Emotion and conflict adaptation: the role of phasic arousal and self-relevance

Conflict adaptation reflects the increase in cognitive control after previous conflict between task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. Tonic (sustained) arousal elicited by emotional words embedded in a conflict task has previously been shown to increase conflict adaptation. However, the role of phasic (transient) emotional arousal remains unclear. In Experiment 1 (N = 55), we therefore investigated the effect of phasic arousal using a colour flanker task with negative, positive, and neutral words as stimuli. We hypothesised that phasic arousal elicited in this context will increase conflict adaptation in the subsequent trial. Indeed, when the words were positive or negative as compared to neutral, we observed increased conflict adaptation. In Experiment 2 (N = 54), we examined the role of the self-relevance by presenting words with a self-related pronoun ("my") or sender-related pronoun ("his"/"her"). We expected that emotional words with high self-relevance would lead to stronger effects of emotional arousal on conflict adaptation. Confirming this hypothesis, results showed that emotional words within a self-related context again increased conflict adaptation, whereas this effect was not observed in the sender-related context. Taken together, these results are the first to show that phasic arousal elicited by emotional words increases conflict adaptation, in particular when these words have high self-relevance.