BEHAVIORAL ASSESSMENT OF COGNITIVE-EMOTIONAL INTERACTIONS AND MOOD INSTABILITY: DEVELOPMENT OF NOVEL TASK – Psychology Department Research Poster Session

Faculty Sponsor: Charles Sanislow

Live Poster Session: Zoom Link

Shakira Fortson (SHE/HER/HERS)

Shakira Fortson is a BA/MA student concentrating on Psychology at Wesleyan University (23′). She is from Atlanta, GA. Coming from a marginalized and underrepresented background, Shakira’s passion lies in the accessibility and affordability for mental health resources in low-income areas. Outside of school, her passions lie in social justice, beauty, and fashion. After she graduates, she hopes to continue research and work in clinical psychology.

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Abstract: Behavioral tasks can be used to understand psychopathological mechanisms, and the incorporation of negative emotional material can identify disruptions relevant to affective lability. To understand this interaction more in-depthly, the researchers sought to investigate the relationship emotion has with the disruption of cognition. Furthermore, the current research developed a novel task to assess cognitive control and ways that emotional distraction can disrupt executive processes. The current study’s task, E-LERT, incorporated features from well-studied tasks of affective distraction (the “Dot-Probe”), executive control (the “Attention Network Task”), and cognitive control (the “Flankers Task”). In a sample of 89 university students, results found that negative emotional material (pictures) disrupted performance, but only under conditions that demanded a greater level of cognitive control. These results demonstrate the utility of this novel task to study disruptions in affect, and that it offers a potential behavioral assessment for affective lability.

Keywords: affective lability, emotion, cognition, disruption

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