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Emotional information poses a challenge to our limited cognitive resources because it prioritizes attention and competes for processing resources, and because to achieve goal directed behavior, it may need to be ignored. Therefore, when emotional information is irrelevant to current goals, conflict arises and how it is resolved depends on different factors. Some factors pertain to the characteristics of the competing stimuli (e.g., low-level perceptual characteristics, perceptual salience, grouping, feature binding, etc.), but others directly tap onto cognitive control (see Pessoa, 2009; Pourtois et al., 2013). Albeit, implicit learning based on immediate (e.g., trial n-1 effects) or recent (e.g., contextual, statistical, and associative learning, etc.) history challenges this dichotomy between bottom-up and top-down factors. Interestingly, under certain conditions, emotional information reduces rather than enhances cognitive conflict.

The present perspective has three objectives: (i) to offer an integrative account of emotional conflict resolution; (ii) to define the contribution of emotional arousal and approach or avoidance motivation in accounting for conflict resolution; and (iii) to explore some of these mechanisms in patients with spinal cord lesion (SCI). We argue that a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying emotional conflict resolution could be critical for adaptive and flexible behavior and has potential implications for the selection of appropriate therapeutic interventions.

Research has typically used tasks that entail presenting task-relevant and task-irrelevant information either concurrently as two dimensions of the same stimulus (i.e., emotional variant of the Stroop task, Stroop, 1935), as two competing stimuli assembled as a compound (e.g., Word-Face Interference, Stenberg et al., 1998), or as two or more spatially separated stimuli (e.g., Flanker task, Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974).¹ In the emotional variant of the Stroop task, a stimulus varies on two dimensions, one emotional and the other perceptual (e.g., emotional words written in different ink color), and participants respond based on the non-emotional, perceptual feature. In the emotional Word-face interference task, two stimuli (e.g., a word and a face) are presented superimposed onto the other (compound stimulus) one being the target and the other the distractor, whereas in the emotional Flanker task, target and distractor are presented next to each other.

Except for the emotional variant of the Stroop task and for some variants of the Flanker task, target and distractor can be affectively congruent (e.g., positive word and positive face) or incongruent (e.g., positive word and negative face). When a control condition is used, it entails presenting neutral in addition to the emotional distractors. Regardless of the specific task performed, emotional conflict is greater when the to-be attended and the to-be ignored stimuli (i.e., distractors) are affectively incongruent than when they are congruent or neutral. Importantly, emotional distractors yield a larger incongruence effect (i.e., interference) and greater performance impairment (i.e., slower responses and lower accuracy), compared to neutral distractors (e.g., Stenberg et al., 1998; Pecchinenda and Heil, 2007; Zhu et al., 2010; Strand et al., 2013; Pecchinenda et al., 2015; Ma et al., 2016; Petrucci and Pecchinenda, 2017; Viviani et al., 2021), independently of whether emotion is task relevant. Depending on the specific methodology used, this effect can stem from different underlying mechanisms, but response interference is always involved (Musch and Klauer, 2003). Importantly, in recent years, there has been evidence that emotional stimuli, rather than engendering greater interference, facilitate conflict resolution as there are faster and/or more accurate responses in the incongruent condition (for recent reviews, see Zinchenko et al., 2020). However, this finding is not homogenous probably due to differences in the methodologies used. This has focused the discussion on the factors affecting this effect and whether conflict resolution relies on phasic or tonic effects of emotion (Zinchenko et al., 2020). A recent review of available studies has concluded that evidence is so far inconclusive (Dignath et al., 2020). Moreover, that emotion facilitates conflict resolution has sometimes been attributed to the effect of arousal (Zeng et al., 2017; Landman and van Steenbergen, 2020). Taken together, this evidence points to the possible contribution of different underlying mechanisms to the effect of emotion on conflict resolution.

There are three major accounts for the mechanism responsible for emotion conflict resolution: Dual-process theory, Dual-competition framework, Arousal-biased competition model:

All three views received empirical support, suggesting that the emotional conflict resolution relies, in fact, on multiple factors. We combined this information to assess the role of emotional arousal and motivation in conflict resolution and whether they can operate independently or simultaneously.

Here, we argue for an integrated approach that considers the role of different factors on emotion conflict resolution, including emotional arousal and motivation. There is a long tradition of linking arousal to cognitive control. However, although cognitive control can be affected by arousal (see Porges, 2001), the direction of the effect and the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. For instance, increased arousal due to parasympathetic withdrawal and increased sympathetic activity has been linked to cognitive resources mobilization and better cognitive control. It has also been suggested that the arousal value of a stimulus, but not its valence, signals the urgency of processing and leads to motor preparation. Therefore, emotional arousal would facilitate processing of emotional stimuli, yielding faster responses (Robinson, 1998). It follows that if increased arousal due to parasympathetic withdrawal speeds up responses, then it may facilitate emotional conflict resolution by attenuating the slowing down due to response interference effect in tasks relying on response activation.

