A large body of research has looked at the effects of positive or negative mood manipulations on performance in tasks of executive function.
Cognitive reappraisal studies indicate the vlFPC's role in reinterpreting stimuli, and reducing or augmenting responses.
Signals of expected outcomes trigger the mPFC to update stimulus associations through exchanges with the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens.
Preliminary findings indicate that the vlPFC may also modulate activity in the nucleus accumbens, temporal cortex, anterior insula and amygdala.
Specifically, dopamine-rich regions related to motivation, including the ventral striatum which has been shown to represent the appetitive value of a stimulus, show increased signaling in adolescent years.
In contrast, it is known that regions of the brain known to be involved with modulation of emotional effect on executive function, including the vlPFC, as well as the entire ventrolateral frontostriatal network, do not fully mature until late adolescence to early adulthood.
Additionally, the ventral striatum and frontolateral prefrontal cortex showed patterns of activity that are more connected with each other during adolescence than early adulthood.
While it is accepted that adolescents are less able to inhibit responding to tempting stimuli, it is unclear the specific neural mechanism that modulates this phenomenon.
Studies show emotionally enhanced memory during trials depicting negative imagery when people participate in visual, simultaneous attention-emotional tasks.
[8] Emotional arousal has also been shown to cause augmentation in memory, and enhanced processing and information consolidation when paired with stimuli.
This effect has been explained by the arousal-biased competition (ABC) model, which postulates that bottom-up sensory preference to arousing stimuli and top-down relevance to current activity or goal pursuit both influence how priority is determined for an event.