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Acta Psychologica 223 (2022) 103507
Available online 17 January 2022
0001-6918/© 2022 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
The inuence of peripheral emotions on inhibitory control among children
Sophia Czapka
a
,
d
, John W. Schwieter
b
, Julia Festman
c
,
d
,
*
a
Leibniz-Centre General Linguistic, Berlin, Germany
b
Language Acquisition, Multilingualism, & Cognition Lab/Bilingualism Matters@Laurier, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
c
Multilingualism Research Team, Institute for Research and Development (IFE), University College of Teacher Education, Tyrol, Austria
d
Diversity and Inclusion Research Group University of Potsdam, Germany
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Executive function
Inhibitory control task
Cognitive emotional regulation
Primary school children
ABSTRACT
In this study, we investigated the cognitive-emotional interplay by measuring the effects of executive competi-
tion (Pessoa, 2013), i.e., how inhibitory control is inuenced when emotional information is encountered. Sixty-
three children (8 to 9 years of age) participated in an inhibition task (central task) accompanied by happy, sad, or
neutral emoticons (displayed in the periphery). Typical interference effects were found in the main task for speed
and accuracy, but in general, these effects were not additionally modulated by the peripheral emoticons indi-
cating that processing of the main task exhausted the limited capacity such that interference from the task-
irrelevant, peripheral information did not show (Pessoa, 2013). Further analyses revealed that the magnitude
of interference effects depended on the order of congruency conditions: when incongruent conditions preceded
congruent ones, there was greater interference. This effect was smaller in sad conditions, and particularly so at
the beginning of the experiment. These ndings suggest that the bottom-up perception of task-irrelevant
emotional information inuenced the top-down process of inhibitory control among children in the sad condi-
tion when processing demands were particularly high. We discuss if the salience and valence of the emotional
stimuli as well as task demands are the decisive characteristics that modulate the strength of this relation.
1. Introduction
In the present study, we examine the interaction between bottom-up
processing of emotions and top-down processing of inhibitory control
among 8- to 9-year-old children. For this purpose, we used an inhibitory
control task with peripheral, i.e., task-irrelevant, emotional information
to investigate if and how this information inuenced top-down inhibi-
tion. Inhibitory control is characterized as the capacity to purposely
suppress dominant, automatic, or prepotent action tendencies for the
benet of more situation-adapted and goal-appropriate behavior (Carl-
son, 2005; Drechsler, 2007; Friedman & Miyake, 2004; Garavan et al.,
1999; Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1994). It is a domain-general, effortful
process that is part of a larger set of executive functions, “which are
needed when non-routine behaviors are called for” and which are
“thought to confer behavioral exibility and context-dependency to
complex behaviors” (Pessoa, 2009, p. 160).
Various stimulus-response compatibility tasks have been designed
(see Homack & Riccio, 2004) to assess inhibitory control in both adults
and children. For example, the day-night task (Gerstadt et al., 1994; see
Montgomery & Koeltzow, 2010 for review) represents a child-
appropriate task that is widely used for measuring inhibitory control
among 3- to 7-year-olds. In the task, two different cards are presented
depicting either a sun or a moon with stars. For the sun, children are
instructed to say “day” in the congruent condition, but “night” in the
incongruent condition; respectively vice versa for the moon with stars.
The uncommon associations in the incongruent conditions require
inhibitory control to overcome the dominant and more automatic as-
sociation between sun—day or moon—night. Performance on the day-
night task improved signicantly with age (3.5 to 7 years) but yielded
a ceiling effect for reaction times (RTs) and accuracy after that age range
(cf. Simpson & Riggs, 2005a, 2005b; Wright et al., 2003 for another
version of the day-night task).
2. The link between cognitive control and emotion processing
Both traditional explanations of inhibitory control (Norman &
Shallice, 1986) and later theories such as the conict monitoring ac-
count, which incorporates a system that monitors conict during in-
formation processing (Botvinick et al., 2001), suggest that solely top-
down control is adjusted to resolve perceptual conicts. Recently, it
* Corresponding author at: Multilingualism Research Team, Institute for Research and Development (IFE), University College of Teacher Education, Tyrol, Austria.
E-mail address: julia.festman@ph-tirol.ac.at (J. Festman).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Acta Psychologica
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/actpsy
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103507
Received 18 March 2021; Received in revised form 4 January 2022; Accepted 14 January 2022
Acta Psychologica 223 (2022) 103507
2
has been noted that conict monitoring is grounded in reinforcement
learning (Aben et al., 2017; Chiu & Egner, 2019 for a review). Particu-
larly, it is believed that control emerges from associative learning pro-
cesses that are responsible for overseeing processes such as goal
representation and attention. The learning perspective of cognitive
control argues that cognitive control can be additionally inuenced by
bottom-up processing of stimuli that have been learned from previous
goals or attentional settings (cf. Awh et al., 2012) and thus interprets
them as inter-dependent processes.
One way to examine the interplay between top-down and bottom-up
processing in cognitive control is by incorporating the processing of
emotions into experimental designs (Pessoa, 2017). Bottom-up emotion
generation is a stimulus-focused view of emotional processing that refers
to “the elicitation of emotion by the presentation of a stimulus that is
thought to have simple physical properties that are inherently
emotional” (McRae et al., 2012, p. 253–254). Human faces expressing
anger and happiness have been viewed as biologically predisposed to
negative and positive stimuli, respectively (Bar & Neta, 2007; ¨
Ohman &
Mineka, 2001). Although emotion and cognition traditionally have been
treated as separate processes, there is increasing evidence that they
share an intricate relationship (Chiew & Braver, 2011; Damasio, 1994;
Dreisbach & Fischer, 2012; Dreisbach & Fischer, 2015; Dreisbach &
Goschke, 2004; Goschke & Bolte, 2014; Mueller, 2011; see Pessoa, 2013
for review), which is partly due to the same brain areas being involved in
both emotion and cognition (e.g., amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex;
see Pessoa, 2013 for review). Part of this relationship is also evident
from the fact that the activation and access of emotion is an automatic
and unconscious procedure (Bargh, 1997; Pessoa, 2013).
