Emotion Perception as a Cause and Effect of Cognitive Control
Open Access Depositedand (3) the longer-term affective value of stimuli associated with effort depends on task, i.e. whether participants resolve or merely detect conflict—passive viewing produced no reliable revaluation (Experiment 4), whereas conflict detection for high-conflict identities was re-valued more positively (Experiment 5). These results converge in suggesting that positive, relative to negative, valence can serve as a resource for efficient control and that exertion of cognitive effort (especially when tied to successful resolution or detection) can retrospectively imbue stimuli with positive (to a greater extent than negative) value. The dissertation closes by discussing implications for theories of meta-control, the role of stimulus category (faces) in generalization, and directions for testing neural and behavioral boundary conditions.
(1) positive emotional expressions facilitate cognitive stability, producing smaller Stroop congruence effects relative to negative expressions (Experiment 1)
Historically, cognitive control and emotion have been pitted against each other in antagonistic frameworks of human behavior. However, evidence is emerging that the two guide behavior in a more cooperative sense. Given conflicting findings in the current literature, this dissertation examines how associated emotional valence and moment-to-moment cognitive effort interact. Across five experiments, I show that
(2) positive expressions can also facilitate cognitive flexibility when emotional information is encoded before the task cue, reducing task-switch costs (Experiments 2 and 3)
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