Emotion and reasoning: the effect of task-relevant and irrelevant arousal

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Understanding how emotion affects the way people think is a central question in psychology and the neurosciences. One important aspect of this question relates to whether emotion improves or hinders normatively correct thinking. Many studies have shown that emotion impairs logical thinking in deductive reasoning tasks. Most of that research has been performed in the laboratory, experimentally manipulating affective states. However, recent studies with participants reasoning about meaningful personally experienced events (e.g. war veterans reasoning about combat-related contents) show improved logicality as a result of emotion. This programme of research will attempt to resolve this apparent paradox. Our hypothesis is that when emotional arousal is relevant, related to the contents of what people reason about, it improves logicality in reasoning. By contrast, when arousal is task-irrelevant, induced by something other than the reasoning contents, it hinders logicality.