According to Pessoa's conceptual framework, the dual competition
model, visual perception and executive functions are considered
capacity-limited processes and share mental resources; therefore,
handling perceptual conict may complicate dealing with inhibition at
the same time (e.g., Pessoa, 2013). At the perceptual level, items with
emotional content are thought to divert processing resources, increase
salience and thereby inuence task performance. Although processing of
emotion-laden stimuli is prioritized in many ways, it is not independent
of attention, but depends on resources in many contexts. In other words,
emotion processing is linked to cognition since the manipulation of the
one interferes with performance in the other and vice versa (Pessoa,
2013).
At the level of executive function, high-arousal information (e.g.,
threat) typically causes behavioral interference due to competition for
resources, however with the strength of the impact depending on
available resources, i.e., when task demands are high, fewer resources
are available and interference effects from irrelevant emotional infor-
mation will be eliminated. In this line of thought, “capacity sharing”
(Pessoa, 2009, p. 160) leads to executive competition for resources, a
term which refers to the way executive functions such as inhibition are
inuenced when emotional information is encountered.
From a developmental perspective, emotion and cognitive control
are linked, too. As children get older, their inhibitory control (Christ
et al., 2001; Wright et al., 2003) and executive functions in general
improve (Archibald & Kerns, 1999; Best & Miller, 2010); both are likely
linked to the maturation of the prefrontal cortex (Diamond, 2002;
Durston et al., 2002; Spencer-Smith & Anderson, 2009). Inhibitory
control is a central skill since it is a signicant predictor for later school
success, social behavior, and academic achievement (Allan et al., 2014;
Anderson & Reidy, 2012; Blair & Razza, 2007; Bull et al., 2008), but is
also related to cognitive emotion regulation, the ability to intentionally
generate, enhance, reduce, or stop a given emotion (Langner et al.,
2018). Several studies have argued that children's executive functions
mediate cognitive emotion regulation (Hofmann et al., 2012; Schmei-
chel & Tang, 2015; Teper et al., 2013) and that there is a typical
developmental trend for cognitive emotion regulation that is also linked
to children's self-control abilities (Carlson & Wang, 2007; Rothbart &
Rueda, 2005).
The inuence of emotion on cognitive control is relatively task-
specic: It depends on the type of affect, positive or negative, the
presence of emotions in the task, focal (task-relevant) or peripheral
(task-irrelevant; see Goschke & Bolte, 2014 for a review), and the order
of congruency in the task. We discuss these parameters in the sections
below.
3. Negative versus positive emotion
Positive affect is argued to provide an environment propagating
“freedom to explore” (Clore & Gasper, 2000) and facilitates information
processing on tasks which require creativity, exibility, and novel
thinking (Ashby & Isen, 1999; Isen, 2008). Some studies have shown
that basic emotional interference can be detected as early as 4 years of
age (Tottenham et al., 2011). Positive emotions increase cognitive
exibility in production of unique responses (Russ & Schafer, 2006) and
verbal generation and (math) problem-solving (Bryan & Bryan, 1991;
Greene & Noice, 1988; Qu & Zelazo, 2007). However, positive emotions
can also be distracting because they can enhance the scope of attention
(Rowe et al., 2007) and result in a lack of attention to detail for both
children (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2010; Schnall et al., 2008; Stifter
et al., 2020) and adults (Goschke & Bolte, 2014).
Findings regarding the impact of negative affect on cognitive per-
formance are as well controversial. Although some previous studies have
found that negative emotions impair cognitive control (Houwer & Tib-
boel, 2010; Padmala et al., 2011; Verbruggen & De Houwer, 2007),
others have reported the opposite (¨
Ohman et al., 2001; van Steenbergen
et al., 2011). Recent fMRI studies replicate these inconsistent ndings.
Jasinska et al. (2012) examined the effects of peripherally presented
threat and reward distracters on behavioral performance and the neural
correlates of cognitive control among adults aged 20–31. The results
showed that both threat and reward distracters signicantly hampered
RTs for incongruent trials compared to conditions without distracters. At
the neural level, threat distracters signicantly decreased activity in
regions associated with cognitive control on incongruent trials but
signicantly increased activity in these same areas on congruent trials.
An important aspect in research on emotional processing and cognitive
control is that the amount of cognitive demand inuences these effects.
In an fMRI-study with adults, Papazacharias et al. (2015) investigated
the impact of task-irrelevant negative emotions (fearful faces presented
shortly before each item) on the performance in an inhibitory control
task with conditions varying in levels of attentional control (i.e., low,
medium, and high). Negative emotions affected attentional processing
differently depending on the cognitive load: Compared to the neutral
condition, there were slower RTs when cognitive load was low, faster
RTs when cognitive load was intermediate, and no effect when it was
high. Papazacharias et al. argued that negative emotions facilitated
processing, but this effect disappears in high cognitive load condition
because cognitive resources are exhausted. Taken together, these nd-
ings indicate that emotion processing inuences inhibition, but the di-
rection of this effect remains unclear due to inconsistent ndings.
