprise valence judgements (i.e., positive or negative?) in response to an internal (e.g., thought) or external (e.g., a snake) stimulus, in addition to changes in physiological arousal (e.g., sweating, heart rate, pupil dilation),

The emotive nature of conflict and control implementation

Central to emotion is the urgency to act in ways that deal with immediate challenges, opportunities, or threats (Frijda, 1988, Levenson, 1999). And through these ties to changes in action, conflict can be considered emotive. Here, while motivation might broadly reflect a general urge or willingness to act, valence can give motivation the direction to either approach or avoid an event or situation (Bradley, 2009). Evaluating conflict as negative appears to trigger increased avoidance motivation,

Anxiety, acceptance, and improving cognitive control

Considering the functional integration of negative affect and cognitive control, it is noticeable that our view deviates from established views that hot, emotional processes have an antagonistic relationship with colder cognition (Baumeister and Heatherton, 1996, Heatherton and Wagner, 2011, Hofmann et al., 2009, Iordan et al., 2013, Kahneman, 2011, Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999). From this, the obvious question arises: How can different models of control provide such opposing roles for affect?

Emerging directions and unanswered questions

In this overview, we have investigated the emotive nature of conflict. We now focus on current controversies and less studied areas in the field with the goal to stimulate ongoing research.

Concluding remarks

Considerable converging evidence from affective psychophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, and social and personality psychology now indicates that conflict is aversive. Contrasting accounts in which control and emotion are seen as separable but interacting phenomena, this emerging consensus suggests that affect and cognition are functionally integrated (Inzlicht et al., 2015, Koban and Pourtois, 2014, Pessoa, 2009, Shackman et al., 2011). It is our hope that this overview will be generative,

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