Informational and non-informational effects of emotion on thinking and reasoning

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Emotion has a deleterious impact on reasoning. Incidental emotions (emotions not related to the task) decrease the likelihood of providing logically valid inferences, increase reliance on heuristics and reduce the use of statistical information in reasoning. These effects are particularly correlated with sympathetic physiological arousal. While these effects are well established, we know little about the underlying mechanisms that lead to this outcome. The goal of this research programme is to explore the informational (cognitive/semantic) and non-informational (bodily/peripheral) mechanisms underlying the effect of emotion on higher level cognitive processes. The proposed studies will examine deductive reasoning, symbolic thinking and the balance between heuristic and analytic processes. Specifically, four cognitive tasks will be used: conditional reasoning, belief bias in syllogistic reasoning, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, and analogical reasoning. In all cases, we will compare behaviour when participants reason about emotional (negative) and neutral contents. Emotional value will be experimentally manipulated using evaluative conditioning. We will determine whether the effect of emotion occurs through informational mechanisms. In particular, we will test the hypothesis that emotional contents incur an additional cognitive load resulting in interference and reducing performance on the primary task. We will test this idea using concurrent task and timing paradigms. If the effect of emotion results from cognitive load, performance on a secondary task should decrease during emotional trials and concurrent timing estimates should be slowed down. Furthermore, if specific emotion-related thoughts are activated by emotion, it should be possible to detect this using a concurrent lexical decision task embedded during the reasoning, which will index the level of activation of specific concepts. Altogether these experiments will allow us to determine the extent to which emotion leads to irrelevant thoughts that deplete resources available for reasoning. In addition, we will examine possible non-informational effects of emotion on reasoning. We will look at the role of embodied aspects of emotion (physiological changes, facial expressions) in the interaction between emotion and reasoning. We are interested in whether emotions can have an impact on reasoning without “emotional thought”. We will try to produce deficits in symbolic and analytic thinking directly through inducing changes in arousal and facial expressions. We will also examine the possibility that people strategically use the information provided by their peripheral bodily reactions in reasoning. To do this, we will use a false-feedback paradigm in which participants are given accurate or inaccurate information about their own emotion-related bodily changes. We will examine the extent to which this information influences reasoning. This research programme will contribute to our understanding of the nature of the interaction between two characteristically human processes: reason and passion. It will test a number of important hypotheses that have never been examined empirically.