Cognitive control is ubiquitous in daily life. From academic success to eating healthy, cognitive control is needed to monitor and direct goal-driven behavior. Recent findings have suggested a link...Show moreCognitive control is ubiquitous in daily life. From academic success to eating healthy, cognitive control is needed to monitor and direct goal-driven behavior. Recent findings have suggested a link between cognitive control and affective states. Various types of positive affect have been shown to reduce adaptation to conflict in cognitive control functions. In this study, we examine the effects of positive affective touch on cognitive control and activation of corrugator supercilii (facial frowning muscle) during a Stroop-like conflict task. Positive affect was induced with brush stroking at the optimal speed (3 cm/s) to stimulate CT afferents in the forearm. We predicted that positive tactile affect would reduce conflict adaptation and transient corrugator response to conflict. Additionally, we predicted it would reduce sustained corrugator activation during three timeframes: Each trial block, each touch application and the first touch application of each trial block. We did not find robust evidence suggesting that positive affective touch modulates cognitive control, nor did we find that it reduced corrugator response to conflict. Furthermore, positive affective touch did not reduce the sustained corrugator activation in any timeframe. However, our findings showed that positive affective touch reduces the overall transient corrugator activation immediately following a trial response. We suggest that (a) some baseline amount of negative affect is inherent to action selection in conflict tasks, and (b) positive affective touch increases μ-opioid activation in the anterior cingulate cortex which suppresses negative affect. Lastly, we speculate why the affective quality of CT optimal touch might not be strong enough to produce behavioral changes in the Stroop-like conflict task used in this study.Show less
