The prefrontal cortex has long been suspected to play an important role in cognitive control, in the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals. Its neural basis, however, has remained a mystery. Here, we propose that cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represent goals and the means to achieve them. They provide bias signals to other brain structures whose net effect is to guide the flow of (...) activity along neural pathways that establish the proper mappings between inputs, internal states, and outputs needed to perform a given task. We review neurophysiological, neurobiological, neuroimaging, and computational studies that support this theory and discuss its implications as well as further issues to be addressed. (shrink)

In the present study we elucidate the emotional and executive control interactions that might underlie optimism and pessimism. Participants completed a self-report measure of optimism/pessimism and performed an emotion faces categorisation task and an emotion n-back task in which they indicated whether each of a series of faces had the same or a different emotional expression (happy, sad, neutral) as the face presented two trials before. Trials were structured to measure latency to update emotional content in working memory (WM). More (...) pessimistic individuals formed connections among positive stimuli, and broke connections among positive and sad stimuli, in WM more slowly than did less pessimistic individuals; levels of optimism/pessimism did not affect the rate with which individuals formed and broke connections among neutral representations in WM. It appears, therefore, that levels of pessimism are related to specific affective cognitive mechanisms in WM that may be involved in emotion regulation. (shrink)

This chapter discusses memory in the elderly and examines age-related changes in emotional processing — in mechanisms of emotional regulation and arousal, for example, considered both psychologically and in terms of their neural mechanisms. It then offers an intriguing set of suggestions about how these changes should influence emotional memory. Among other issues, it considers whether the older person's improved ability to regulate emotion implies that memories should become more emotionally gratifying, as well as whether the emotional qualities of experience (...) might actually protect an individual against the age-related decline in memory. These suggestions are then evaluated by reviewing the current literature on age differences in the effects of emotion on memory. Existing behavioral studies on emotion and aging indicate that the relationship between emotion and memory should change as people age. The link between aging and flashbulb memories is also considered. (shrink)