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: 2017
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2017-01-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=631227
• 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.

情绪对推理有有害影响。附带情绪（与任务无关的情绪）会降低提供逻辑上有效的推论的可能性，增加对启发式的依赖，并减少推理中统计信息的使用。这些影响与交感神经生理唤醒特别相关。虽然这些影响已得到充分证实，但我们对导致这一结果的潜在机制知之甚少。该研究计划的目标是探索信息（认知/语义）和非信息。拟议的研究将研究演绎推理、象征性思维以及启发式和分析过程之间的平衡，具体来说，将使用四种认知任务：条件推理、信念偏差。在三段论推理、瑞文渐进矩阵和类比推理中，我们将使用评价性实验来比较参与者推理情感（消极）和中性内容时的行为。我们将确定情绪的影响是否通过信息机制发生，特别是，我们将测试以下假设：情绪内容会产生额外的认知负荷，从而导致干扰并降低主要任务的表现。我们将使用并发任务来测试这个想法。如果情绪的影响是由认知负荷引起的，那么在情绪试验期间，次要任务的表现应该会下降，并且并发的时间估计应该会减慢。此外，如果特定的情绪相关的想法是由情绪激活的，那么这应该是可能的。使用嵌入期间嵌入的并发词汇决策任务来检测这一点推理，这将索引特定概念的激活水平，总而言之，这些实验将使我们能够确定情绪导致不相关的想法消耗可用于推理的资源的程度。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，我们感兴趣的是情感是否可以在没有“情感思维”的情况下对推理产生影响。产生象征性和分析性思维的缺陷我们还将研究人们在推理中策略性地使用其外围身体反应提供的信息的可能性。我们将研究这些信息对推理的影响程度，这将有助于我们理解两个典型的人类过程：理性和激情之间相互作用的本质。许多从未被检验过的重要假设凭经验。