Incentive effects occurred in both block- and trial-based contrasts, enhancing performance in all trial types except AY, which was characterized by sharp increases in errors with both block and trial manipulations; this pattern is consistent with increased proactive utilization of contextual cue information.
Furthermore, we used these indices to calculate difference scores, Rew Difference and Pos Difference (i.e., the extents to which proactive control increased under trial manipulations of incentive/positive emotion in Rew Rew and Pos Pos, relative to Rew Neut and Pos Neut, respectively).
Suggestions and recommendations for future research are discussed, including using trial-by-trial manipulation of regulation instructions and studying the effect of stimulus arousal on up- and down-regulation of positive emotions.
Because the trial-by-trial manipulation of reward value was indicated to participants at the start of each trial, this value could be encoded and represented in a fully transient manner.
Specifically, F/D, but not our study, involved (a) a distractor AX-CPT variant associated with increased difficulty, which may have increased its susceptibility to positive affect; (b) a fully between-subjects manipulation of emotion/reward; and (c) only trial-by-trial manipulations of positive affect.
We next examined event-related increases related to the trial-by-trial incentive manipulation.
These regions replicate well the regions identified to show monetary incentive-related sustained activity in our prior work [8], even though that study involved a different task, no trial-by-trial incentive manipulation, and no comparison to Liquid incentives.
Furthermore, transient pupil activity did not significantly change with trial-by-trial emotion manipulation.
Although potential concerns exist regarding the effects of fatigue over time and the emotional validity of the IAPS images used as a trial-by-trial emotion manipulation, self-report evidence indicates that the block-based positive emotion induction did elicit the desired effect.
Next year the team will look at establishing semi-wild enclosures populated with captive-bred animals where they will trial environmental manipulation to try to help frogs survive in the wild with the disease.
In 1 trial, spinal manipulation was compared to amitriptyline.
