Cognitive performance can become impaired when a stimulus evokes an emotional response. Social media often elicits emotional reactions, but, despite social media’s ubiquity, cognitive and neural consequences of exposure to negative online content are relatively unknown. Fifty-seven human adults (18–29 years; 38 female) who identified with at least one historically-marginalized group performed a novel ‘Tweet Task’. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants completed a spatial reasoning task before and after reading a set of actual tweets. Participants were randomly assigned to read negative, discriminatory tweets from President Trump (Negative Condition) or neutral tweets (Neutral Condition). Participants in the Negative Condition reported worsening affect and demonstrated performance interference post-tweet compared to those in the Neutral Condition. Affect post-tweet was associated with parametric reductions in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which predicted variance in performance beyond elicited negative affect. Performance effects were demonstrated on an unrelated spatial reasoning task suggesting that engaging with negative, emotionally-arousing content on social media can have deleterious effects on executive functioning in non-social domains.

中文翻译：

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背外侧前额叶皮层对负面推文的反应与执行功能有关。

当刺激引起情绪反应时，认知能力会受损。社交媒体通常会引起情绪反应，但是，尽管社交媒体无处不在，但接触负面在线内容的认知和神经后果相对未知。57 名成年人（18-29 岁；38 名女性）与至少一个历史上被边缘化的群体认同，他们执行了一项新颖的“推文任务”。在进行功能磁共振成像时，参与者在阅读一组实际推文之前和之后完成了空间推理任务。参与者被随机分配阅读来自特朗普总统的负面、歧视性推文（负面条件）或中性推文（中立条件）。与处于中立状态的参与者相比，处于消极状态的参与者在推特后报告了情绪恶化并表现出表现干扰。推文后的影响与左背外侧前额叶皮层的参数减少有关，这预测了超出引发负面影响的表现差异。在一项无关的空间推理任务中证明了性能影响，这表明在社交媒体上参与负面的、情绪激动的内容会对非社交领域的执行功能产生有害影响。