Exploring the effects of emotional salience on neurophysiology, decision-making and action execution

Individuals routinely encounter various external stimuli, some of which carry significant emotional consequence, triggering immediate reactions. This emotional salience, defined as a stimulus’s capacity to evoke a strong emotional response and enhance attentive behavior, profoundly influences cognitive function. Among these functions, decision-making, a complex cognitive process, is directly impacted by emotional assessment and anticipation of outcomes [1]. Recent studies have demonstrated that exposure to negative audiovisual stimuli alters the time needed for processing information and performance, in contrast to exposure to neutral stimuli [2]. Consistent with prior research, this phenomenon can be attributed to emotional and attentional biases, such as the negativity bias or positivity offset [3,4]. Emotional significance may affect various cognitive processing mechanisms, fundamentally impacting emotional regulation, cognitive load, and executive functions, even in the presence of biases. However, there is limited understanding of how emotionally significant stimuli concurrently affect decision-making and cognitive performance. In order to address this gap, a cohort comprising 26 individuals of healthy Italian adults (mean age = 23.038, standard deviation of age = 1.455, age range: 22-28, male count = 10, female count = 16) underwent a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test, referred to as the Social Stress Test (SST). The primary objective was to explore how increasing emotional salience, through a realistic stressful interview, influences decision-making processes and discourse production in individuals. Subjects were asked to prepare and present five distinct discourses containing increasingly emotionally charged requests (REQs). Furthermore, participants were exposed to video-auditory emotional stimuli represented by dynamic videos showing an examining committee gradually characterized by negative emotional connotations during each discourse. Emotional salience’s impact was assessed by analyzing reaction times during the interview preparation phase (Pp) using stress regulation (RegStress) and stress resilience (ResStress) indices. Emotional escalation’s role in cognitive performance was examined through an arithmetic task (aT), alongside, in order to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the covert mechanisms [5], electroencephalography (EEG, frequency band: delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma) and autonomic measures. Behavioral findings indicated that heightened emotional salience and stressful conditions lead to reduced response times (RTs) for the preparation phase (Pp), indicating an augmented "attentional bias” towards salient stimuli. Electroencephalography (EEG) data collected during the Pp revealed elevated delta and theta frequencies alongside decreased gamma activity in the right parietal regions (P4) when exposed to emotionally salient stimuli, indicative of heightened emotional involvement and self-awareness. Additionally, autonomic measures demonstrated an increase in pulse volume amplitude (PVA) corresponding to heightened emotional salience of stimuli. In conclusion, these findings collectively illustrate the influence of increased emotional salience on individuals’ decision-making processes and action execution, facilitating consistent performance over time. In the workplace, in politics, in therapeutic settings, in marketing, and in advertising, for example, emotional salience may be controlled to achieve desired results. This multimethod approach can help shape the development of more complete theories in psychology and neuroscience into these contexts.