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

情绪对推理有有害的影响。附带情绪(与任务无关的情绪)减少了提供逻辑上有效的推理的可能性，增加了对启发式的依赖，并减少了在推理中使用统计信息。这些效应与交感神经的生理唤醒特别相关。虽然这些影响已经确立，但我们对导致这一结果的潜在机制知之甚少。这项研究的目标是探索情绪对更高水平的认知过程产生影响的信息性(认知/语义)和非信息性(身体/外围)机制。**拟议的研究将审查演绎推理、象征性思维以及启发式和分析过程之间的平衡。具体来说，将使用四个认知任务：条件推理、三段论推理中的信念偏差、瑞文的递进矩阵和类比推理。在所有情况下，我们都会比较参与者对情绪(负面)和中性内容进行推理时的行为。情绪价值将通过评估条件反射进行实验操作。**我们将确定情绪的影响是否通过信息机制发生。特别是，我们将测试这一假设，即情绪内容会导致额外的认知负荷，导致干扰和降低主要任务的表现。我们将使用并发任务和计时范例来测试这一想法。如果情绪的影响是由认知负荷引起的，那么在情绪测试过程中，次要任务的表现应该下降，同时时间估计也应该减慢。此外，如果特定的情绪相关思维是由情绪激活的，那么应该可以通过在推理过程中嵌入的同时词汇判断任务来检测这一点，这将索引特定概念的激活程度。总之，这些实验将使我们能够确定情绪在多大程度上会导致无关紧要的想法，从而耗尽可用于推理的资源。**此外，我们还将考察情绪对推理可能产生的非信息性影响。我们将研究情感的具体方面(生理变化、面部表情)在情感和推理之间的相互作用中的作用。我们感兴趣的是，情绪是否会在没有“情绪思维”的情况下对推理产生影响。我们将尝试通过诱导唤醒和面部表情的改变，直接造成象征性思维和分析性思维的缺陷。我们还将研究人们在推理中战略性地使用其外围身体反应提供的信息的可能性。为了做到这一点，我们将使用错误反馈范式，在该范式中，参与者被给予关于他们自己与情绪相关的身体变化的准确或不准确的信息。我们将检查这些信息对推理的影响程度。**这项研究计划将有助于我们理解人类特有的两个过程：理性和激情之间相互作用的本质。它将检验一些从未经过经验检验的重要假说。

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.