Metacontrol and emotion: Negative affect reduces aperiodic brain activity

Metacontrol refers to the capacity to effectively balance persistence and flexibility according to situational circumstances. Recent studies have demonstrated the crucial role of cortical noise in metacontrol by employing the aperiodic exponent analyzed using the FOOOF toolbox serving as an appropriate index reflecting metacontrol. Emotion may have interaction with metacontrol however it remains unclear whether aperiodic activity can reflect the associations between emotion and metacontrol. Therefore, in the present study, we analyzed the aperiodic activities in response to emotional stimuli with negative, neutral and positive valences in a facial emotional 2-back task from two separate datasets. Our results showed that in the whole-brain level, the exponents for positive faces were lower than that for both neutral and negative faces. Subsequent analysis further identified that the difference was significant in wide-spread electrodes located in frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobe. In conclusion, the present study demonstrated that aperiodic exponents changed with emotional valences and compared to neutral and negative states the cortical noise was increased in positive emotional state.