Test–retest reliability and task order effects of emotional cognitive tests in healthy subjects

ABSTRACT

Little is known of the retest reliability of emotional cognitive tasks or the impact of using different tasks employing similar emotional stimuli within a battery. We investigated this in healthy subjects. We found improved overall performance in an emotional attentional blink task (EABT) with repeat testing at one hour and one week compared to baseline, but the impact of an emotional stimulus on performance was unchanged. Similarly, performance on a facial expression recognition task (FERT) was better one week after a baseline test, though the relative effect of specific emotions was unaltered. There was no effect of repeat testing on an emotional word categorising, recall and recognition task. We found no difference in performance in the FERT and EABT irrespective of task order. We concluded that it is possible to use emotional cognitive tasks in longitudinal studies and combine tasks using emotional facial stimuli in a single battery.

KEYWORDS:

• Test–retest reliability
• attentional blink
• emotional test battery
• facial emotion recognition task

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Sally Preston and Tom Adams were both funded through Research Capability Funding (RCF) from Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust.