Emotion and Cognitive Control: An Essential Partnership for Adaptive Behavior

SPECIAL REPORT: COGNITION

Cognitive control (sometimes referred to as executive function) is a set of cognitive processes that enable individuals to adaptively and flexibly guide their behavior across different situations to achieve desired goals. Cognitive control comprises several interrelated but partly distinct skills, including inhibition of prepotent responses, maintaining and updating content in working memory, and flexibly shifting mental sets.¹ Disruptions to cognitive control, as well as to emotional processes, are implicated in a wide range of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and substance use disorders. Importantly, while these disorders present with diverse symptomology, disruptions in both emotion and cognitive control appear to be transdiagnostic and have been argued for as core indicators of psychopathology.² Understanding emotion as a factor that can interact with cognitive control, both adaptively and maladaptively, might be important for advancing mechanistic accounts of psychopathology as well as identifying potential points for intervention and treatment.

A Bidirectional Relationship

Given robust evidence of altered cognitive control and emotion functioning in psychopathology, a key element to consider is the role of cognitive control in regulating emotion. “Emotion regulation” draws on cognitive control to alter emotional experience and behavior—for example, “looking for the silver lining,” reframing a negative situation, or “keeping one’s cool” and inhibiting an emotional response.³ Cognitive control enables individuals to set adaptive emotional goals and flexibly select, implement, and adjust emotion-regulation strategies to pursue such goals across diverse contexts. In psychopathology, disruptions in cognitive control and emotional functioning may be intertwined, leading to emotion dysregulation. Poorer cognitive control might be associated with a reduced ability to inhibit unwanted thoughts and update the contents of working memory, as well as increasing rigidity in the selection and use of emotion-regulation strategies, leading to ineffective regulation and worse emotional outcomes. For example, if individuals have difficulty mobilizing cognitive control to inhibit maladaptive thought patterns or to flexibly replace them with more adaptive interpretations, they may be more prone to using maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies such as rumination. Such inflexibility is commonly seen in psychiatric conditions such as depression and OCD.⁴

In addition to a burgeoning literature examining the role of cognitive control in emotion regulation, extensive evidence indicates a bidirectional relationship between emotion and cognitive control. Cognitive control can be deployed to regulate emotion, but emotional states can also modulate cognitive control processes. Such emotional modulation of cognitive performance can lead to variable processing outcomes. For example, anticipation of reward pursuit has been linked with increased attentional focus, typically resulting in improved cognitive control performance across a variety of tasks.⁵ In contrast, induction of positive mood without direct reward incentives has been associated with attentional broadening and improved performance on tasks requiring creativity and cognitive flexibility.⁶ Importantly, such broadening also appears to come at the cost of increased distraction and ability to stay on task,⁶ suggesting that different emotional states can promote distinct cognitive modes with unique advantages and drawbacks. Negative emotional states can also have variable consequences for cognitive control. For instance, sad mood inductions have led to enhanced attentional focus and improved cognitive control,⁷ while the presentation of high-intensity negative images has been associated with poorer cognitive control, perhaps due to competition for cognitive resources.⁸ Altogether, while reward-related positive emotions have generally benefited cognitive control to a greater extent than negative emotions, different emotional states can promote variable modes of attentional processing and cognitive control, the adaptiveness of which might depend on the situation and context.

However, whether emotional influences promote or impair cognitive control is not simply a function of positive vs negative valence. Instead, it is also important to consider the dimension of emotion intensity. In general, evidence suggests that too much or too little emotion, regardless of valence, might be less optimal for cognitive control than a moderate level of emotion (a Goldilocks effect). When emotional arousal is excessively high, whether positive or negative, cognitive control processing is typically impaired. This has been observed across a range of psychiatric disorders. For example, patients with bipolar disorder who are experiencing mania, a state of heightened positive emotion, have been found to display impaired cognitive control performance, including conflict processing, working memory, and goal management tasks.⁹ Similarly, individuals with higher trait anxiety, who typically experience heightened negative emotion, have shown impairments in inhibitory control, task switching, and conflict resolution.¹⁰

