Task relevance alters the effect of emotion on congruency judgments during action understanding

Conscious Cogn. 2024 Mar 29;120:103682. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2024.103682. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTThe congruency judgments in action understanding helps individuals make timely adjustments to unexpected occurrence, and this process may be influenced by emotion. Previous research has showed contradictory effect of emotion on conflict processing, possibly due to the degree of relevance between emotion and task. However, to date, no study has systematically manipulated the relevance to explore how emotion affects congruency judgments in action understanding. We employed a cue-target paradigm and controlled the way emotional stimuli were presented on the target interface, setting up three experiments: emotion served as task-irrelevant distractor, task-irrelevant target and task-relevant target. The results showed that when emotion was irrelevant to the task, it impaired congruency judgements performance, regardless of a distractor or a target, while task-relevant emotion facilitated this process. These findings indicate that the impact of emotion on congruency judgements during action understanding depends on the degree of emotion-task relevance.PMID:38554524 | DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2024.103682

Source: Consciousness and Cognition - March 30, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Yiheng Chen Qiwei Zhao Yueyi Ding Yingzhi Lu Source Type: research