4. Focal versus peripheral emotion
Only a few studies have specically examined the role of emotional
presence, i.e., peripheral, focal or absent emotions, in cognitive control
in children (Kramer et al., 2015; Lagattuta & Kramer, 2017). Lagattuta
et al. (2011) designed the happy-sad task (see also Bluell & Montgomery,
2014; Song et al., 2017) to extend the application of the day-night task
beyond the age of 7 years. In the happy-sad task, children are presented
with two focal emotional stimuli, namely happy or sad cartoon faces,
printed on cards. When they see a happy face, they are required to say
“happy” in the congruent, but “sad” in the incongruent condition,
respectively, and vice versa when seeing sad faces. Results showed that
the happy-sad task led to increased error rates and longer RTs compared
to the emotionally neutral day-night task in both young children and
S. Czapka et al.
Acta Psychologica 223 (2022) 103507
3
adults. The greater amount of difculty in the happy-sad task is claimed
to be caused by the presence of emotion and likely attributed to inter-
ference from emotional stimuli processing with inhibitory control (for
similar results, see Ikeda et al., 2014).
Kramer et al. (2015) also compared several stimulus-response-
compatibility tasks: e.g., the happy-sad task with focal emotions (task-
relevant) and the boy-girl task with peripheral (task-irrelevant) emo-
tions in a sample of 4–11-year-olds and adults. Both tasks were based on
the same set of stimuli, i.e., photographs of emotion faces, but for the
rst, participants had to attend to emotion whereas in the second only to
gender. The results revealed that for both children and adults, focal
emotions impaired the ability to inhibit prepotent responses more than
peripheral emotions (more errors, longer RTs). In an additional experi-
mental manipulation, Kramer et al. (2015) compared performance on
boy-girl sad and boy-girl happy (i.e., the card set contained only one
emotion); contrary to their assumption boy-girl sad would be more
difcult due to the continuous presence of the negative emotion, the
results on both tasks did not show any differential inuence of emotion
in this set-up questioning the impact of sad stimuli in quick succession.
However, care must be taken when interpreting the results of this study
given that Kramer et al. examined RTs in a cumulative fashion.
In an eye-tracking study, Lagattuta and Kramer (2017) examined
4–10-year-olds' and adults' visual attention to negative and neutral faces
which were accompanied by happy faces in two experimental condi-
tions. In one condition, they were asked to “look at the faces” (i.e., free
viewing) and in the other, to “look only at the happy faces” (i.e., directed
viewing). The results revealed that in both conditions, children and
adults more frequently looked at negative faces before positive faces,
suggesting that initial visual orientation was driven by bottom-up pro-
cesses. However, the experimental condition (i.e., top-down instruction)
modulated the sustained attention for both groups. During free viewing,
both children and adults showed a negativity bias that reduced with age.
Contrarily, in the directed viewing condition, both age groups displayed
a positivity bias, although this ability weakened over time and signi-
cantly more so for children. Post-hoc analyses by Lagattuta and Kramer
explored whether the additional cognitive effort in the directed viewing
condition inuenced participants' attention biases over the course of the
experiment. In the free viewing condition, negative attention biases
remained stable throughout the trials for both children and adults. In the
directed viewing condition, in contrast, the continuous demanding goal
to “only look at the happy faces” apparently created additional cognitive
demands and led to progressive fatigue in implementing this top-down
goal. The authors argued that, as this effect was larger for children
compared to adults, the ability to control these concurrent processes
improves with age.
These studies indicate the interference of emotion-laden focal in-
formation on inhibitory processing in children, whereas emotion-laden
peripheral information led to weaker effects on task performance and
little impact on behavioral ndings (Kramer et al.'s (2015) study).
Depending on task requirements (e.g., different viewing conditions), a
possible differential inuence of positive and negative affect on inhibi-
tory control could be observed, e.g. revealed as attention biases in
Lagattuta and Kramer's (2017) study.
5. Congruency sequence
There are several studies that have shown a congruency sequence
effect (also referred to as Gratton effect) in tasks examining inhibitory
control (e.g., Stroop, Flanker, Simon) in adults (see Egner, 2007) and
children (Erb & Marcovitch, 2018). Many of these studies employ an
inhibition task in which congruency sequence effects persisting to sub-
sequent trials are interpreted as evidence for conict-driven cognitive
control (Egner et al., 2008; Egner & Hirsch, 2005; Etkin et al., 2006;
Kerns et al., 2004). When controlling for feature integration, there are
signicantly larger congruency sequence effects that emerge more
rapidly than conict adaptation (Notebaert et al., 2006). The sensitivity
for trial sequence has been reported in experimental blocks that include
trials of alternating congruency. It is unclear, however, as to whether
this effect is observed in a blocked design and particularly when
examining emotion processing and inhibitory control in children.
6. Present study
Until now, it remains unclear how emotions modulate inhibitory
control in children (i.e., “executive competition”, Pessoa, 2013) since
research ndings have been controversial. Therefore, we investigate the
impact of bottom-up perception of peripheral emotional information
(happy, sad) on top-down inhibitory control. We chose to examine a
group of third-graders (typically between ages 8 to 9 years) because
important improvements in EF take place between the age of 6 to 13
years (Brocki & Bohlin, 2004; De Cat et al., 2018; Diamond, 2002) and
examining this age group can contribute to our understanding of EF
development.
For the central task, we designed a computerized version of a child-
appropriate inhibitory control task (cf., Ikeda et al., 2014) in which
congruency (congruent, incongruent) was manipulated per block. The
emotional information (happy, sad) was displayed in the periphery and
entirely task-irrelevant. This allowed us to determine the emotion-
cognition interplay in a more subtle way and is therefore the strength
of the current design. We also included a neutral emotional expression as
a neutral baseline and used an increased number of trials compared to
previous studies on the interplay of emotion and cognition (e.g., Kramer
et al., 2015; Nakagawa et al., 2015). In contrast to Kramer et al. (2015),
we analyzed RTs of single trials and counterbalanced the order of
congruent and incongruent blocks to manipulate cognitive load and to
investigate if congruency sequence effects also emerge in a blocked
design.
