What affects executive cognitive control? an investigation into the effects of mood, emotion, and intervention programmes

Individuals are struggling more and more with attention, controlling unhelpful behaviours and emotion regulation. A concrete understanding of how mood, emotion and ECC interact could provide a base for improving outcomes. Furthermore, understanding if cognitive flexibility and meditation affect ECC when compared to an active control could be a basis for improvement programmes. This would be beneficial to the national health service, society and the individual. This thesis is naturally in three main parts. The first introduced the topic of executive cognitive control (ECC) and its theoretical underpinning. Additionally tried to distinguish task specific adaptations from domain general processes. The second investigates how mood and emotion affect ECC, both individually and in combination. The final section examines how a 14-day cognitive flexibility training task and a meditation programme affect ECC and the emotional modulation of ECC when compared to a control group (mental maths).

The first part of this thesis aimed to introduce the conflict, learning and combined accounts of ECC, then devise a way to test if learning based or conflict based accounts best describe modulations across consecutive trials, a key component of ECC. It was found that when the task remained the same on consecutive trials ECC was left intact. However, when the task was different it did not. This suggests that learning accounts or domain general ECC cannot explain sequential modulation (SM) and therefore a task specific conflict induced modulation was more appropriate.

The second part of this thesis focused on combining and extending the research from two prominent researchers in the field. The affective signalling hypothesis (e.g van Steenbergen et al., 2010) and the dual competition model (Pessoa, 2009, Padmala et al., 2011). This was investigated using an adapted face/word Stroop like task, mood induction (using visualisation and music) and emotional images (positive, negative or neutral). ECC was investigated using SM and expectancy effects. When investigating mood alone, there were no effects on SM. In contrast, negative emotional stimuli disrupted SM while only some positive stimuli (baby faces) disrupted ECC, others (sexual images/reward) left SM intact. When mood and emotion were combined the disruption to SM seen in the emotion study did not occur. This demonstrated that mood can modulate emotions' effect on ECC. This study shows that mood and emotion interact with ECC in unique and additive ways. These findings could have important implications for mood disorders and well-being.

The final section of this thesis investigated claims that cognitive flexibility and mindfulness meditation programmes can improve ECC and the emotional modulation of ECC. This was done using 14 10-13 minute sessions of each intervention compared to active control (mental maths) using the same face/word Stroop-like task as a measure of selective attention. This selective attention task was interspersed with emotional images in Experiment Two to test how the training programme affected the emotional modulation of ECC. It was found that multiple sessions of each intervention did not change ECC or the emotional modulation of ECC compared to (mental maths). This study concludes that stricter regulations need to be implemented, in line with medical placebo-controlled randomised trials to prevent incorrect conclusions.