On the opposite end of the emotional intensity spectrum, a relative lack of emotion, or apathy, may also be detrimental to cognitive control performance, particularly in the context of psychopathology. For example, in older adults with depression, increased apathy has been linked to worse performance on a battery of cognitive control tasks.¹¹ Interestingly, a recent study conducted by Westbrook et al demonstrated that individuals with depression exhibited lower levels of cognitive effort relative to those without depression, but these effort reductions were mitigated by a sad mood induction.¹² Given that cognitive effort is thought to be essential for successful cognitive control,¹² these results suggest that the induction of emotion, even if negative, can benefit cognitive control in individuals experiencing apathy. This may be particularly true if the emotional experience is validating and/or controllable, as might be the case for sad emotions induced through controllable means, such as music or films, in depression.¹³ Thus, negative emotions may not always be detrimental to cognitive performance. When examining interactions between emotion and cognitive control, it is important to consider emotion goals—how individuals want to feel—as these goals may influence both how they choose to regulate their emotions as well as the potential impact of emotions on cognitive control outcomes.¹⁴ Emotion goals might thus be a crucial element to the bidirectional relationship between emotion and cognitive control, with implications for daily functioning.

Neurotransmitter System Activity

Neurobiological evidence indicates that the complex and bidirectional relationships observed between emotion and cognitive control processes are supported by multiple interacting neurotransmitter systems. Decades of evidence implicate dopamine as integral to both cognitive control and reward processing.^15,16 More recently, dopamine neuromodulation has also been identified as a key mechanism by which emotion and motivation may influence cognitive control.¹⁵ The effects of dopamine on cognitive control have been argued to follow a nonlinear, inverted-U pattern, whereby increased dopamine benefits cognitive control performance up to a point, beyond which further increases are associated with performance decrements.¹⁷ This pattern is consistent with the Goldilocks effect discussed previously, whereby moderate levels of emotion may be associated with optimal cognitive control performance relative to very low or high levels of emotion. While the dopamine system has been most extensively studied in cognitive control research, other neurotransmitter systems have also been implicated in interactions between emotion and cognitive control. Serotonin and norepinephrine neurotransmitter systems have been implicated in threat responses and negative emotion^18,19; as such, they may play a complementary role to the dopamine system, which has been largely associated with reward processing and positive emotions.¹⁶

In addition, similarly to the inverted-U account of dopamine, moderate levels of both serotonin and norepinephrine, relative to high or low levels, have been associated with better cognitive and emotional outcomes.^18,20 For instance, serotonin depletion is associated with increased threat sensitivity and difficulties with impulse control, while heightened serotonin levels are associated with exaggerated behavioral inhibition.¹⁸ Both reductions and excesses in serotonin activity have been associated with elevated risk for psychopathology.¹⁸ Meanwhile, moderate levels of norepinephrine may facilitate improved cognitive performance by enhancing the allocation of attention and cognitive resources toward highly salient and/or goal-relevant stimuli.¹⁹ However, with excessive norepinephrine activity, arousal levels become overwhelming, performance begins to decline, and individuals shift from goal-directed to more habitual responding.²⁰ Disruptions in these and other neurotransmitter systems have been implicated across a range of psychiatric disorders. While attempts to alter neurotransmitter activity with medication (including monoamine oxidase inhibitors, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, selective serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, and benzodiazepines, among others) have been largely successful in ameliorating symptoms for many patients, there is still much to learn about their functioning, as they work in complex and interactive manners to shape cognitive control and emotional experience.

Concluding Thoughts

In conclusion, the relationship between emotion and cognitive control is complex and bidirectional: cognitive control is involved in the regulation of emotions, and emotions can influence cognitive control performance (see Table). Critically, a moderate level of emotional intensity may typically be most optimal for adaptive cognitive control outcomes, and patterns of neurotransmitter system activity may underlie this relationship. These complex interactions between emotion and cognitive control are important to consider in the characterization and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Ms Brough is a psychology PhD student at the University of Denver. Ms Asmar is a psychology PhD student at the University of Denver. Dr Chiew is an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Denver.

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