1) We hypothesize that an interference effect in the central task will
emerge for both accuracy and RTs.
2) If peripheral emotional information does not affect inhibitory control
due to processing resources being exhausted by the demands of the
central task (Pessoa, 2013), no observable difference between the
emotional conditions should be found (Ikeda et al., 2014; Kramer
et al., 2015).
With regard to a possible impact of different emotional informa-
tion, we expect a larger interference effect in the positive condition
compared to the neutral condition if positive affect facilitates exi-
bility at the expense of increased distractibility resulting in dif-
culties to focus on the color embedded in the stimulus. By contrast, if
bottom-up perception of emotional information in the periphery
leads to negative bias (cf., Lagattuta & Kramer, 2017) and negative
affect narrows the focus of attention, participants would likely focus
only on the central task. Thus, there should be smaller interference
effects for the negative conditions compared to the neutral
conditions.
3) If the order of congruency blocks (congruent-incongruent, C-I, vs.
incongruent-congruent, I-C) affects the current blocked design in the
same way as has been shown for trial-by-trial analyses (cf. Egner,
2007), we expect the interference effect to be larger in blocks
beginning with C-I compared to blocks starting with I-C.
7. Method
7.1. Participants
One hundred primary school children in 3rd grade took part in this
study. We excluded children whose IQ indicated an intellectual
disability (i.e., IQ <70; n =2 children) what was assessed with the
Culture Fair Intelligence Test Scale 1 (CFT 1-R, Weiß & Osterland, 2013).
Additionally, multilingual children were excluded, since multilin-
gualism can inuence executive functions (n =37 children; based on
S. Czapka et al.
Acta Psychologica 223 (2022) 103507
4
information from a parental questionnaire; (Czapka et al., 2019). The
nal sample included 63 children from three different primary schools
(32 males, 31 female) who were on average 106.7 months old (SD =5.1;
range: 97–121) and had intelligence values within a normal range (t-
value; M =52.0, SD =8.4). All children had normal or corrected-to-
normal vision, were naive to our research objectives in the study, and
received stickers for their participation. The study was approved by the
University of Potsdam Ethics Committee, the head of the schools, the
Ministry of Education, Youth and Health (Land Brandenburg), and the
Senate for Education, Youth and Science (Berlin) and was conducted in
accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Parents gave written
informed consent for their children's participation.
7.2. Inhibitory control task
The inhibitory control task (central task) required children to
respond to the nose color of a yellow emoticon presented at the center of
a black touch screen (see Fig. 1). This target stimulus was a colored oval
(blue or white) depicting the “nose” of the emoticon. Participants were
asked to press the button in the same color in congruent blocks (e.g.,
blue “nose” – blue button), but the opposite color-button (e.g., blue
“nose” – white button) in the incongruent condition. The buttons were
located at the opposite corners at the bottom of the screen (see Fig. 1)
and the arrangement was counterbalanced such that for half of the
participants the white button was on the left and the blue button was on
the right corner, and for the other half, the blue corner was left and the
white one was right. Before each trial, a xation cross (4 ×4 cm) was
presented for 500 ms followed by the stimulus (i.e., the emoticon 6 cm in
diameter with the colored nose 1.5 cm in diameter) that appeared until a
response was given or until 2500 ms. Participants responded by tapping
on one of two colored buttons (5.2 ×3.5 cm) at the lower left/right side
of the touch screen with a pen. Afterwards a blank screen was displayed
until the participant pressed the orange “home-button” (2.5 ×2.5 cm) in
the lower center of the touch display. This button was introduced so that
participants could not stay on either side of the tablet after responding to
a given stimulus, since this would inuence the RT on the next trial.
After 500 ms, the next trial began.
To test the impact of emotional information presented in the pe-
riphery, we used three conditions by manipulating the emoticon: happy,
neutral, and sad (see Fig. 2). In each of the three conditions, participants
were instructed to respond exclusively to the color of the “nose” ignoring
whether the emoticon expressed an emotion (i.e., happy or sad) or not (i.
e., neutral). The entire experiment consisted of 6 blocks with 30 trials
each (15 blue and 15 white “noses”): one block for each congruency and
emotion (i.e., sad/congruent, sad/incongruent, neutral/congruent,
neutral/incongruent, happy/congruent, and happy/incongruent). We
chose to present consecutive blocks with the same emotion to create
longer-lasting emotional manipulations as they are more age-
appropriate and more intense than brief presentations with trial-by-
trial changes. Congruency conditions were presented alternatingly.
Consequently, six different versions were created (every possible order
of emotion and both congruency sequences, C-I and I-C) to counterbal-
ance order of congruency and emotional conditions across participants.
7.3. Procedure
Participants were seated in front of a tablet computer (i.e., Microsoft
Surface Pro 2; 1920 ×1080 pixel; using Microsoft Visual Studio) in a
quiet classroom where 10 to 12 children at a time completed the task.
The instruction phase (about 5 min) included presentation of the stimuli
with their assignments to response buttons according to the congruency
and the task itself. Then participants were asked to take the Surface Pro 2
pen with their writing hand while placing the other hand next to the
tablet. Training consisted of six trials (each colored “nose” presented
once on each emoticon; refer back to Fig. 2) for which feedback was
provided. After the instruction phase, the experimental phase began.
The entire session took approximately 30 min.
7.4. Data pre-processing and statistical analyses
Blocks with a below chance performance (i.e., 50%) were excluded
(n =2). Only RTs from correct trials were analyzed and log-transformed
to normalize distribution. Outliers in the form of single data points that
were 2 SD above or below a participant's mean RT (n =488 what cor-
responds to 4.3% of all data points) were removed. Performance in terms
of percentage of correct answers was very high, in particular in the
congruent condition. As such, detailed analyses included only RTs, but
differences between emotion and congruency conditions in terms of
accuracy were analyzed using linear regression models including main
effects for CONGRUENCY and EMOTION and their interaction.
