Motivated cognition: effects of reward, emotion, and other motivational factors across a variety of cognitive domains

A growing body of literature has demonstrated that motivation influences cognitive processing. The breadth of these effects is extensive and span influences of reward, emotion, and other motivational processes across all cognitive domains. As examples, this scope includes studies of emotional memory, value-based attentional capture, emotion effects on semantic processing, reward-related biases in decision making, and the role of approach/avoidance motivation on cognitive scope. Additionally, other less common forms of motivation–cognition interactions, such as self-referential and motoric processing can also be considered instances of motivated cognition. Here I outline some of the evidence indicating the generality and pervasiveness of these motivation influences on cognition, and introduce the associated ‘research nexus’ at Collabra: Psychology

Effects of emotions on social cognition

Can our emotions alter our ability to infer emotions and feel pain in others? Answering this question may shed light on human social brain functions and help avoid misunderstandings in real life. In experiment 1, participants watched joyful or fearful movie-clips, and then judged fear or joy in others based on reading about their situation. Using fMRI, we found reduced activity in brain areas implicated in mentalizing (superior temporal gyrus, precuneus, frontoparietal operculum) when others' emotions differed from those experienced by the participant. This accord with embodied accounts of affective mentalizing. In experiment 2, brain response to others' pain was reduced after watching fearful movie-clips in regions involved in empathy for pain (anterior insula). This supports a Broaden-and-build account where positive or negative affect respectively amplifies or attenuates reactivity to others. This work reveals that our emotions may dampen brain response to emotions and pain in others through different mechanisms

Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task

<div><p>Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants’ propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.</p></div

Protocol.

<p>A) Example of a fear-happy morph continuum in facial expression, ranging from pure fear to pure happiness. B) During the task, participants watched negative, neutral or positive movie clips, and subsequently performed a decision-making task where they categorized morphed faces as fearful or happy. Note that these face images are examples similar but not identical to the faces presented in the actual tasks which used KDEF faces, and are therefore for illustrative purposes only. We have received informed consent according to Plos guidelines from the individual portrayed here.</p

Interpretation bias are strongly influenced by persistent emotional states associated with individual trait differences.

<p>A) Subjects with a more negative mood showed a higher propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful than subjects with less negative mood (1^st and 3^rd tertiles of the PANAS negative scale). B-D) Correlations showing that the more individuals’ interpretation bias (i.e. PSE) was negative, the higher the state anxiety (B), depression (C), and trait anxiety (D).</p