Emotional experiences are temporally dynamic, but prior work suggests that temporal features are usually neglected in remembered emotion. For instance, retrospective emotion evaluations are often biased by discrete salient timepoints, such as the peak and end moments, at the expense of objective event duration (i.e., peak-end effects and duration neglect). However, how these retrospective emotion biases originate, as well as their significance for emotional functioning, remain unclear. Here, we test the hypothesis that retrospective emotion biases are related to fundamental limits of temporal processing and memory capacity. Further, we examine whether these limits have implications for emotional functioning. Participants (n = 60) underwent a novel paradigm comprising affectively-rich movie sequences while providing emotion ratings continuously (moment-by-moment) and retrospectively. Temporal memory for previously watched emotional movie sequences and dispositional negativity were measured. Our findings revealed a greater "end" bias as the duration of emotional-movie sequences increased, suggesting that limitations in temporal processing capacity may contribute to retrospective emotion biases. Critically, temporal-memory errors were associated with larger retrospective emotion biases and with individual differences in dispositional negativity. Collectively, these results indicate that retrospective emotion biases may stem partly from mnemonic temporal errors that are emotionally maladaptive. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotional states provide an ever-present source of contextual information that should inform behavioral goals. Despite the ubiquity of emotional signals in our environment, the neural mechanisms underlying their influence on goal-directed action remains unclear. Prior work suggests that the lateral frontal pole (FPl) is uniquely positioned to integrate affective information into cognitive control representations. We used pattern similarity analysis to examine the content of representations in FPl and interconnected mid-lateral prefrontal and amygdala circuitry. Healthy participants (n = 37; n = 21 females) were scanned while undergoing an event-related Affective Go/No-Go task, which requires goal-oriented action selection during emotional processing. We found that FPl contained conjunctive emotion-action goal representations that were related to successful cognitive control during emotional processing. These representations differed from conjunctive emotion-action goal representations found in the basolateral amygdala. While robust action goal representations were present in mid-lateral prefrontal cortex, they were not modulated by emotional valence. Finally, converging results from functional connectivity and multivoxel pattern analyses indicated that FPl emotional valence signals likely originated from interconnected subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (BA25), which was in turn functionally coupled with the amygdala. Thus, our results identify a key pathway by which internal emotional states influence goal-directed behavior.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Optimal functioning in everyday life requires behavioral regulation that flexibly adapts to dynamically changing emotional states. However, precisely how emotional states influence goal-directed action remains unclear. Unveiling the neural architecture that supports emotion-goal integration is critical for our understanding of disorders such as psychopathy, which is characterized by deficits in incorporating emotional cues into goals, as well as mood and anxiety disorders, which are characterized by impaired goal-based emotion regulation. Our study identifies a key circuit through which emotional states influence goal-directed behavior. This circuitry comprised the lateral frontal pole (FPl), which represented integrated emotion-goal information, as well as interconnected amygdala and subgenual ACC, which conveyed emotional signals to FPl.

Metacognitive awareness-the ability to know that one is having a particular experience-is thought to guide optimal behavior, but its neural bases continue to be the subject of vigorous debate. Prior work has identified correlations between perceptual metacognitive ability and the structure and function of lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC); however, evidence for a causal role of this region in promoting metacognition is controversial. Moreover, whether LPFC function promotes metacognitive awareness of perceptual and emotional features of complex, yet ubiquitous face stimuli is unknown. Here, using model-based analyses following a causal intervention to LPFC in humans, we demonstrate that LPFC function promotes metacognitive awareness of the orientation of faces-although not of their emotional expressions. Collectively, these data support the causal involvement of the prefrontal cortex in metacognitive awareness, and indicate that the role of LPFC in metacognition encompasses perceptual experiences of naturalistic social stimuli.