PMC

Diagram demonstrating elements of the visual target identification task. The first row shows instruction images used in the instructions before the onset of each task block. L1, L2, and L3 indicate facial features for identifying targets of low (L1), medium (L2), and high (L3) load conditions, respectively. During the task, the instruction screen showed “Please Identify” above each instruction image for five seconds before the onset of the following stimuli block. For the rest condition, the instruction screen showed “Please rest and look at the screen” without any additional instruction image. The middle row shows examples of faces used in the task. T1, T2, and T3 indicate examples of targets for task conditions L1, L2, and L3, respectively. The bottom row shows an example of face-scene pairs used as stimuli in the task.

Emotion generation and regulation task. Participants were first presented with either fearful faces (bottom-up) followed by the instruction to look or reappraise, or negative sentences (top-down) followed by the instruction to look or reappraise. Emotion generation refers to the look instruction, or the presentation of the neutral face with the instruction to look and respond naturally, considering the relevant background information. Emotion regulation refers to the reappraisal instruction, or the presentation of the neutral face with the instruction to decrease negative affect using reappraisal, considering the relevant background information. Also presented were scrambled pictures or words presented before the instruction to look, combined and used as a control condition.

The switching cognitive task used during fMRI scanning. (A) shows an example of the beginning of a block including the instruction screen for a task-switching block, intertrial interval, a stimulus for the vowel/consonant task, intertrial interval, and a stimulus for the upper-/lower-case task. (B,C) show the instruction screens for the single-task and the task-switching conditions, respectively. The colors served as task-cues: green for the vowel/consonant task, red for the upper-/lower-case task, and white for no-go trials. Arrows show the response-hand assignments: left for vowel/right for consonant and left for lower-case/right for upper-case.

Ernest's percentage of compliance with high-p instructions during the high-p instruction analysis, the high-p instruction sequence plus low-p instructions, and conditions with and without stimuli associated with the low-p task.