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

理解情绪如何影响人们的思维方式是心理学和神经科学的核心问题。这个问题的一个重要方面涉及到情绪是促进还是阻碍规范性的正确思维。许多研究表明，情绪会损害演绎推理任务中的逻辑思维。大多数研究都是在实验室进行的，通过实验来操纵情感状态。然而，最近关于参与者对有意义的个人经历事件进行推理的研究（例如，战争退伍军人对战斗相关内容进行推理）表明，由于情绪的影响，逻辑性得到了提高。这个研究计划将试图解决这个明显的矛盾。我们的假设是，当情绪唤起与人们推理的内容相关时，它会提高推理的逻辑性。相反，当唤醒是与任务无关的，是由推理内容以外的东西引起的，它会阻碍逻辑。

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.