Overlapping And Specific Brain Mechanism Of Emotional And General Cognitive Conflict Control

In recent years,there has been a surge of research examining the relationship between emotional conflict and general cognitive conflict and trying to reveal the common and specific neural mechanisms of emotional conflict control and general cognitive conflict control.The present study uses functional magnetic resonance image（f MRI）to explore the overlapping and specific brain mechanism of emotional conflict control and general cognitive conflict control.The study 1 administered the lexical valence conflict task to estimate emotional conflict control,in which participants were required to judge or switch lexical validity based on cues as quickly and accurately as possible;adopted an arrowhead version of the Flanker task was used to investigate general conflict control,in which participants were asked to ignore the congruent or incongruent arrows on both sides while pointing the direction of the middle target arrow accurately and quickly.Through the conjunction analysis,the present study found a distributed fronto-parietal network,as a general cognitive control system,playing important roles in the successful resolution of both types of conflicts.Additionally,the disjunction analysis revealed that emotional conflict control implicated a broader control network compared to general conflict control and uncovered a possible lateralization in the lateral prefrontal cortex（l PFC）for the two types of conflict control,that is,brain activity patterns demonstrated that emotional conflict control involved the left l PFC while general conflict control involved the right l PFC.Results of generalized psychophysiological interaction（g PPI）analyses further demonstrated that emotional conflict control,compared to general conflict control,elicited broader synergistic activities in individuals’ brain networks.The study 2 used the extended unified structural equation modeling（eu SEM）to examine the effective connectivity patterns of the fronto-parietal network which involved in both types of conflict control in the study 1 and to construct a functional connectivity network for emotional conflict control versus general conflict control.The results displayed that the right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex,bilateral dorsomedial prefrontal cortex,right inferior parietal lobule,left superior parietal lobule and bilateral anterior insula collaborated with each other as a connectivity network in emotional conflict control and general cognitive conflict control to implement cognitive control according to task demands.The functional connectivity patterns of emotional conflict control and general conflict control showed some similarities on the one hand and differed with the type of conflicts on the other,revealing more insight into the overlapping and specific brain mechanism of emotional conflict control and general cognitive conflict control.In summary,neural mechanisms of emotional conflict control and general conflict control both overlap and separate,both at the level of brain activation and in brain functional connectivity patterns.These findings offer novel and reliable neural evidence that further deepens our understanding of the complex relationship between emotional conflict control and general cognitive conflict control.