All analyses were run using R (R Core Team, 2015). RTs were
analyzed in stepwise linear mixed regression models (with the lme4
package; Bates et al., 2014) that assessed in the rst step the congruency
effect (xed effect for CONGRUENCY; congruent coded as 0, incon-
gruent coded as 1). In the next step, we added and examined xed effects
for EMOTION (neutral coded as 0, happy and sad coded as 1) including
main effects and interaction with CONGRUENCY. Model t was
compared with an ANOVA. In a last step, other predictors for executive
functions (i.e., age, intelligence, and gender) were added. In all models,
a maximally complex random effects structure with varying intercepts
Fig. 1. Example of an experimental trial. In a congruent condition, the
participant needs to tap on the blue corner button with the pen and then to
move back to the orange “home-button” in the lower center of the screen and to
tap on it. In the sad incongruent condition, the participant is required to tap on
the white corner button, then on the orange button. (For interpretation of the
references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web
version of this article.)
Fig. 2. Six stimuli used in the test including two color-noses (white or blue) and
three emoticon-emotional states. (For interpretation of the references to color in
this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
S. Czapka et al.
Acta Psychologica 223 (2022) 103507
5
for subjects and varying slopes for CONGRUENCY and EMOTION was
t. More parsimonious random effects structures without random slopes
for CONGRUENCY or EMOTION did not improve model t (Bates et al.,
2015).
In a planned post-hoc analysis investigating the interference effect
and the order of the congruency conditions (CONGRUENCY SEQUENCE:
C-I – congruent-incongruent; I-C – incongruent-congruent), a linear
mixed effects model with a varying intercept for subject was computed
to calculate the effect of CONGRUENCY SEQUENCE and EMOTION on
the size of the interference effect.
8. Results
8.1. Main Analyses
Performance in each emotion and congruency condition in terms of
accuracy and RTs is displayed in Table 1. As performance in terms of
accuracy was at ceiling, we did not analyse accuracy in detail. Still,
linear regression models predicting the percentage of correct answers
and errors revealed a signicant congruency effect (correct: b = − 7.2,
SD =1.3, t = − 5.4, p <.001; errors: b =5.9, SD =0.9, t =6.5, p <.001).
For correct answers, the intercept varied signicantly (b =95.2, SD =
0.9, t =101.8, p <.001) but not for the percentage of errors (b =1.1, SD
=0.6, t =1.7, p >.05). No inuence of emotion (correct: happy vs.
neutral b = − 0.5, SD =1.3, t = − 0.4, p >.05; sad vs. neutral b = − 0.6,
SD =1.3, t = − 0.4, p >.05; errors: happy vs. neutral b =0.0, SD =0.9, t
=0.0, p >.05; sad vs. neutral b =0.0, SD =0.9, t =0.1, p >.05) nor an
interaction of congruency and emotion was found for either measure
(correct: incongruent x happy b =1.8, SD =1.9, t =1.0, p >.05;
incongruent x sad b =1.0, SD =1.9, t =0.5, p >.05; errors: incongruent
x happy b = − 1.2, SD =1.3, t = − 0.9, p >.05; incongruent x sad b =
−0.5, SD =1.3, t = − 0.4, p >.05). For missing responses, the intercept
varied signicantly (b =3.7, SD =0.7, t =5.2, p <.001) but no inuence
of congruency or emotion was found (incongruent: b =1.3, SD =1.0, t =
1.3, p >.05, happy: b =0.5, SD =1.0, t =0.5, p >.05; sad: b =0.6, SD =
1.0, t =0.5, p >.05; incongruent x happy: b = − 0.7, SD =1.4, t = − 0.5,
p >.05; incongruent x sad: b = − 0.5, SD =1.4, t = − 0.4, p >.05).
The stepwise regression model predicting log-transformed RTs
included initially only a xed effect for CONGRUENCY and t the data
best (regression coefcients for all models are displayed in Table A1 in
the Appendix). This model included a signicantly varying intercept
(corresponding to the mean for the congruent condition; b =6.87, SE =
0.01, t =590.1) and a signicant effect of CONGRUENCY (b =0.23, SE
=0.01, t =24.7), indicating that RTs in the incongruent condition were
signicantly higher than in the congruent condition. Neither adding
xed effects for EMOTION, the interaction EMOTION and CONGRU-
ENCY, nor adding the background variables AGE, GENDER, and IN-
TELLIGENCE to the congruency-only model improved the model t
(Model 2:
χ
2
=3.10, p =.5; Model 3:
χ
2
=1.03, p =.6; Model 4:
χ
2
=
5.58, p =.13, respectively). Fig. 3 displays the RT results per emotional
condition (neutral, happy, sad) for congruent and incongruent blocks
and illustrates the overall congruency effect irrespective of emotional
condition.
8.2. Post-hoc analyses
In follow-up analyses, we investigated if emotions affected RTs
differently over the course of the experiment. This was motivated by our
knowledge of the impact of congruency order on performance in inhi-
bition tasks (Egner, 2007; Erb & Marcovitch, 2018), which is why we
counter-balanced the order of congruency in this experiment, and
reinforced by the insignicant effect of emotion in the previous analysis.
Since congruency inuenced RTs in all conditions, we used the inter-
ference effect (RT difference between congruent and incongruent con-
ditions) as the dependent variable. We calculated the interference effect
in combination with congruency sequences (i.e., the order of
Table 1
Descriptive statistics by emotional condition and congruency: percentage of
correct, missing, or incorrect responses (in %), and mean and standard deviation
(SD) of RTs.
