How does higher level cognition affect emotion? Neurophysiological and behavioral investigations

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Emotion and cognition interact in important ways. Much of my previous research has documented that emotions affect reasoning. We know very little about the relation in the other direction: how higher-level cognitive processes contribute to emotion. This is what I will examine in this program of research, examining in particular how abstract thinking may shape emotional responses. According to dual-process models of cognition, Type 2, higher-level cognitive processes, allow for abstract and decontextualized thinking; they are flexible and goal-directed and they rely on working memory. The general aim of my program is to directly, experimentally, manipulate the preponderance of Type 2 processing to examine it's causal impact on emotional responses. We will try to increase or decrease the extent of Type 2 processing using different techniques: forced rapid responses, priming with semantic or abstract reasoning, and priming with abstract or concrete analogies. We will also use repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to alter the activity of certain brain structure that are key in working memory and abstract thinking. Cross-cultural studies will allow us to examine the impact of learning and culture on emotional responses. We will compare emotional and neutral stimuli in reasoning tasks (deductive reasoning) and attentional tasks (visual search; emotional Stroop). We will measure different dimensions of the emotional response: cognitive, self-report, and psychophysiological. Sympathetic arousal will be indexed using heart rate variability and skin conductance. We will use event-related potentials to measure early visual processing (P1) and later, more cognitively complex responses (P300, N400). The main hypothesis we will examine is that when Type 2 processes are primed/available/developed, this magnifies the amplitude of certain emotional responses: the effect of emotion on reasoning, the visual processing of emotional stimuli (P1), the advantage in detecting threatening stimuli (in the visual search task), even physiological responses to emotional stimuli. The proposed research will be novel in examining how higher-level cognitive processes affect emotions. Previous work has shown that specific semantic contents (priming precise thoughts or concepts) can affect emotion. The proposed work is novel in examining whether the process of abstract thinking itself affects emotion. Results of this research could nuance the widespread view that emotions are automatic and reflexive; it could illustrate how intelligence, complex cognitive processes, actually contribute to the construction of human emotion.