Neural mechanisms underlying the integration of emotion and working memory

The present study aimed at investigating the behavioral effects and neuronal correlates of emotional content and emotional components, i.e. valence and arousal, in the context of a verbal working memory task. Our findings in twenty healthy male subjects demonstrate that (1) word valence has no impact on performance in the verbal working memory task, and (2) that emotion leads to an increase of activation in cognition-related lateral prefrontal regions, whereas cognitive effort yields enhanced deactivation in emotion-related cortical midline regions. The stronger dorsolateral prefrontal recruitment during emotional stimuli may reflect an arousal effect or higher cognitive effort due to interference with emotion.