Cluster of Excellence Languages of Emotion, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2011 Feb;79(2):236-43. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2010.10.014. Epub 2010 Oct 31.
The present study investigates the interaction of cognition and emotion in decision making, using an analogical reasoning task. In this task, two word pairs were presented simultaneously. Each word pair could be characterized by an associative conceptual relation (object, actor, or location relation) as well as an emotional relation (negative, neutral, or positive valence). Both types of relations were equally task-relevant: Participants had to identify both types of relations, to compare them, and to decide whether or not the word pairs were analogous, i.e., corresponding in both conceptual and emotional relations. Behavioral data showed that emotional relations were identified preferentially and faster than conceptual relations. Pupil dilations reflected the descending difficulty of the conditions and were greatest in amplitude when both conceptual and emotional correspondence was shown, intermediate when only one type of relation (either the emotional or the conceptual) corresponded, and least when neither correspondence existed. Additionally, a negative valence of the word material slowed down response times and increased pupil dilation relative to positive and neutral items. In summary, pupil and response time data together support recent (neurobiological) models concerning the interaction of emotion and cognition by showing that affective significance leads to a processing advantage at a cognitively lower level of information processing (here, identification or retrieval of relations from long-term memory) but can also distract people from higher level cognitive processes (here, from the controlled comparison of retrieved relations).
本研究采用类比推理任务，考察了认知与情绪在决策中的相互作用。在这个任务中，同时呈现两个词对。每个词对都可以用联想概念关系（物体、行为者或位置关系）和情绪关系（负面、中性或正面效价）来描述。这两种关系都与任务同等相关：参与者必须识别这两种关系，对其进行比较，并确定词对是否相似，即概念和情绪关系都对应。行为数据表明，情绪关系比概念关系更容易识别，速度也更快。瞳孔扩张反映了条件的难度下降，当同时显示概念和情绪对应时，瞳孔扩张幅度最大，当只有一种关系（情绪或概念）对应时，瞳孔扩张幅度中等，当没有对应时，瞳孔扩张幅度最小。此外，与积极和中性项目相比，词材料的负面效价会减慢反应时间并增加瞳孔扩张。总之，瞳孔和反应时间数据共同支持了最近的（神经生物学）模型，即情绪和认知的相互作用，表明情感意义在认知处理的较低水平（此处为从长期记忆中识别或检索关系）上产生处理优势，但也会分散人们对较高水平认知过程的注意力（此处为对检索关系的控制比较）。
