# How Emotions Influence Cognitive Control: A Within-Subject Investigation

## TL;DR

This study shows how negative emotions affect different aspects of cognitive control, like decision-making and task switching, in the same individuals.

## Contribution

The study uniquely examines the effects of negative emotions on multiple cognitive control components within the same participants.

## Key findings

- Negative emotions slow response times in inhibitory tasks, suggesting increased interference.
- Emotions reduce accuracy in working memory tasks, indicating trouble updating and disengaging from irrelevant info.
- Negative emotions increase error rates in tasks requiring cognitive flexibility, regardless of trial type.

## Abstract

This study examined how negative emotions influence three core components of cognitive control, inhibition, updating, and shifting, as assessed through a Go/No-Go, 2-back, and set-switching task, respectively. Participants performed these three tasks under both negative and neutral emotional conditions. Negative emotions led to slower response times on false-positive trials, suggesting increased interference during inhibitory demands rather than a direct impairment of inhibition. In the 2-back task, accuracy decreased on Non-Match trials under negative emotions, indicating difficulties in updating working memory and disengaging from irrelevant information. In the switching task, participants showed higher error rates under negative emotions regardless of trial type, pointing to a broader decline in performance when cognitive flexibility is required. Correlation analyses indicated that emotion-related effects were associated between updating and shifting, but not with inhibition, suggesting that negative emotions preferentially affect partially overlapping control processes depending on their cognitive demands. These findings highlight that the impact of negative emotions is not uniform across executive functions and underscore the importance of investigating emotion–cognition interactions across multiple domains within individuals.