Emotion Congruency Correct Missing Incorrect RT (SD)
Neutral Congruent 95.2 3.7 1.1 988 (134)
Neutral Incongruent 88.0 5.0 7.0 1238 (153)
Happy Congruent 94.7 4.2 1.1 998 (119)
Happy Incongruent 89.3 4.9 5.8 1257 (170)
Sad Congruent 94.6 4.3 1.1 998 (98)
Sad Incongruent 88.3 5.1 6.6 1242 (124)
Fig. 3. Reaction times (RT, log-transformed, error bars display standard errors)
for congruency (central task) according to emotion conditions (peripheral task).
Fig. 4. Interference effects (IE, log-transformed, error bars display standard
errors) for congruency sequences (C-I =congruent block followed by an
incongruent block; I-C =incongruent-congruent) according to emotion condi-
tions (peripheral task).
S. Czapka et al.
Acta Psychologica 223 (2022) 103507
6
congruency conditions) and found a subtle inuence of emotion (see
Fig. 4).
Table 2 displays the linear mixed effects model predicting the size of
the interference effect with ORDER and EMOTION as predictors. The
model shows a signicantly varying intercept for subject and a signi-
cant effect for ORDER (b =0.13, SE =0.02, t =5.22) indicating that the
interference effect was larger when incongruent blocks preceded
congruent ones. It also yielded a signicantly lower impact of order in
the sad condition (b = − 0.07, SE =0.03, t = − 2.12). t-Tests revealed that
CONGRUENCY SEQUENCE inuenced the size of the interference effect
signicantly in all three EMOTION conditions, with a large effect size in
the neutral condition (C-I: M =0.16, SD =0.11, I-C: M =0.29, SD =0.1,
t(56.97) = − 4.93, p <.001, d = − 1.26) and happy condition (C-I: M =
0.18, SD =0.09, I-C: M =0.27, SD =0.11, t(60.99) = − 3.75, p <.001, d
= − 0.94) and a medium effect size in the sad condition (C-I: M =0.19,
SD =0.09, I-C: M =0.24, SD =0.08, t(56.93) = − 2.58, p <.05, d =
−0.66).
To unravel the origin of the congruency sequence effect, we exam-
ined whether it changed over the course of the experiment. To do so, we
calculated linear regression models predicting the interference effect
with the same factors (CONGRUENCY SEQUENCE and EMOTION) but
for each set of congruent-incongruent conditions separately. Given that
congruency conditions were presented alternatingly, the experiment
consisted of three sets that were assigned to one of the emotion condi-
tions (see Fig. 5). Here, we report only signicant effects, but the com-
plete models can be found in Table A2 in the Appendix. There was
signicant variance in intercepts (rst set: b =0.16, SE =0.03, t =5.19,
p <.001; second set: b =0.18, SE =0.03, t =6.47, p <.001; third set: b
=0.15, SE =0.03, t =5.16, p <.001) and a signicant effect of ORDER
in every set (rst set: b =0.22, SE =0.04, t =5.17, p <.001; second set:
b =008, SE =0.04, t =2.18, p <.05; third set: b =0.1, SE =0.04, t =
2.42, p <.05), implying that the interference effect was larger when the
incongruent preceded the congruent condition compared to the opposite
order. Although there were no signicant main effects for EMOTION, the
interaction between CONGRUENCY SEQUENCE and EMOTION, i.e., sad
compared to neutral, reached statistical signicance, but only in the rst
set (b = − 0.17, SE =0.06, t = − 3.09, p <.01). This effect indicated that
the interference effect in the rst set in the I-C sequence was smaller in
the sad compared to the neutral condition (see also Fig. 5).
Pairwise t-tests (see Table 3) revealed that the sad condition was the
only one in which RTs were relatively stable throughout the experiment
(i.e., RTs of the rst block were not signicantly different from the other
blocks taken together). In all other conditions, RTs were initially longer
and became shorter. As can be also seen in Fig. 5, only at the beginning
of the experiment (i.e., in the rst set), the difference between C-I and I-
C was smaller in the sad than in the neutral condition.
9. Discussion
In the present study, we investigated the impact of task-irrelevant
peripheral emotions on inhibitory control in 3rd graders. We pre-
sented happy, neutral, and sad emoticons in an age-appropriate
computerized inhibitory control task allowing for within-task differen-
tiation of emotional expressions on inhibitory control processes (“ex-
ecutive competition”, Pessoa, 2013). First of all, we found a reliable
interference effect in the RTs and number of correct answers, with
incongruent blocks leading to slower RTs and less correct answers than
congruent blocks. No general inuence of peripheral emotion was
found. That said, in post-hoc analyses, we found that a) the size of the
interference effect depended on the congruency sequence order with
incongruent preceding congruent conditions leading to a larger inter-
ference effect and that b) this difference was reduced in the sad condi-
tion, especially at the beginning of the experiment, yielding evidence of
distinct modulations of the impact of task-irrelevant emotional
information.
9.1. Top-down inhibitory control
The interference effect observed in the present study is in line with a
long history of studies using stimulus-response compatibility tasks
showing that in the present manipulation (color of the “nose”) the
incongruent blocks were more demanding than congruent ones (slower
RTs and more errors; e.g., Gerstadt et al., 1994). In this newly designed
task, the setup of the central task was successful since the nose as the
relevant stimulus triggered the color identication as the prepotent re-
action (i.e., associative learning). Task performance was relatively easy
on congruent trials (color congruency) but more difcult for the
participating children on incongruent trials. In these latter, more
demanding trials, after identication of the nose color, children needed
to inhibit the general color congruency (i.e., tapping on the matching
color button) and choose the competing subdominant response in this
two-response set (i.e., the other color button in the other corner of the
tablet). The results also indicated that top-down inhibitory control was
exible as it was executed according to block-wise changing task de-
mands (congruent or incongruent block) and that the participants could
adapt inhibitory control to the degree of conict in the block. Beyond
the necessary inhibitory control required for executing the central task,
more general cognitive control was necessary to master the perceptual
conict inherent in the emoticon stimulus (central and peripheral in-
formation): The focus of attention on the central task was necessary for
successful task performance. It can be assumed that the children in our
study were well able to prioritize the information of the central task and
to focus their attention on allocating resources to process the color
stimuli according to task demands. The high percentage of correct re-
sponses shows overall successful task performance which indicates focus
on the relevant stimulus and underlying appropriate general cognitive
control.
