ArticleJournal of cognitive neuroscience2012
Processing of emotional distraction is both automatic and modulated by attention: evidence from an event-related fMRI investigation.
Article in Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The influence of emotional stimuli on response inhibition: a systematic review in non-clinical adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Simultaneous manipulation of emotion and working memory load distorts temporal distance memory.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Distractor processing of emotional faces: behavioral and women-only fMRI findings on the perceptual load-dilution debate.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- The influence of perceptual load on behavioral interference of simultaneous positive and negative emotional distractors.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- The impact of fear of pain on the temporal processing of emotional faces: modulation of attentional resources.Cognitive processing · 2025Article
- Pupillometry: A Simple and Automatic Way to Explore Implicit Cognitive Processing.Bio-protocol · 2025Article
- Dissociating and linking divergent effects of emotion on cognition: insights from current research and emerging directions.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Multi-level processing of emotions in life motion signals revealed through pupil responses.eLife · 2024Article
- Altered Functional Activity and Functional Connectivity of Seed Regions Based on ALFF Following Acupuncture Treatment in Patients with Stroke Sequelae with Unilateral Limb Numbness.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2023Article
- Natural sleep loss is associated with lower mPFC activity during negative distracter processing.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- In exogenous attention, time is the clue: Brain and heart interactions to survive threatening stimuli.PloS one · 2021Article
- The Impact of Focused Attention on Emotional Experience: A Functional MRI Investigation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Positive reinforcement modulates fronto-limbic systems subserving emotional interference in adolescents.Behavioural brain research · 2018Article
- Responding to emotional scenes: effects of response outcome and picture repetition on reaction times and the late positive potential.Cognition & emotion · 2018Article
- Modulating Effects of Contextual Emotions on the Neural Plasticity Induced by Word Learning.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2018Article
- Cardiorespiratory concerns shape brain responses during automatic panic-related scene processing in patients with panic disorder.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN · 2018Article
- Distracting tracking: Interactions between negative emotion and attentional load in multiple-object tracking.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2017Article
- Task difficulty modulates brain activation in the emotional oddball task.Brain research · 2017Article
- Differential functional connectivity of rostral anterior cingulate cortex during emotional interference.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2017Article
- Emotional Picture Perception: Repetition Effects in Free-Viewing and during an Explicit Categorization Task.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Traditionally, emotional stimuli have been thought to be automatically processed via a bottom-up automatic "capture of attention" mechanism. Recently, this view has been challenged by evidence that emotion processing depends on the availability of attentional resources. Although these two views are not mutually exclusive, direct evidence reconciling them is lacking. One limitation of previous investigations supporting the traditional or competing views is that they have not systematically investigated the impact of emotional charge of task-irrelevant distraction in conjunction with manipulations of attentional demands. Using event-related fMRI, we investigated the nature of emotion-cognition interactions in a perceptual discrimination task with emotional distraction by manipulating both the emotional charge of the distracting information and the demands of the main task. Our findings show that emotion processing is both automatic and modulated by attention, but emotion and attention were only found to interact when finer assessments of emotional charge (comparison of most vs. least emotional conditions) were considered along with an effective manipulation of processing load (high vs. low). The study also identified brain regions reflecting the detrimental impact of emotional distraction on performance as well as regions involved in coping with such distraction. Activity in the dorsomedial pFC and ventrolateral pFC was linked to a detrimental impact of emotional distraction, whereas the dorsal ACC and lateral occipital cortex were involved in helping with emotional distraction. These findings demonstrate that task-irrelevant emotion processing is subjective to both the emotional content of distraction and the level of attentional demand.
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Registered trials
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