AI Article Synopsis
- The text discusses the unclear connection between emotion and cognitive tasks, highlighting two opposing hypotheses regarding how emotions affect cognition.
- One hypothesis suggests that negative emotions slow down processing due to a defense mechanism, while another argues that both positive and negative emotions enhance processing because they are important for survival.
- The authors present evidence supporting the idea that emotional valence generally facilitates verbal processing and challenge previous views that favored negative emotions by pointing out potential biases and variables in earlier studies.
Article Abstract
Despite increasing interest in the interface between emotion and cognition, the role of emotion in cognitive tasks is unclear. According to one hypothesis, negative valence is more relevant for survival and is associated with a general slowdown of the processing of stimuli, due to a defense mechanism that freezes activity in the face of threat. According to a different hypothesis which does not posit a privileged role for the aversive system, valence, regardless of polarity, facilitates processing due to the relevance of both negative and positive stimuli for survival and for the attainment of goals. Here, we present evidence that emotional valence has an overall facilitatory role in the processing of verbal stimuli, providing support for the latter hypothesis. We found no asymmetry between negative and positive words and suggest that previous findings of such an asymmetry can be attributed to failure to control for a number of critical lexical variables and to a sampling bias.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.06.007 | DOI Listing |
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