FMRI network dynamics underpinning the impact of affective carry-over on cognitive control

Abstract Behavioral research has extensively documented the impact of affective states on cognitive control. Despite increasing interest in investigating how affect and emotion influence cognition, the functional neural architecture mediating these effects remains unresolved. Here, we examined how changes in brain network dynamics elicited by negative emotions modulate the subsequent recruitment of attentional processes at behavioral and neural levels. We collected fMRI BOLD activity in healthy humans during three sequential conditions (naturalistic movie watching, resting state, and cognitive control task) in either neutral or negative emotion contexts. We assessed fMRI data by using co-activation patterns (CAPs) analysis to characterize dynamic functional connectivity within whole-brain networks across experimental conditions, and then applied structural equation modelling to uncover their functional relationships. We found that neural markers of cognitive control (FPN) were modulated by prior occurrences of distinct activity patterns after negative emotions, involving (1) the salience (SN) and sensorimotor (SMN) networks during the emotion-eliciting event itself, and (2) the default mode (DMN), salience (SN), and sensorimotor (SMN) networks in a resting period following emotional elicitation. Further, these neural interactions were related to concomitant changes in behavioral measures of cognitive control after negative emotion. Altogether, our results provide new insights into the brain dynamic functional organization supporting high-order cognitive processing and its regulation by negative emotions.