Please be logical, I am in a bad mood: An electrophysiological study of mood effects on reasoning

Why might negative mood help or hinder inhibitory performance? An exploration of thinking styles using a Navon induction

Theories of affective influences on cognition posit that negative mood may increase cognitive load, causing a decrement in task performance (Seibert & Ellis, [1991]. Irrelevant thoughts, emotional mood states, and cognitive task performance. Memory & Cognition, 19(5), 507-513), or cause a shift to more analytic thinking, which benefits tasks requiring attention to detail (Schwarz & Clore, [1983]. Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 513-523). We previously reported that individuals who are higher in the trait of emotional reactivity performed better on an inhibitory task with increasing negative mood whereas low-reactive individuals showed the converse pattern (Gabel & McAuley, [2018]. Does mood help or hinder executive functions? Reactivity may be the key. Personality and Individual Differences, 128, 94-99; [2020]. React to act: Negative mood, response inhibition, and the moderating role of emotional reactivity. Motivation and Emotion, 44(6), 862-869). Because high-reactive individuals are more accustomed to negative affect (Nock et al., [2008]. The emotion reactivity scale: Development, evaluation, and relation to self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Behavior Therapy, 39(2), 107-116), we speculated that negative mood engendered analytic thinking but without a task-incongruent increase in cognitive load - thereby facilitating performance. Here, we induced a heuristic or analytic approach to information processing prior to performance of an inhibitory task and expected different results pending the thinking style induced. In the heuristic condition, increasing negative mood was associated with better performance for high-reactive participants but not their low-reactive counterparts. In the analytic condition, increasing negative mood was associated with better performance irrespective of emotional reactivity. Our results are consistent with the notion that negative mood engenders analytic thinking which may benefit response inhibition provided it does not increase task-incongruent cognitive load.

Neutral and negative mood induction in executive tasks of working memory

The mood induction paradigm has been an important tool for investigating the effects of negative emotional states on working memory (WM) executive functions. Though some evidence showed that negative mood has a differential effect on verbal and visuospatial WM, other findings did not report a similar effect. To explore this issue, we examined the negative mood's impact on verbal and visuospatial WM executive tasks based on grammatical reasoning and visuospatial rotation. Participants with no anxiety or depression disorders performed the tasks before and after negative (n = 14) or neutral (n = 13) mood induction. Participants' mood at the beginning and the end of the session was assessed by the Present Mood States List (LEAP) and word valence rating. The analyses showed changes in the emotional state of the negative group (ps < .03) but not of the neutral group (ps > .83) in the LEAP instrument. No significant differences between groups were observed in the WM tasks (ps > .33). Performance in the visuospatial WM task improved after mood induction for both groups (p < .05), possibly due to a practice effect. In sum, our findings challenge the view that negative mood modulates WM executive functions; thus, they were discussed considering the similarities and differences between studies that found negative mood effects on WM and those that did not find. Different WM tasks tap distinct processes and components, which may underlie behavioral effects of negative mood on WM tasks.

Exploring the mechanisms responsible for the modulating role of frowning in emotional reasoning: An ERP study

Studies show that emotions impact reasoning, and that emotions are embodied. A recent study revealed that emotions embodied in facial expressions can modulate the impact of emotional content on reasoning accuracy. In the current study, we aimed to explore the mechanisms responsible for the impact of frowning on emotional reasoning using electrophysiology. We examined two reasoning-related ERPs: the N400 related to inference process and the N2 related to conflict detection. We also measured the LPP, associated with sustained attention to emotional stimuli. Twenty-six participants completed a reasoning task with emotional content while we recorded their brain activity with electroencephalography. In one block, they were instructed to solve syllogisms while voluntarily frowning. In another block, they were asked to solve syllogisms while contracting a non-facial muscle. Results revealed that frowning influenced sustained attention towards emotional stimuli, as measured through LPP. Frowning also showed a trend for a deleterious effect on the inference process measured through the N400. In line with the dual process models, this suggests that frowning impacts sustained attention, but surprisingly it might also impact Type 2 processes. This study provides useful insight regarding the link between reasoning and emotions in the body.