ArticlePsychophysiology2020
The face of control: Corrugator supercilii tracks aversive conflict signals in the service of adaptive cognitive control.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Revisiting the post-resolution positivity effect in conflict tasks: Meta-analytic and behavioral evidence for context-dependent affective valence of conflict resolution.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Pooled it
- The experience of cognitive conflict is intrinsically rewarding.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Self-Generated Expectations of Hazard Prevalence Affect Virtual Search and Rescue.Human factors · 2026Article
- Laughter regulation in solitary and social contexts varies across emotion regulation strategies.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The role of cognitive conflict-induced negative affect in adaptive performance adjustments: An ERP investigation comparing subjective experience and implicit regulation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- The Role of Cognitive Effort in Emotion Regulation.Affective science · 2025Review
- Unequal resource division occurs in the absence of group division and identity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Non-verbal effecting - animal research sheds light on human emotion communication.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- More than a feeling: physiological measures of affect index the integration of effort costs and rewards during anticipatory effort evaluation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Is cognitive conflict really effortful? Conflict priming and shielding effects on cardiac response.Psychophysiology · 2023Article
- Multiple Routes to Control in the Prime-Target Task: Congruence Sequence Effects Emerge Due to Modulation of Irrelevant Prime Activity and Utilization of Temporal Order Information.Journal of cognition · 2021Article
- Acute effects of alcohol on error-elicited negative affect during a cognitive control task.Psychopharmacology · 2020Article
- The face of control: Corrugator supercilii tracks aversive conflict signals in the service of adaptive cognitive control.Psychophysiology · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Cognitive control is the ability to monitor, evaluate, and adapt behavior in the service of long-term goals. Recent theories have proposed that the integral negative emotions elicited by conflict are critical for the adaptive adjustment of cognitive control. However, evidence for the negative valence of conflict in cognitive control tasks mainly comes from behavioral studies that interrupted trial sequences, making it difficult to directly test the link between conflict-induced affect and subsequent increases in cognitive control. In the present study, we therefore use online measures of valence-sensitive electromyography (EMG) of the facial corrugator (frowning) and zygomaticus (smiling) muscles while measuring the adaptive cognitive control in a Stroop-like task. In line with the prediction that conflict is aversive, results showed that conflict relative to non-conflict trials led to increased activity of the corrugator muscles after correct responses, both in a flanker task (Experiment 1) and in a prime-probe task (Experiment 2). This conflict-induced corrugator activity effect correlated marginally with conflict-driven increases in cognitive control in the next trial in the confound-minimalized task used in Experiment 2. However, in the absence of performance feedback (Experiment 3), no reliable effect of conflict was observed in the facial muscle activity despite robust behavioral conflict adaptation. Taken together, our results show that facial EMG can be used as an indirect index of the temporal dynamics of conflict-induced aversive signals and/or effortful processes in particular when performance feedback is presented, providing important new insights into the dynamic affective nature of cognitive control.
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