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Gepubliceerd in:

01-03-2014 | Original Article

Socially triggered negative affect impairs performance in simple cognitive tasks

Auteurs: Svenja Böttcher, Gesine Dreisbach

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 2/2014

Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate the influence of a social-evaluative context on simple cognitive tasks. While another person present in the room evaluated photographs of beautiful women or landscapes by beauty/attractiveness, female participants had to perform a combination of digit-categorization and spatial-compatibility task. There, before every trial, one of the women or landscape pictures was presented. Results showed selective performance impairments: the numerical distance effects increased on trials that followed women pictures but only, if another person concurrently evaluated these women pictures. In a second experiment, using the affective priming paradigm, the authors show that female pictures have a more negative connotation when they are concurrently evaluated by another person (social-evaluative context) than when they are not evaluated (neutral context). Together, these results suggest that the social-evaluative context triggers mild negative affective reactions to women pictures which then impair performance in an unrelated task.

volgende artikel Emotional attention modulates microsaccadic rate and direction

Eliminating one shortcoming of our previous study, this time, we already presented both picture types in Block 1 of the cognitive task (landscape evaluation).

This larger compatibility effect in the social-evaluation might be taken as evidence for a general distraction by the concurrent evaluation at the beginning of the experiment.

Note however, that Aharon et al. (2001) found the effect for male participants only.

The reason why we used a different outlier correction procedure in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1 was that the tasks used in both experiments are qualitatively different: in two-choice RT tasks, like the digit task in Experiment 1, it is common practice to use cutoff procedures based on the individual distributions (in our case a 3-SD cutoff). In contrast, due to the automaticity of the evaluation processes underlying the affective priming paradigm, it is common to use stricter cutoff values (e.g., Wentura, 1999; Strick et al. 2009). Therefore, the fact that the main results of Experiment 2 would not be significant anymore, if the 3 SD-criterion from Experiment 1 was used instead of the fixed < 2,000-ms cutoff, does not pose any problem to the validity of our results. Applying the 2,000-ms cutoff to Experiment 1 before the 3-SD cutoff did not have any qualitative effect on the data pattern.

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Titel: Socially triggered negative affect impairs performance in simple cognitive tasks
Auteurs: Svenja Böttcher
Gesine Dreisbach
Publicatiedatum: 01-03-2014
Uitgeverij: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 2/2014
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-013-0488-6

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