Poster Sessions

Neu-45

Samantha Crowe

S. L. Crowe, I. T. N. Jurkowitz, R. J. R. Blair

The effects of negative emotional distracters on BOLD responses associated with goal-directed processing and emotion regulation

Previously, we examined how attentional control modulates emotional processing and how emotion modulates attentional control. Emotional distracters did not disrupt activity in frontal brain regions implicated in attentional control. Recently, however, we found that emotional distracters significantly disrupted attentional control regions in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients. This disruption may reflect frontal pathology in PTSD or instead be a secondary consequence of an enhanced response to emotional stimuli. In the current study, we used fMRI and an affective Stroop task to test this latter hypothesis. We predicted that if sufficiently salient, emotional stimuli would disrupt recruitment of top-down attentional systems in healthy volunteers. Volunteers (N=19) viewed two numerical displays temporally bracketed by emotional distracters of varying intensity. Displays were either congruent (two 2s vs. three 3s) or incongruent (two 3s vs. three 2s). Participants determined which display contained more numbers. Neutral and low negative, but not high negative, distracters were associated with greater recruitment of dorsal cingulate and lateral frontal cortices to congruent and incongruent trials relative to view trials. This suggests that sufficiently-intense emotional distracters can disrupt recruitment of frontal cortex regions implicated in attentional control. This may indicate that reduced recruitment of attentional control regions in PTSD patients may be a secondary consequence of their enhanced response to emotional stimuli as opposed to overt frontal pathology.