In certain situations, the incompatibility of emotional cues regarding semantic information in an associative context requires cognitive processes in order to solve this conflict.
Likewise, another recent study [18] reported distinct patterns of conflict-related neural activity in conditions involving emotional stimulus-response (S-R) incompatibility (emotion expression interference; elicited via making facial expressions incongruent with those of presented faces) with cognitive S-R incompatibility (elicited via the Simon task).
This paradigm capitalized on the use of controlled facial expressions as a response modality to generate S-R incompatibility that was either emotional or non-emotional in nature.
Accordingly, we developed a new paradigm to examine emotional conflict via S-R incompatibility using emotional facial expressions to emotional, but non-face stimuli [25].
By the time they are ready to settle down, their male contemporaries are married or looking for younger, softer women; if it's not too late for a husband, it's likely to be too late for a baby; if they manage to produce one, they'll confront the fundamental incompatibility - practical, psychological, emotional - of motherhood and career.
The emotion expression interference paradigm developed by Lee and colleagues [18] is a first step in exploring S-R incompatibility in the context of emotional conflict: this paradigm examines interference when participants make emotional facial expressions as a behavioral response, capitalizing on their role as an index of emotional experience and expression [24].
While some divorces are clearly justified by physical or emotional abuse, intolerable infidelity, addictive behavior or irreconcilable incompatibility, experts say many severed marriages seem to have just withered and died from a lack of effort to keep the embers of love alive.
The examination of brain activity associated with the processing of these two forms of S-R incompatibility helps clarify the extent to which emotional conflict relies on neural circuitry common to that associated with more traditionally studied forms of cognitive conflict.
A novel adaptation of the AX Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), a stimulus-response incompatibility paradigm, was examined that permits close comparison of emotional and cognitive conflict conditions, through the use of affectively-valenced facial expressions as the response modality.