9.2. The inuence of congruency sequence
In the literature congruency sequencing effects are commonly tested
on a trial-by-trial basis and indicate a smaller interference effect for a
congruent following an incongruent trial as compared to the opposite
(Egner, 2007). In our study using a blocked design, the opposite pattern
emerged: the interference effect was larger when a congruent block
followed an incongruent one. This could be explained based on differ-
ential monitoring demands in blockwise and trial-by-trial conditions:
The blockwise-changing demands might require the participants to rely
on sustained proactive control as compared to the uctuating moni-
toring demands in trialwise-changing designs that might require reac-
tive control (for the dual mechanisms of control model, see Braver,
2012). Given that proactive control emerges between 5 and 7 years
(Munakata et al., 2012), children in our age-group were most likely able
to anticipate incongruency in the incongruent block as they seemed to
prevent interference in the upcoming trials quite successfully by relying
on proactive control (rather than on reactive control; Braver, 2012). This
more demanding incongruent condition leads to slower RTs. In the
following congruent block, the task can be perceived as easier
(compared to the previous block) what allows participants to speed up.
This leads to a magnied interference effect compared to the sequence
order with increasing difculty (i.e., congruent followed by incongruent
Table 2
Fixed effects of the regression model including congruency sequence and
emotion predicting the interference effect.
b SE t
(Intercept) 0.16 0.02 9.14
I-C 0.13 0.02 5.22
Happy 0.02 0.02 0.80
Sad 0.02 0.02 1.03
I-C: happy −0.03 0.03 −1.00
I-C: sad −0.07 0.03 −2.12
S. Czapka et al.
Acta Psychologica 223 (2022) 103507
7
block).
9.3. The inuence of task-irrelevant emotions on inhibitory control
Unlike the happy-sad tasks reported in Ikeda et al. (2014) and
Lagattuta et al. (2011), emotional information was only displayed at the
periphery and it was not relevant for performing the task in the present
study. Thus, there were no emotional properties in the central stimulus
itself (i.e., a colored nose rather than emotion words or angry faces) and
no emotional responses had to be given. At the level of a general analysis
of accuracy and RTs, the emotional distracter in the periphery did not
yield any modulation of speed or accuracy in either emotion condition in
our study.
This might be surprising as emotional stimuli have been found to
interfere with performance even when they were task-irrelevant (see e.
g., Pessoa & Ungerleider, 2004; Vuilleumier, 2005) and even when the
central task is quite basic (Pereira et al., 2010). Even irrelevant stimuli
are thought to capture unintentionally resources that enable their pro-
cessing, if the relevant, central task does not demand all the available
attentional resources (Pessoa, 2013). What follows from this is that
when cognitive demands are high for performing on the central task,
fewer resources are available for the peripheral information and inter-
ference effects from the irrelevant information could be eliminated. This
means that responses to peripheral emotional stimuli depend on the
availability of resources (De Cesarei et al., 2009). The lack of the
CONGRUENCY X EMOTION interaction might be related to participants
investing more effort (or attention) in the central task trials and thus
were not able to process the emotional information enough to enable its
effect on performance. In contrast, focal presentation of emotion in
Kramer et al. (2015) did impair children's inhibitory control; in Lagat-
tuta and Kramer (2017), the task instruction induced bottom-up pro-
cessing of emotional information (i.e., look at faces) and led to a
negative bias when contrasted with a general bottom-up perception in
the happy-sad task (and see Song et al., 2017 describing the impact of
task-relevant mild and intense emotional conict on inhibitory control
in adults).
However, emotional information in the periphery is still assumed to
be processed automatically (Pessoa, 2013). But when arousal is low and
the emotional information is task-irrelevant, despite interference of the
main task being observed, the behavioral effects are small. This is why
only our ne-grained analyses revealed a small effect of emotion, and
only at the beginning of the experiment: In contrast to the neutral
condition, the congruency sequence effect in the sad condition was
smaller. This effect was caused by lower RTs in the sad, incongruent
block at the beginning of the experiment (I-C order). Thus, the fact that
the interference effect varied as a function of emotion provides rst
evidence that peripheral emotional expressions inuence inhibitory
control processes - at least at the beginning of this type of task. More
precisely, the participants' RTs in the incongruent, sad block when
presented rst in the experiment were already as fast as the RTs in
subsequent blocks, whereas RTs in the other two congruency-emotion
conditions were initially slower than in the rest of the experiment. The
results for the neutral and positive condition seem to reect the default-
mode of interference control, i.e., decreasing RTs with continuous
training. The results for the negative condition, however, may indicate a
context-driven change in performance (see further below for more detail).
In contrast to our study, other studies found a general impact of
peripherally-presented emotions on inhibition, but two contextual
Fig. 5. Interference effect (IE, log-transformed, error bars display standard errors) for emotion conditions and congruency sequence with C-I (light grey) (i.e.,
congruent preceded incongruent block), and I-C (dark grey) (i.e., incongruent before congruent block) split by set (i.e., pair of congruent and incongruent blocks).
Table 3
Mean RTs (in ms) per experimental block (1 to 6) for version and congruency, and p-values for pairwise comparisons between rst and subsequent blocks.
