Affective Executive Functions and Emotional Functioning

The content of our thoughts and the processes that allow us to change our thoughts play an important role in how we feel. However, most research examining the cognition-emotion relation has focused on the cognitive content associated with emotions, and have mostly neglected the processes responsible for changing cognitive content associatednbsp;changing emotions. In this dissertation, we address this shortcoming by examining affective executive functions—cognitive control processes responsible for regulating or changing affective thoughts—and its relation to emotional functioning. We focus on two specific affective executive functions: affective proactive interference and affective updating, and relate them to two aspects of emotional functioning: emotional change (Chapters 1-3) and psychological well-being (Chapters 4-5). In Chapters 1 and 2, we examined whether both affective proactive interference (Chapter 1) and affective updating (Chapter 2) would be associated with efficacious use of emotion regulation strategies—that is, the magnitude of emotional change when individuals are actively regulating their emotions. Results revealed that efficacious use of emotion regulation strategies is associated not only with cognitive inhibition, but also with affective updating. Emotional change, however, does not only involve changing emotions to make us feel better (emotion recovery), but it also involves changing emotions to fit the emotional event (emotion reactivity). Therefore, in Chapter 3, we examined whether affective updating would be involved in both emotion reactivity to and emotion recovery from an emotional event. Results revealed thatnbsp;affective updating ability was indeed associated with resistance to emotional change, such as blunted reactivity to and impaired recovery from negative emotion-eliciting events. Resistance to emotional change is characteristic of clinical depression. Given that affective updating ability seems to be partly responsible for flexible emotional change, and emotional change is key to mental health, we then examined in Chapter 4 whether poor affective updating ability would be considered a risk factor for clinical depression. Results revealed that especially under high levels of stress, individuals with poor affective updating ability experienced increased depressive symptoms afternbsp;months and one year. If poor affective updating ability is a risk factor for depression, this however does not immediately imply that better affective updating ability would correspond to more happiness. Therefore, in Chapter 5, we examined whether affective updating would be associated with happiness. Our findings revealed that better updating of specifically positive, and not negative, information in working memory was associated withnbsp;happiness both in general as well as in the context of daily life.status: publishe