Keep Calm and Carry On: Improved Frustration Tolerance and Processing Speed by Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS)

Cognitive control (CC) of attention is a major prerequisite for effective information processing. Emotional distractors can bias and impair goal-directed deployment of attentional resources. Frustration-induced negative affect and cognition can act as internal distractors with negative impact on task performance. Consolidation of CC may thus support task-oriented behavior under challenging conditions. Recently, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been put forward as an effective tool to modulate CC. Particularly, anodal, activity enhancing tDCS to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) can increase insufficient CC in depression as indicated by a reduction of attentional biases induced by emotionally salient stimuli. With this study, we provide first evidence that, compared to sham stimulation, tDCS to the left dlPFC enhances processing speed measured by an adaptive version of the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT) that is typically thwarted by frustration. Notably, despite an even larger amount of error-related negative feedback, the task-induced upset was suppressed in the group receiving anodal tDCS. Moreover, inhibition of task-related negative affect was correlated with performance gains, suggesting a close link between enhanced processing speed and consolidation of CC by tDCS. Together, these data provide first evidence that activity enhancing anodal tDCS to the left dlPFC can support focused cognitive processing particularly when challenged by frustration-induced negative affect.