Version Congruency 1 2 3 4 5 6 p Block 1 vs. blocks 2–6
Neutral Congruent 1034 995 1011 978 996 908 <.001
Neutral Incongruent 1440 1212 1255 1203 1165 1157 <.001
Happy Congruent 1048 985 1040 951 998 961 <.001
Happy Incongruent 1353 1237 1273 1316 1190 1147 <.001
Sad Congruent 1044 976 970 966 1037 993 <.001
Sad Incongruent 1265 1309 1258 1176 1223 1199 .12
S. Czapka et al.
Acta Psychologica 223 (2022) 103507
8
factors seem to determine the relation between emotion processing and
inhibitory control: salience of the emotion distractors and cognitive task
demands. For example, emotional distractors in Jasinska et al. (2012)
inuenced performance as both negative and positive distractors in their
study slowed down RTs. The reason may be different perceptual salience
of the emotional information: In their study the items (three digits) were
anked on both sides by large, colorful pictures of either humans
expressing intense negative emotions (fear distractor) or highly attrac-
tive food stimuli (reward distractor). For the emotional information in
our study, in contrast, we used visually less salient stimuli: the mouths of
emoticons were only a thin black line, which had the same color and
thickness as all lines in the yellow emoticon and were less salient than
the target (nose colored in blue or white).
However, the direction of the effect in Jasinska et al.'s study was
opposite to ours. Papazacharias et al.'s (2015) results indicate that task
demands might modulate the direction of the effect. Papazacharias
et al.'s study with adults reported faster responses on incongruent trials
with intermediate attentional demands following the presentation of
negative emotions. The demands in our task might be at an intermediate
level as in Papazacharias et al. since we tested children whose cognitive
control is still developing. Additionally, the impact of emotions
appeared only at the beginning of the experiment. Cognitive load is
commonly higher at the beginning of the experiment (when participants
are occupied with associative learning, perceptual conict, and adap-
tation of control processes to demands of the current task and block), as
indicated by slower responses. Participants in our study not only quickly
learned to associate their response in the requested condition (incon-
gruent condition), but as argued above, likely also learned to efciently
associate the stimulus already with specic control needs (i.e., proactive
control) and thus were able to adapt their processing speed when
executing inhibitory control (lower RTs in all subsequent blocks) ––but
only in the sad condition. This nding is in line with Lagattuta and
Kramer (2017) in which negative/sad emotions cue a focus of attention,
even if presented peripherally and with no relevance for the currently
executed task. The sharpened focus gained from the experience with the
sad condition in our study might have led to enhanced inhibitory control
and a small adaptation in behavior (i.e., RTs) throughout the experi-
ment. This is in line with studies that showed that negative emotion
might increase conict adaptation (van Steenbergen et al., 2010) what
has been shown in this study for children.
10. Limitations and future studies
In the present study, we could only provide some indication for
differences between the neutral condition and the other two emotional
conditions. Therefore, behavioral research ndings on the impact of
task-irrelevant emotional information on inhibitory control remain
controversial and future studies need to unveil the impact of salience of
emotional distracters and task demands on inhibitory control, including
the direction and strength of this relation. Investigations which combine
behavioral and neuroimaging methods seem most suitable for providing
a better understanding of these factors and their modulating impact.
Notwithstanding, future studies should investigate individual differ-
ences with regard to the effect of emotions on cognitive processing, in
particular on executive competition. For example, in a study on brain
and behavioral inhibitory control, Farbiash and Berger (2016) found
that some kindergarten children performed worse than others when
facing negative emotions.
This study is, to our knowledge, the rst that reports congruency-
sequence effects in a blocked design. Further studies that compare RTs
in a blocked versus a trial-based design might give further insights into
the inuence of congruency sequence on performance.
11. Conclusion
In the present study, we examined the relationship between bottom-
up processing of peripheral emotions and top-down processing of
inhibitory control. We did not nd a general impact of emotions on
inhibitory control, likely due to the reduced salience of our emotional
stimuli in comparison to, for example, Jasinska et al. (2012) and the
children's efcient and focused handling of the central task. Still, we
found that our sad condition led to a smaller interference effect at the
beginning of the study related to smaller RTs in the incongruent block if
it appeared as initial block. The direction of the relation between
emotion and RTs is opposite to other studies with adults like Jasinska
et al. (2012). As faster RTs appeared in intermediate but not low
cognitively demanding conditions (Papazacharias et al., 2015), we
conclude that the cognitive demands likely led to this effect: higher
demands at the beginning of the experiment and the fact that we tested
children with developing cognitive control abilities explain our results.
Our study also extends the ndings from Kramer et al. (2015), who
examined the impact of peripheral emotion information on inhibitory
control in children, by overcoming methodological limitations, i.e., by
using a trial-based RT analysis and replicating an effect of sadness on
inhibitory control in terms of a reduction of response latencies. The
irrelevance of the emotional information displayed at the periphery
nonetheless shows the strong automaticity (Pessoa, 2013) of emotional
processing when cognitive demands in the central task are high enough.
More specically, due to the inherent warning sign for cautiousness,
negative (at least facial) emotional expressions—task-irrelevant and
presented in the periphery—seem to narrow children's attention,
resulting in improved situation-adapted and goal-appropriate behavior.
Declaration of competing interest
We have no conicts to declare.
Acknowledgment
This study was conducted by the Diversity and Inclusion Research
Group, University of Potsdam. We are grateful to all members of the
Research Group, in particular to Thomas Dolk and Larissa Arndt, for
many fruitful discussions and support in study preparation, data
collection and data processing. We also thank the children for their
participation in this study as well as their parents and the schools for
their permission to carry out this project, and Land Brandenburg for
funding this research.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103507.
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