Is negative affect necessary for cognitive control? Toward an affect alarm framework of control

认知控制使人们能够克制自己的心灵、身体和思想，远离日常生活的诱惑，转向更安全、更健康的抱负。虽然可以通过看似微不足道的任务(例如，颜色命名)来评估，但认知控制预测了一系列具有个人和社会意义的令人印象深刻的行为，包括体重增加、大学成绩、问题赌博和性不忠等。鉴于其深远的影响，认知控制的研究不仅对认知科学家，而且对经济学家和其他政策制定者都非常重要。拟议的研究计划建立在我过去关于认知控制基本过程的工作基础上，特别是认知控制的神经基础，在那里我研究了一种诱发的大脑潜力思想，以反映大脑控制网络中关键节点的活动。它还建立在我过去关于认知控制和认知控制失败的各种文化、情景和动机前因的工作基础上。拟议的假设驱动研究计划的主要目标是探索认知控制的基本神经、情感和认知过程。具体地说，我问的是激发认知控制的因素，重点是负面情绪或负面情绪的重要性。这项拟议的研究测试了来自我最近提出的控制情感警报框架的预测。基于动物研究、控制论、认知神经科学和临床研究的综合证据，情感警报框架表明，负面情绪是认知控制不可或缺的必要组成部分，它提醒人们注意它的需要，并激励它的执行。根据该框架，认知控制是由认知冲突的存在所激发的，认知冲突会产生阶段性和暂时性的负面情绪。这些非常快速的影响作用是提醒人们，他们的目标有可能无法实现，并引发行为从常规到可控的转变。虽然负面情绪是控制的必要部分，但仅有控制是不够的。负面情绪只会在负面情绪强度适中的程度上招募控制力；如果负面情绪强度太高，就会分散注意力，与控制加工竞争。情绪警报的第二个调节因素是心理定势：对于那些对自己的情绪状态具有接受性和非防御性的人来说，负面情绪尤其有可能招致控制。尽管支持该框架关键方面的证据趋同，但对其他方面的审查相对较少。因此，拟议研究的目标是调查该框架中相对未被探索的方面是否得到了经验支持。具体地说，虽然人们普遍认为认知控制是由认知冲突引起的，从现象学的角度来看，认知冲突是一种厌恶状态，但负面情绪是否直接预测认知控制，或者负面情绪是否只是认知冲突的副产品，与控制无关，目前还不太清楚。因此，需要更直接的证据。总而言之，拟议的研究项目认识到了负面情绪在促进认知控制方面的核心作用，因此，它可以帮助理解文献中强有力的发现，并测试新的和相对未被探索的预测。我通过社会情感神经科学的方法来探索这些影响，这是一种植根于脑科学的跨学科方法，寻求在多个分析水平上理解现象。

Cognitive control allows people to restrain their hearts, bodies, and minds away from the temptations of everyday life and toward safer and healthier ambitions. Although it can be assessed by seemingly trivial tasks (e.g., color naming), cognitive control predicts an impressive variety of behaviors of both personal and societal significance, including weight gain, university grades, problem gambling, and sexual infidelity, among many others. Given its far reach, the study of cognitive control is of great importance not only to cognitive scientists, but also to economists and other policy makers. The proposed program of research builds on my past work on the basic processes underlying cognitive control, and especially the neural bases of cognitive control where I have studied an evoked brain potential thought to reflect activity in a key node in the brain’s control network. It also builds on my past work on the various cultural, situational, and motivational antecedents of cognitive control and cognitive control failure. The primary objective of the proposed program of hypothesis-driven research is to explore the basic neural, affective, and cognitive processes that underlie cognitive control. In specific, I ask about the factors that instigate cognitive control, zeroing in on the importance of negative affect or negative emotion. The proposed research tests predictions stemming from my recently advanced affect alarm framework of control. Based on converging evidence from animal research, cybernetics, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical studies, the affect alarm framework suggests that negative emotion is an integral and necessary part of cognitive control, alerting people to its need and motivating its execution. According to the framework, cognitive control is instigated by the presence of cognitive conflict that produces phasic and transient twinges of negative affect. These very fast affects function to alert people to the possibility that their goals are at risk of not being met and arouse shifts in behavior from routine to controlled. Although negative affect is a necessary part of control, it is not sufficient to instigate control. Negative affect will only recruit control to the extent that the intensity of the negative affect is moderate; if it is too high, it will be distracting and compete with control processing. A second moderator of the affect alarm is mental-set: negative affect will be especially likely to recruit control for people who are receptive and non-defensive about their own emotional states. Although there is a convergence of evidence in support of key aspects of the framework, other aspects are relatively less examined. The goal of the proposed research is to therefore investigate whether the relatively unexplored aspects of the framework find empirical support. Specifically, although it is generally agreed that cognitive control is instigated by cognitive conflict, which is experienced phenomenologically as an aversive state, it is less clear whether negative affect directly predicts cognitive control or whether negative affect is merely a byproduct of cognitive conflict, but unrelated to control. Thus, more direct evidence is needed. In sum, the proposed program of research appreciates the central role of negative emotion in prompting cognitive control, and as such, it can help make sense of robust findings in the literature and test novel and relatively unexplored predictions. I explore these effects by taking a social affective neuroscience approach, which is an interdisciplinary approach rooted in the brain sciences and that seeks to understand phenomena at multiple levels of analysis.