Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex response to negative tweets relates to executive functioning

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.