Regulation of the conflict adaptation effect by emotion

A number of recent studies have shown that emotion can moderate the control of cognitive conflict on Stroop tasks. Much of this work suggests that positive mood, compared to negative or neutral mood, reduce cognitive control. This has been demonstrated by a reduction in the conflict adaptation effect with positive mood induction. Recently Padmala, Bauer and Pessoa (2011) embedded irrelevant negative and neutral images in between trials on a face-word version of the Stroop task. They reported that negative images, compared to neutral images, can also reduce cognitive control. In our research we report on two studies. First, a direct replication of Padmala et al’s study that demonstrates further support for their finding that negative images reduce cognitive control. In a second study we show that the conflict adaptation effects are similar for irrelevant positive and neutral images.