Affective Modulation of Cognitive Control: A Biobehavioral Perspective

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Guido Band and Bernhard Hommel who were involved in many of the studies described in this chapter. This work was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). In addition, I would like to thank Sander Koole, Mattie Tops, and Senne Braem for providing helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter. A life well-lived depends on a delicate balance between immediate and delayed rewards, between convenience and effort expenditure, and between letting go and hanging on. By keeping higher goals in mind, people may choose to resist an excess of leisure in favor of personal growth, for example, or permit themselves to give in to the pleasure of a well-earned vacation. That is, throughout life, people need to flexibly adapt their efforts to control their behavior. The task of adapting one's efforts to varying life demands has been of longstanding interest to self-regulation researchers (e. attracted increased attention among cognitive psychologists, who have become interested in the question how people adjust their levels of cognitive control to changes in task demands (Botvinick et al., 2001). Relatively to self-regulation research, cognitive control research has conducted more fine-grained analyses of active control processes in seemingly affectively neutral tasks that are somewhat artificial, but also subject to higher levels of experimental control. Despite these methodological differences, it is becoming increasingly apparent that self-regulation and cognitive control strongly overlap (e.g. One area in which cognitive control research is particularly converging with self-regulation research has focused on the affective modulation of cognitive control (e.g. thought of cognitive control as a 'cold' cognitive process that operates more or less independently of affective processes. Recent studies, however, have shown that cognitive control is strongly modulated by affective factors, such as reward, humor, and mood (e.g. Dreisbach and Fischer, 2012b; van Steenbergen et al., 2014). Moreover, there appears to be significant overlap in brain areas involved in cognitive control and affective processes Van Steenbergen-Affect and control 3 (Shackman et al., 2011). These new findings have great potential for not only informing cognitive control research, but also self-regulation research, which has traditionally paid more attention to emotion (e.g. this potential, the present chapter will review recent research on the affective modulation of cognitive control. In the following paragraphs, I set the stage with a brief discussion of modern research on cognitive control and control adaptation processes. Next, I …