Happy is easy
The influence of affective states on cognitive control and metacognitive reports
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21505186 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Catherine Culot (0000-0001-7697-0829, Centre for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (CRCN), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium, corresponding author), Wim Gevers (0000-0002-2365-2250, Centre for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (CRCN), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1195-1202 |
| Publication date | 2021-08-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cognition & Emotion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0269-9931 • E-ISSN: 1464-0600 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02699931.2021.1932427 |
| PMID | 34041999 |
| OpenAlex | W3164044443 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 25 |
In many situations, engaging cognitive control is required to override automatic responses and to behave in an adaptive manner. However, cognitive control is also effortful and costly which makes it aversive. A fundamental question is how individuals decide to engage or not in cognitive control based on the costs of this effort and the motivation to achieve the goals. In the present study, we explored the hypothesis that affective states can influence this decision by changing participants' subjective experiences during the task. Participants performed a conflict task (arrow priming) and judged their feeling of difficulty after each trial. Affective states were induced by presenting emotional faces (happy, fearful or neutral) at the beginning of each trial. We found that participants subjectively judged happy trials as easier even though they objectively made more errors in this condition. Follow-up analyses revealed that participants engaged less cognitive control with happy than with neutral or fearful faces. We conclude that affective states influence the recruitment of cognitive control and associated metacognitive experiences
Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Developmental psychology · Feeling · Metacognition · Metamemory · Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes · Memory and Neural Mechanisms · Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology
What Is the Subjective Cost of Cognitive Effort? Load, Trait, and Aging Effects Revealed by Economic Preference
Conflict monitoring and cognitive control.
Optimizing the use of information
Different time courses for visual perception and action priming
Motivation and Cognitive Control
Presentation and validation of the Radboud Faces Database
The Expected Value of Control
The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia scale—I. Item selection and cross-validation of the factor structure
Emotion and conflict adaptation
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |