Cognitive control plays a crucial role in navigating ambiguous or conflicting situations. Does control of thoughts and behavior go hand in hand with the ability to control emotions?
Traditionally, the exploration of control has taken separate paths for cognitive and emotional conflicts. However, recent theoretical perspectives that are based on evidence from clinical, social, and developmental psychology, as well as neuroscience suggest a close link between processes governing emotional and cognitive control.
The main objective of our study was to investigate whether cognitive and emotional control operates within specific domains or whether control processes induced by cognitive or emotional conflict can generalize across the respective other domain.
In four Experiments, we tested how control in one domain (e.g., cognitive) interacts with control in the other domain (e.g., emotional) on a trial-by-trial basis. We devised an experimental protocol that varied the source of conflict using both, cognitive and emotional Stroop tasks, examining the Congruency Sequence Effect as an indicator of cognitive or (implicit) emotional control, respectively.
Our results revealed significant Congruency Sequence Effects across cognitive and emotional conflict tasks, suggesting an interaction of control mechanisms across domains. However, within-domain Congruency Sequence Effects were significantly larger than across-domain Congruency Sequence Effects. Therefore, we put forward a hybrid account, which posits a dual nature of control that is partly based on domain-general mechanisms and partly acts specifically for cognitive and emotional domains.