Emotion affects prefrontal cortex activity during cognitive task performance: A change blindness functional near infrared spectroscopy study.
Research is increasingly demonstrating that emotional processes interact with our cognitions and that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is heavily involved during such tasks. Higher naturalistic negative mood is related to reduced PFC activity during working memory tasks (Aoki et al. 2011) In addition increases in PFC activity have been observed when attending to visual art of positive valence (Kreplin Fairclough, 2013) How emotion influences attentional processes and what the underlying role of the PFC is during attentional tasks warrants investigation. This study aimed to investigate if changes in PFC activity were evident during a change detection flicker task (e.g. Rensink, O'Regan, Clark, 1997) following induction of positive, negative as well as neutral affect. The Positive and Negative Affect Scale (Watson, Clark, Tellegan) was employed to collect self reported emotional affect. The study also sought to examine if there were any behavioural improvements in visual attention following induction of positive affect.