When emotions improve reasoning: The possible roles of relevance and utility

Abstract

New paradigms in the psychology of reasoning have included a consideration for general contextual factors that may impact on the reasoning process, including individuals’ goals and motivations. We suggest that emotions are one such important contextual factor that influences reasoning. The classic literature on thinking and reasoning has typically ignored the possible influence of emotion, except to consider it a source of disruption. We review findings from studies where participants were asked to reason about personally relevant emotional experiences such as sexual abuse, war, and terrorist attacks. While some findings are consistent with the view that incidental emotions have a deleterious effect on reasoning, a number of findings also suggest a beneficial impact of emotion. For instance, veterans reasoned more logically about combat-related syllogisms than structurally identical syllogisms with neutral contents; victims of sexual abuse reporting more negative emotions following the events also reasoned more logically on abuse-related contents, relative to neutral contents. This may be associated with integral emotions, when the affective reaction is relevant to the semantic contents reasoned about. We propose that the positive impact of integral emotions on reasoning can be explained by increased utility of problem content and increased utility of reasoning.

Keywords:

• Reasoning
• Emotions
• Affect
• Utility
• Logic.

Acknowledgments

Both authors contributed equally to this work and should be considered co-first-authors.

Notes

 1 Note that this measure is not related to PTSD symptoms, so it is not related to psychological distress. In other words, there does not seem to be a direct link between the “objective” level or intensity of experiences and psychological distress or emotional intensity.