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

情绪对思维和推理的信息和非信息影响

• 批准号: RGPIN-2014-05948
• 负责人: Blanchette, Isabelle
• 金额: $ 2.91万
• 依托单位: Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2015-01-01 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=588715
• 关键词: Informational; non; informational; effects; emotion

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.

情绪对推理有有害的影响。附带情绪（与任务无关的情绪）降低了提供逻辑有效推断的可能性，增加了对启发式的依赖，减少了在推理中使用统计信息。这些效应尤其与交感生理唤醒相关。虽然这些影响已经得到证实，但我们对导致这一结果的潜在机制知之甚少。本研究的目的是探讨情绪对高层次认知过程影响的信息（认知/语义）和非信息（身体/外围）机制。