Changes in resilience and masculine gender role stress following 8 weeks of maximal power cycling training in male university students: a single-group pre-post study.

Cannabis use has been associated with alterations in cognitive control, emotional processing, and self-regulatory functions, although the magnitude, direction, and persistence of these effects vary considerably across studies. Such heterogeneity appears to depend on multiple factors, including pattern of use, abstinence status, and the cognitive or affective demands imposed by the task. Recent reviews suggest that cannabis-related differences are often modest and not uniformly expressed across cognitive domains, raising the possibility that emotionally salient paradigms may be more informative than non-emotional tasks for detecting subtle functional variability. In particular, tasks requiring cognitive control under affective distraction may provide a useful window into cannabis-related differences in emotion–cognition interaction, especially when distinct consumption profiles are compared across repeated assessments. From this perspective, within-subject pre–post approaches combining behavioral and neurophysiological measures may be especially useful in pilot studies aimed at identifying preliminary neurofunctional correlates rather than demonstrating broad, generalized impairment (; ). A plausible neurobiological basis for this approach lies in the effects of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a partial CB1 receptor agonist, on fronto-limbic circuitry involved in emotion regulation and executive control. Functional neuroimaging studies indicate that THC can modulate amygdala responses to threat-related cues and alter functional coupling between limbic regions and prefrontal areas such as the rostral anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These effects are relevant because paradigms that integrate emotion and cognition, such as the Emotional Stroop, require participants to suppress emotionally salient information while maintaining goal-directed responding. Accordingly, cannabis-related differences may become more apparent under conditions of emotional interference than in “cold” cognitive tasks that do not strongly recruit affective regulatory systems (; ; ). Within this context, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) offers a practical method for quantifying cortical hemodynamic responses, including oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin, with good tolerance to movement and relatively high ecological portability. fNIRS is particularly well suited to monitoring prefrontal dynamics during tasks involving executive control and emotion–cognition interaction, and methodological advances have strengthened its use in cognitive and clinical neuroscience, including improved recommendations for preprocessing, artifact handling, and physiological interpretation. Importantly, previous work has shown that acute THC exposure can modulate prefrontal hemodynamic responses measured with fNIRS during working memory and cognitive control tasks, with increases in prefrontal HbO varying as a function of intoxication and task load. However, evidence remains limited for studies that combine repeated behavioral assessment with concurrent prefrontal fNIRS during affect-laden interference paradigms while also contrasting different patterns of cannabis use (; ; ; ; ; ).