This latter position would predict a main effect of emotion; that is, significantly greater gamma synchronization power for emotional relative to neutral stimuli "irrespective" of awareness.
Indeed, its hero, Jacques Austerlitz, emerges as an emotional relative of the doomed exiles described in that earlier book -- another man who apparently escaped from the Nazis with his life only to find himself haunted afterward by feelings of loss, displacement and terror.
If this is the case, then since consolidation takes time, the enhancement in the recollective experience for emotional relative to neutral memories should increase following a delay.
The hypothesis that emotional versus cognitive conflict may depend on distinct subdivisions of the ACC was based on evidence from emotional adaptations of the Stroop task, which examine interference from emotional distracters (e.g., performance of the colour-naming task for emotional relative to non-emotional words; [19]).
To further quantify the attentional enhancement effects of emotional, relative to neutral images, that was observed at 800 ms, an emotional blink magnitude (EBM) score was determined by subtracting the percent correct for the emotion trials at a particular lag from the neutral trials at the same lag.
Further analysis revealed that the interaction was due to reduced perfusion in the emotional relative to the neutral condition in spontaneous participants (x, y, z: 44, 4, 52, t = −5.67, p = 0.030, corrected), while in instructed participants perfusion increased slightly (x, y, z: 48, 0, 52; t = 2.23, p = 0.017; see Figure 3).
In all cases, there was significantly greater ERS to emotional relative to neutral trials.
In the present study, we observed that emotional relative to neutral stimuli were associated with significantly greater gamma band synchronization.
Both groups showed an emotional Stroop effect on pure blocks manifest as slower RTs on the emotional, relative to the neutral, block.
