FIGURE 1.

The Executive RT Test (Hartikainen et al., 2010b). Participants were seated in front of a computer screen at one meter in a sound-attenuated room. Subjects were required to respond as fast and accurately as possible to the orientation of a triangle using their middle or index finger in a Go-trial indicating the triangle was pointing up or it was pointing down, respectively. In a NoGo-trial, subjects were supposed to withhold from responding. A trial started with an upright or inverted white triangle presented in the middle of the screen for 150 ms. After the onset of the triangle, a fixation dot appeared for 150 ms. This was followed by a black square with a colored circle and an emotional figure inside it. The colored circle and the emotional figure were response cues. There were two possible response sets: the participants were either asked to pay attention to the color (red or green) and ignore the emotional figures (flower or spider) as task-irrelevant distractors or pay attention to the emotional figures and ignore the colors. The stimuli (color or emotional figure) attended to indicated the rule for responding, e.g., when color was attended to the red-color indicated a Go-trial and the green-color a Nogo-trial or vice versa. When the emotional figure was attended to the spider figure indicated a Go-trial and the flower a Nogo-trial or vice versa. In case of a Go-trial, participants indicated the orientation of the previously presented triangle by pressing a button on a response pad. The emotional stimuli were black-line drawings of a spider (threat-related emotional stimulus) and a flower (emotionally neutral stimulus) constructed the exact same line elements as the spider but in a different configuration. This allowed control for the impact of low-level properties of visual stimuli, like color, contrast, and complexity.