An fMRI study on how decisions are influenced by affective evaluations from different social hierarchical positions.

Expectation States Theory suggests that social status carries emotions, with higher statuses producing positive emotions and lower statuses leading to negative emotions. However, the theory is broad and lacks empirical evidence. This study investigated whether positive and negative evaluations from positions of higher and lower social hierarchies affect decisions.

Spatiotemporal evidence uncovers differential neural activity patterns in cognitive and affective conflict control.

Studies have shown that there are overlapping neural bases for cognitive and affective conflict control, but whether the neural activity patterns caused by the two types of conflict are similar remains to be explored. The present study utilizes electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to temporally and spatially analyze the differences between cognitive and affective conflict control. We employ a semantic conflict task which includes blocks of cognitive and affective judgements primed by conflicting and non-conflicting contexts.

Genetic bases of language control in bilinguals: Evidence from an EEG study.

Previous studies have debated whether the ability for bilinguals to mentally control their languages is a consequence of their experiences switching between languages or whether it is a specific, yet highly-adaptive, cognitive ability. The current study investigates how variations in the language-related gene FOXP2 and executive function-related genes COMT, BDNF, and Kibra/WWC1 affect bilingual language control during two phases of speech production, namely the language schema phase (i.e.