The Time Course of the Aversive Conflict Signal
Abstract
The idea that conflicts are aversive signals recently has gained strong support by both physiological as well as psychological evidence. However, the time course of the aversive signal has not been subject to direct investigation. In the present study, participants had to judge the valence of neutral German words after being primed with conflict or non-conflict Stroop stimuli in three experiments with varying SOA (200 ms, 400 ms, 800 ms) and varying prime presentation time. Conflict priming effects (i.e., increased frequencies of negative judgments after conflict as compared to non-conflict primes) were found for SOAs of 200 ms and 400 ms, but absent (or even reversed) with a SOA of 800 ms. These results imply that the aversiveness of conflicts is evaluated automatically with short SOAs, but is actively counteracted with prolonged prime presentation.
References
(2012). Evidence for the automatic evaluation of self-generated actions. Cognition, 124, 117–127.
(2006). Affective priming with pictures of emotional scenes: The role of perceptual similarity and category relatedness. Spanish Journal of Psychology, 9, 10–18.
(1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968–1987. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 265–289.
(2007). Conflict monitoring and decision making: Reconciling two perspectives on anterior cingulated function. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 7, 356–366.
(2001). Conflict monitoring and cognitive control. Psychological Review, 108, 624–652.
(2009). Embodiment of abstract concepts: good and bad in right- and left-handers. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138, 351–367.
(1998). Affective and identity priming with episodically associated stimuli. Cognition and Emotion, 12, 145–169.
(2012a). Conflicts as aversive signals. Brain & Cognition, 72, 94–98.
(2012b). The role of affect and reward in the conflict-triggered adjustment of cognitive control. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 342.
(2001). On the activation of associated evaluations: An overview. Cognition and Emotion, 15, 115–141.
(1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 229–238.
(2013). Conflicts as aversive signals: Conflict priming increases negative judgments for neutral stimuli. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 13, 311–317.
(1994). The affective priming effect: Automatic activation of evaluative information in memory. Cognition and Emotion, 8, 515–533.
(2001). A time course analysis of the affective priming effect. Cognition and Emotion, 15, 143–165.
(2003). Automatic affective priming of recently acquired stimulus valence: Priming at SOA 300 but not at SOA 1000. Cognition and Emotion, 17, 83–99.
(2002). The neural basis of human error processing: Reinforcement learning, dopamine, and the error-related negativity. Psychological Review, 109, 679–709.
(2004). Anterior cingulate conflict monitoring and adjustments in control. Science, 303, 1023–1026.
(1997). List-context effects in evaluative priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 246–255.
(2009). Contrast effects in spontaneous evaluations: A psychophysical account. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 265–287.
(2007). Autonomic arousal in cognitive conflict resolution. Autonomic Neuroscience – Basic, 132, 70–75.
(2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review Neuroscience, 24, 167–202.
(1997). The stress of Stroop performance: Physiological and emotional responses to color-word interference, task pacing, and pacing speed. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 27, 87–97.
(2003). Motivation and attention: Incongruent effects of feedback on the processing of valence. Emotion, 3, 223–238.
(2011). Counter-regulation and control-dependency: Affective processing biases in the service of action regulation. Social Psychology, 42, 56–66. doi: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000043.
(2008). Counter-regulation in affective attentional bias: A basic mechanism that warrants flexibility in motivation and emotion. Emotion, 8, 34–46.
(2012). Conflict: run! Reduced Stroop interference with avoidance responses. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65, 1052–1058.
(2011). The integration of negative affect, pain and cognitive control in the cingulate cortex. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 12, 154–167.
(1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643–662.
(2013). Blinking predicts enhanced cognitive control. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 13, 346–354.
(2013). Pupil dilation in the Simon task as a marker of conflict processing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 215.
(2009). Reward counteracts conflict adaptation. Evidence for a role of affect in executive control. Psychological Science, 20, 1473–1477.
(2012). Reward valence modulates conflict- driven attentional adaptation: Electrophysiological evidence. Biological Psychology, 90, 234–241.
(2009). The Berlin Affective Word List Reloaded (BAWL-R). Behavior Research Methods, 41, 534–538.
