The goal of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to evaluate whether executive functioning predicts subsequent acute stress responses. A systematic search (conducted between May 22nd and 30th, 2019; updated on April 4th, 2020) on Cochrane, OpenGray, Proquest Dissertations and Thesis Global, PsycInfo, Pubmed, Scopus, and Web of Science revealed 27 correlational and five interventional studies. For quality appraisal, we used the BIOCROSS Tool, the Quality Assessment Tool for Observational Cohort and Cross-Sectional Studies, and the Revised Cochrane Risk-of-bias Tool for Randomized Trials. Attentional control was most consistently associated with acute stress. A robust variation estimation meta-analysis, conducted when sufficient data was available, revealed a small, significant, and negative correlation between higher working memory and subsequent lower cortisol reactivity (r = .09, p = .025, 95 % CI [0.15, 0.02]). These results highlight the role of executive functioning for acute stress responses, the scarcity of relevant data, and the need for both interventional designs and the consideration of mediators and moderators to understand underlying mechanisms.

Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and cause substantial personal, social and economic burden. Altered attentional control has been shown to be present across anxiety disorders and is associated with specific changes in brain activity which can be recorded by electroencephalogram (EEG). These include changes in the EEG markers of error-related negativity (ERN) and correct-response negativity (CRN), both believed to reflect response monitoring and attentional control pathophysiology in anxiety. The aim of this review was to systematically assess the research on ERN and CRN in attentional control in individuals with clinical anxiety and healthy controls, across emotional and non-emotional attentional control.
A comprehensive literature search was conducted for studies published prior to October 22nd, 2020. Details of the protocol for this systematic review were registered on PROSPERO (CRD42019144885).
66 studies had their data extracted. All 66 studies measured ERN, with 85% finding significantly increased ERN amplitudes associated with clinical anxiety. Only 44 of the extracted studies analysed CRN and only ~20% of these found significant changes in CRN amplitude associated with individuals with clinical anxiety.
There were several anxiety disorders that had either limited literature (i.e. specific phobia, separation anxiety disorder or agoraphobia) or nil literature (i.e. selective mutism) available. No extracted studies included samples of older adults (i.e. aged 60+ years), and only six extracted studies included measures of emotional attentional control.
Findings indicate the promising utility of ERN of attentional control as a robust, transdiagnostic trait marker of clinical anxiety.

One of the most influential ideas in recent decades in the cognitive psychology literature is conflict monitoring theory. According to this account, each time we experience a conflict (e.g., between a colour word and print colour in the Stroop task), attentional control is upregulated to minimize distraction on subsequent trials. Though influential, evidence purported to support this theoretical model (primarily, proportion congruent and congruency sequence effects) has been frequently criticized. Furious debate has centered on whether or not conflict monitoring does or does not occur and, if so, under which conditions. The present article presents an updated review of this debate. In particular, the article considers new research that either (a) seems particularly damaging for the conflict monitoring view or (b) seems to provide support for the theory. The author argues that new findings of the latter sort are still not compelling, several of which have already-demonstrated confounds and others which are plausibly confounded. Further progress has, to a greater extent than not, provided even stronger support for the position that conflict monitoring is merely an illusion. Instead, the net results can be more coherently understood in terms of (relatively) simpler learning/memory biases unrelated to conflict or attention that confound the key paradigms.

Anxiety disorders in adults have been associated with biased processing of emotional information which may be due to a deficit in attentional control. This deficit leads to an hypervigilance and a selective attention toward threatening information. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used to study this topic in anxious adults. Similar biases have been reported in children with anxiety but researches investigating the ERPs components underpinning these biases are more scarce. However, the understanding of the neural correlates of attentional biases in anxious children seem quite important since they could play a role in the etiology and the maintenance of this disorder. This review summarizes the results of researches having used ERPs to index emotional processing and attention control in children suffering from anxiety. We will focus on the P1, indexing basic visual perceptual processing, the N2, thought to reflect cognitive control process, the P3 typically associated with response inhibition, and the late positive potential (LPP) that indicates sustained attention toward motivationally salient stimuli. We will also examine the error-related negativity (ERN) that indexes monitoring system for detecting errors. Electro-physiological studies generally reported increased amplitudes of these components in anxious children, even when they did not differ from typically developing children at a behavioral level. These results suggest diminished cognitive control that influences children\'s selective attention mechanisms toward threatening information. Theoretical perspectives and implications for future researches will be discussed in the framework of current models of childhood anxiety.

There has been an increasing interest in and the use of computer-based cognitive training as a treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The authors\' review of current evidence, based partly on a stringent meta-analysis of 6 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in 2013, and an overview of 8 recently published RCTs highlights the inconsistency of findings between trials and across blinded and nonblinded ADHD measures within trials. Based on this, they conclude that more evidence from well-blinded studies is required before cognitive training can be supported as a frontline treatment of core ADHD symptoms.