STUDY--Training the Emotional Brain: Improving Affective Control through Emotional Working Memory Training (Schweizer et al, 2013)

[Pheonoxia]

Abstract:

Affective cognitive control capacity (e.g., the ability to regulate emotions or manipulate emotional material in the service of task goals) is associated with professional and interpersonal success. Impoverished affective control, by contrast, characterizes many neuropsychiatric disorders. Insights from neuroscience indicate that affective cognitive control relies on the same frontoparietal neural circuitry as working memory (WM) tasks, which suggests that systematic WM training, performed in an emotional context, has the potential to augment affective control. Here we show, using behavioral and fMRI measures, that 20 d of training on a novel emotionalWMprotocol successfully enhanced the efficiency of this frontoparietal demand network. Critically, compared with placebo training, emotionalWM training also accrued transfer benefits to a “gold standard” measure of affective cognitive control– emotion regulation. These emotion regulation gains were associated with greater activity in the targeted frontoparietal demand network along with other brain regions implicated in affective control, notably the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. The results have important implications for the utility of WMtraining in clinical, prevention, and occupational settings.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/12/5301.full.pdf

They used a modified dual n-back that was emotionally loaded, one that could hopefully be integrated into an updated version of Brain Workshop.

Some people argue that EQ is more important than IQ, so for those inclined towards mental self-improvement, this avenue could be promising. Does anyone know if this software is available anywhere?

[Gwern Branwen]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 3:38 AM, Pheonoxia <b...@brockman.info> wrote:
> They used a modified dual n-back that was emotionally loaded, one that could
> hopefully be integrated into an updated version of Brain Workshop.
>
> Some people argue that EQ is more important than IQ, so for those inclined
> towards mental self-improvement, this avenue could be promising. Does anyone
> know if this software is available anywhere?

See the previous discussions of this sort of research. IIRC, all it is
is a different set of images which you can dump into BW without a
problem.

--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net