Aversive distractors modulate affective working memory in frontoparietal regions

Rumination and worry are prominent symptoms of many psychiatric disorders. These symptoms compete for the same working memory (WM) storage space as those required for task-goals, leaving few cognitive resources available for successful goal-directed behavior. Once lodged in WM, negative information reduces cognitive control and further biases cognition toward affective stimuli. However, few studies have examined the neural mechanisms associated with maintaining affectively negative information in WM and the filtering of aversive distractors. Here, subjects completed an affective verbal WM task while distractor-cues that predicted aversive or positive stimuli were presented during the delay period while undergoing functional MRI (fMRI). Results revealed that during aversive distractors, there was a decrease in both dlPFC and PPC activity, but only when maintaining negative affective information in WM. Furthermore, dlPFC and PPC activity predicted behavioral performance. This pattern was not observed when maintaining positive words in WM or when positive distractors were presented. These findings demonstrate that the affective valence of the items stored in WM modulates "top-down" control networks necessary for the execution of cognitive control related to affective distractor interreference. Furthermore, these results provide a neurocognitive framework for understanding how rumination and worry produce negative downstream failures in cognitive control and emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).