title: Emotion-specific load disrupts concomitant affective processing.
abstract: Findings in the neuroimaging literature suggest that separate brain circuitries are involved when individuals perform emotional compared to nonemotional working memory (WM) tasks. Here we test this hypothesis with behavioural measures. We predicted that the conceptual processing of affect would be disrupted more by concurrent affective than nonaffective load. Participants performed a conceptual task in which they verified affective versus sensory properties of concepts, and a second, concurrent, working memory (n-back) task in which the target stimuli were facial expressions. Results revealed that storing and updating affective (as compared with identity) features of facial expressions altered performance more for affective than for sensory properties of concepts. The findings are supportive of the ideas that affective resources exist and that these resources are specifically used during the processing and representation of affective properties of objects and events.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Research Institute for Psychological Sciences, Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) , Louvain-la-Neuve , Belgium.
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Vermeulen
authors.forename: Paula M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Niedenthal
authors.forename: Gordy
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Pleyers
authors.forename: Marie
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bayot
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Corneille
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Affective; Emotion concepts; Knowledge; Load; Resources; Updating