Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

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. We will examine this in a series of experiments where participants will be asked to solve different logic problems. These problems will have emotional or neutral contents. The emotions will sometimes be induced by the reasoning problems themselves, which will have emotional contents, or be induced incidentally. We will measure participants' physiological arousal to the stimuli and during the reasoning problems to examine how it is linked with logicality in reasoning. Emotion-related physiological arousal will be assessed with measures such as skin conductance and cardiovascular measures such as heart rate, and heart rate variability. In addition, we will meausre subjective affective states and facial expressions of emotion using electromyography. With this project, we hope to improve our understanding of the interaction between abstract mental processes and bodily arousal.