Emotion-cognition and motivation-cognition relationships and related brain mechanisms are receiving increasing attention in the clinical research literature as a means of understanding diverse types of psychopathology and improving biological and psychological treatments. This paper reviews and integrates some of the growing evidence for cognitive biases and deficits in depression and anxiety, how these disruptions interact with emotional and motivational processes, and what brain mechanisms appear to be involved. This integration sets the stage for understanding the role of neuroplasticity in implementing change in cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes in psychopathology as a function of intervention.

Traditionally, emotional stimuli have been thought to be automatically processed via a bottom–up automatic “capture of attention” mechanism. Recently, this view has been challenged by evidence that emotion processing depends on the availability of attentional resources. Although these two views are not mutually exclusive, direct evidence reconciling them is lacking. One limitation of previous investigations supporting the traditional or competing views is that they have not systematically investigated the impact of emotional charge of task-irrelevant distraction in conjunction with manipulations of attentional demands. Using event-related fMRI, we investigated the nature of emotion–cognition interactions in a perceptual discrimination task with emotional distraction by manipulating both the emotional charge of the distracting information and the demands of the main task. Our findings show that emotion processing is both automatic and modulated by attention, but emotion and attention were only found to interact when finer assessments of emotional charge (comparison of most vs. least emotional conditions) were considered along with an effective manipulation of processing load (high vs. low). The study also identified brain regions reflecting the detrimental impact of emotional distraction on performance as well as regions involved in coping with such distraction. Activity in the dorsomedial pFC and ventrolateral pFC was linked to a detrimental impact of emotional distraction, whereas the dorsal ACC and lateral occipital cortex were involved in helping with emotional distraction. These findings demonstrate that task-irrelevant emotion processing is subjective to both the emotional content of distraction and the level of attentional demand.

Depression has been associated with task-relevant increased attention toward negative information, reduced attention toward positive information, or reduced inhibition of task-irrelevant negative information. This study employed behavioural and psychophysiological measures (event-related potentials; ERP) to examine whether groups with risk factors for depression (past depression, current dysphoria) would show attentional biases or inhibitory deficits related to viewing facial expressions. In oddball task blocks, young adult participants responded to an infrequently presented target emotion (e.g., sad) and inhibited responses to an infrequently presented distracter emotion (e.g., happy) in the context of frequently presented neutral stimuli. Previous depression was uniquely associated with greater P3 ERP amplitude following sad targets, reflecting a selective attention bias. Also, dysphoric individuals less effectively inhibited responses to sad distracters than non-dysphoric individuals according to behavioural data, but not psychophysiological data. Results suggest that depression risk may be most reliably characterised by increased attention toward others' depressive facial emotion.

Facial expressions provide key information for successful social interactions. Recent research finds that accurate perception of emotion expressions decreases when faces are presented with face masks. What is unknown is how individual differences in social intelligence may influence perception of masked emotion expressions. In this study, participants (n = 224) completed an emotion perception task of face stimuli presented with and without face masks and completed two measures of social intelligence: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) and the Tromsø Social Intelligence Scale (TSIS). Face masks were found to significantly decrease the accurate identification of emotion expressions, impacting the perception of disgust and sad expressions the most. Further, the type of emotion misattributed to facial expressions varied across expressions. Performance on the RMET test did predict perception accuracy, while scores on the TSIS did not. As face masks continue to be common globally, we must be aware that they cause interference with our social interactions and perceptions. Further, some individuals may be more negatively impacted by these effects than others. As such, it is important that we find ways to ensure that we are effectively communicating with one another and have patience when perception mistakes arise.

There is evidence of maladaptive attentional biases for lexical information (e.g., Atchley, Ilardi, & Enloe, 2003; Atchley, Stringer, Mathias, Ilardi, & Minatrea, 2007) and for pictographic stimuli (e.g., Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joormann, 2004) among patients with depression. The current research looks for depressotypic processing biases among depressed out-patients and non-clinical controls, using both verbal and pictorial stimuli. A d′ measure (sensitivity index) was used to examine each participant's perceptual sensitivity threshold. Never-depressed controls evidenced a detection bias for positive picture stimuli, while depressed participants had no such bias. With verbal stimuli, depressed individuals showed specific decrements in the detection of positive person-referent words (WINNER), but not with positive non-person-referent words (SUNSHINE) or with negative words. Never-depressed participants showed no such differences across word types. In the current study, depression is characterised both by an absence of the normal positivistic biases seen in individuals without mood disorders (consistent with McCabe & Gotlib, 1995), and by a specific reduction in sensitivity for person-referent positive information that might be inconsistent with depressotypic self-schemas.