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Poster A58 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Emotional cueing modulates attention and Stroop interference in high ruminators
Selena Singh1 (), Benjamin Li1, Suzanna Becker1; 1Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University
Rumination involves the repetitive dwelling on negative thoughts, emotions and memories, is a risk factor for depression, and may be produced by deficits in emotional and attentional control processes. We assessed the impacts of rumination on attentional control for emotional stimuli using both the standard and emotional Stroop tasks in high and low ruminators. High ruminators had slower reaction times for both tasks. A rumination induction negatively impacted performance on the emotional Stroop task for high ruminators, who tended to have slower response times for positive rather than negative words. We modified a computational model of the Stroop task to include an emotion processing pathway, and used this model to propose mechanistic hypotheses to explain the Stroop data we collected. Model parameter adjustments produced simulated results that qualitatively aligned with the Stroop data. Based on our model’s connection weights, we propose that moderate attentional biases for negative stimuli coupled with the need for emotional regulation may explain why high ruminators perform poorly for positively valenced stimuli but not for negatively valenced stimuli. Our modelling predicts that greater negative attentional biases in depression along with baseline emotional regulation needs may shift the balance between attention and emotion pathways, leading to the slower reaction times for negative stimuli observed in clinical populations.
Keywords: rumination parallel distributed processing mechanistic model stroop