Psychological Bulletin, Vol 149(1-2), Jan-Feb 2023, 25-66; doi:10.1037/bul0000389
How do emotional stimuli change the way we control our behavior? The interaction between emotion and behavior-shaping, cognitive control mechanisms remain little understood in psychological science. The present meta-analysis addresses this controversy by means of a quantitative review. We analyzed data from 71 studies published through December 2018 that investigated control in conflict tasks, like the Stroop, Simon, and/or flanker tasks, which are well-known tools for psychologists in various subdisciplines used to probe cognitive control mechanisms. We considered studies that experimentally manipulated emotional stimulus presentation and asked how perception of emotional stimuli modulates the size of the congruency effect (CE), as an index of control. Results of two primary meta-analyses found no clear evidence that emotional stimuli modulate cognitive control in general. Yet, moderator analysis suggested that specific aspects of the task, stimuli, and testing conditions show reduced CE for emotional stimuli. Thus, at a theoretical level, emotional stimuli can facilitate control under specific conditions, supporting views that attribute enhanced control either to overload of perceptual distractor processing or to increased amplification of target information and/or suppression of distractor information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)