Emotion, working memory task demands and individual differences predict behavior, cognitive effort and negative affect

Abstract

We examined whether positive and negative affect motivates verbal and spatial working memory processes, respectively, which have implications for the expenditure of mental effort. We argue that when emotion promotes cognitive tendencies that are goal incompatible with task demands, greater cognitive effort is required to perform well. We sought to investigate whether this increase in cognitive effort impairs behavioural control over a broad domain of self-control tasks. Moreover, we predicted that individuals with higher behavioural inhibition system (BIS) sensitivities would report more negative affect within the goal incompatible conditions because such individuals report higher negative affect during cognitive challenge. Positive or negative affective states were induced followed by completing a verbal or spatial 2-back working memory task. All participants then completed one of three self-control tasks. Overall, we observed that conditions of emotion and working memory incompatibility (positive/spatial and negative/verbal) performed worse on the self-control tasks, and within the incompatible conditions individuals with higher BIS sensitivities reported more negative affect at the end of the study. The combination of findings suggests that emotion and working memory compatibility reduces cognitive effort and impairs behavioural control.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Cognitive control
• BIS
• Negative affect

Notes

¹ The BAS sub-components were also analysed. However, there were no consistent relationships. Thus, we have excluded the subcomponent analyses from the paper and only reported the global BAS score.

² We assessed whether ethnicity, including in-group/out-group effects, influenced performance on the weapons task (Experiment 3) and the IAT (Experiment 4). We failed to find any influence of ethnicity and in-group/out-group effects on the automatic and controlled components (weapons task) or for any of the correlational analyses for both the weapons task and the IAT. However, some cells had a small number of participants for a given ethnicity, and therefore, these results should be interpreted with caution.

³ In Storbeck (2012) control conditions were included. However, for the purpose of this paper and analyses, we removed the control conditions.