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

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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.