Do sadness-primes make me work harder because they make me sad?

Abstract

This experiment sought to clarify the potential role of emotional feelings in the systematic impact of implicitly processed affective stimuli on mental effort mobilisation. Participants worked on an attention task during which they were primed with suboptimally presented happiness versus sadness expressions. Before the task, half the participants received a cue for the possible affective influence of “flickers” to be presented during the task. This manipulation usually reduces the impact of conscious feelings on resource mobilisation. As anticipated, sadness primes resulted in higher experienced task demand and higher mental effort (stronger cardiac contractility assessed as shortened pre-ejection period) than happiness primes. Most importantly, instead of reducing the prime effects on mental effort, the cue manipulation significantly increased participants’ effort in general, reflecting additional cognitive demand. The results speak against the idea that affect primes influence effort mobilisation by eliciting conscious emotional feelings.

Keywords:

• Implicit affect
• Priming
• Mental effort
• Cardiovascular reactivity

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF 100014–131760/1) awarded to the second author.

Notes

¹Women were more available as participants when the study was run. Our previous studies never found that gender moderated masked affective primes’ effects.

²In contrast to previous studies (e.g., Richter et al., 2008), we analysed the 1000 Hz ICG signal without down-sampling, which was possible after a system upgrade.

³Although we did not run a prime content awareness check in this experiment, the masking procedure is analogical to the previous experiments of our lab where prime recognition rate was not significantly different from chance level (50%; Freydefont et al., 2012; Gendolla & Silvestrini, 2011; Silvestrini & Gendolla, 2011a). Although zero effects do not allow clear conclusions about unawareness, our previous studies have at least not provided evidence that the facial expressions in our experimental paradigm are processed with awareness.

⁴We also assessed systolic and diastolic blood pressure and heart rate, which are less sensitive measures of effort intensity than PEP (see Richter et al., 2008). No significant effects emerged on the baseline (ps>.15) or reactivity scores (ps>.09) of these measures.