0.5 How do emotion, attention, thought, and arousal work together  (Page 11/17)

Obviously, the irony being in that a system that is intended to search for an undesirable state, in order to reinstate the operating process, actually brings about this undesirable state. This may occur under conditions of capacity limitations, as seen in both normal and clinical populations during times of stress or distraction, where the monitoring process may supersede operational processes and create more sensitivity to the opposite desired state because the executive resources needed to successfully avoid them, or initiate thought avoidance, are limited. When executive resources are limited, our ability to effectively control our cognitive abilities diminishes; our operating or monitoring system may not work properly. If cognitive control depends on operating or monitoring processes that rely on limited resources, it would be important to know how, and under what circumstances, those resources become limited.

For instance if someone is anxious they may not perform either conscious tasks (the operating system) or unconscious ones (the monitoring system) well. Saying, "when executive resources are limited" is basically like saying, "when you can't think clearly". Executive there means your main, primary thoughts that you are aware and conscious of and that are more primary than the other things your mind does, such as feel and focus attention. so when executive resources are limited, you might be stressed or distracted. The irony of the ironic process is that your unconscious functions, which are supposed to support your conscious ones, actual can hinder them. For instance you are doing one thing, but wind up with more anxiety or wind up being more distracted because unconsciously you were searching for some other state to be in.

Eysenck Eysenck, M. W. and Calvo, M.G. (1992). Anxiety and performance: the processing efficiency theory. Cognition and Emotion, 6, 409-434. also describes how an aversive emotional and motivational state that occurs in an adverse environment may negatively affect performance on cognitive tasks. He explains that a person who is highly anxious would need more resources to obtain a specific performance level compared to a person who is not highly anxious. This need for additional resources would result in negative effects on some cognitive tasks that are already demanding sufficient cognitive resources. Esyenck refers to this reduction of processing efficiency as, quite simply, the Processing Efficiency Theory. The Processing Efficiency theory involves two components: worry and motivation. Worry is characterized by concerns over evaluations and expectations of negative evaluation and may be observed in situations where a person is tested or evaluated. The motivational component involves an increased effort by the individual to minimize the aversive state. These two components would affect the monitoring process that was described earlier by Botvinick and colleagues and Wegner, Eysenck argues that this increase of worry and motivational activity interrupts normal processing of working memory by taking up additional attentional resources. Because attentional resources are limited, the two components consume attentional resources that would normally be available for other tasks; thereby, resulting in a reduction in cognitive performance.