Importantly, the opposite relation between arousal and cognitive control has also been reported. Indeed, the neurovisceral integration model (Thayer et al., 2009) proposes that greater parasympathetic control of cardiac arousal is associated with better cognitive control as it reflects greater involvement of the prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, insula and of brain stem structures that regulate arousal (Thayer et al., 2012) and are involved in emotion regulation. It follows that higher resting values of heart rate variability (HRV) – an indicator of parasympathetic control over the heart – are linked to better cognitive control. Although this relationship has been predicted for tonic arousal, there is evidence that internal signals of moment by moment changes in arousal affect brain processing and cognitive control. For instance, Valt and Stürmer (2021) showed that enhanced phasic physiological arousal is evoked not only by incorrect responses but also by correct responses and this phasic arousal guides optimal performance on a trial by trail basis during cognitive tasks. Importantly, the effects of these internal signals seem to be independent of valence (see also the reinforcement-learning model of Holroyd and Coles, 2002 for the role of dopaminergic signals to the anterior cingulate cortex depending on performance).

We propose to re-conceptualize the effect of emotion on conflict resolution in terms of mechanisms of implicit cognitive control and emotion regulation linked to arousal. Not only cognitive control is enhanced by efficient emotion regulation (Teper et al., 2013) but emotional conflict resolution may call upon the same processes and mechanisms. These interactive effects would not be surprising considering that emotion regulation (e.g., attentional deployment, distraction, and selection all rely on attention, Gross and Thompson, 2007) and cognitive control rely on shared neural circuits (e.g., Phan and Sripada, 2013). In this case, emotional arousal alone would facilitate conflict resolution by enhancing cognitive monitoring and attentional resources allocation (see also Ahumada-Méndez et al., 2022). Depending on whether the to-be attended and the to-be ignored emotional information belong to the same (e.g., allowing for perceptual grouping) or different stimuli, emotion regulation strategy may rely on selectively attending to one aspect of the stimulus over another, shifting attention away from one stimulus toward another, inhibiting the activated responses, or combinations of different strategies.² In contrast, when the to-be ignored and to-be attended emotional stimuli co-occur, emotional conflict resolution may be achieved by means of response-focused regulatory strategies (i.e., response inhibition). However, the success of response inhibition may depend not only on the elicited emotional intensity/arousal, but also on the activated motivational tendency, such that it may be more difficult to inhibit an activated approach response compared to when avoidance is primed, especially when emotional arousal is high, and emotion is task-relevant.

In the next section we discuss the role of internal signals and phasic arousal generated during emotional conflict in patients with SCI.

That emotion regulation may rely on tonic or on moment-by-moment physiological arousal via interoceptive pathways (Thayer and Lane, 2000; Porges, 2001), and that interoceptive feedback may also intrinsically influence emotion regulation processes, by acting at the autonomic level (Damasio and Carvalho, 2013). Of interest here is whether emotion regulation may be attenuated when the autonomic flow of information between the brain and body is permanently disrupted. As the primary relay center of neural transmission, a SCI interrupts the communication of the afferent and efferent systems between the brain and the rest of the body (Leemhuis et al., 2019, 2022), via the spinal projections (Bican et al., 2013; Rupp, 2020). The axotomy after SCI has thus implications for the motor, sensory, autonomic physiology of the cortical and corticospinal network (Nagendran et al., 2017; Michael et al., 2019; Benedetti et al., 2022). Accordingly, patients with SCI represent an ideal model for studying the role of physiological arousal in resolving emotional conflict, given their distinct pathophysiological autonomic profile.

More specifically, higher SCI [at or above the 6th thoracic segment (≥ T6)] due to disruption of sympathetic nervous system pathways (Krassioukov, 2009; Craig et al., 2018), result in an imbalance of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity (Teasell et al., 2000). The loss of supraspinal sympathetic nervous system input following high-level SCI leads to systemic hypotension and episodes of uncontrolled hypertension (Krassioukov, 2009) with an impaired hemodynamic balance which is negatively affected by postural stress (Teasell et al., 2000). Individuals with SCI ≥ T6 may be at higher risk than those with lower lesions to develop autonomic alterations, including heart rate, blood pressure, skin temperature, gut motility, respiration, and piloerection, that are critical for neurophysiological regulation of emotional responses (Nicotra et al., 2006; Migliorini et al., 2009; Mather and Thayer, 2018).

The present perspective offers an integrative account of the mechanisms that may underlie the resolution of emotional conflicts in tasks involving response activation, highlighting the contribution of emotional arousal and primed approach/avoidance. Direct evidence on the contribution of emotional arousal to cognitive control may come from SCI studies, providing the simplest conceivable test for the hypothesis that arousal biases emotional and cognitive control. In fact, if arousal, together with approach and avoidance tendencies, affect emotional conflict resolution, then an effect of SCI lesion level might be predicted.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

AP and MP: conceptualization and supervision. AP, MP, APGP, and CS: writing – original draft preparation and review, and editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.