Independent effects of relevance and arousal on deductive reasoning

Emotional content can have either a deleterious or a beneficial impact on logicality. Using standard deductive-reasoning tasks, we tested the hypothesis that the interplay of two factors – personal relevance and arousal – determines the nature of the effect of emotional content on logicality. Arousal was assessed using measures of skin conductance. Personal relevance was manipulated by asking participants to reason about semantic contents linked to an emotional event that they had experienced or not. Findings showed that (1) personal relevance exerts a positive effect on logicality while arousal exerts a negative effect, and that (2) these effects are independent of each other.

情绪性内容对逻辑性既可能产生损害性影响，也可能带来有益的作用。本研究采用标准化演绎推理任务（standard deductive-reasoning tasks），验证了一项核心假设：个人关联性与唤醒度这两个因素的交互作用，决定了情绪性内容对逻辑性产生影响的具体性质。其中，唤醒度通过皮肤电传导（skin conductance）测量指标进行评估；个人关联性则通过操纵实验材料实现：要求被试推理与自身经历过或未经历过的情绪事件相关的语义内容。研究结果表明：其一，个人关联性对逻辑性具有正向促进作用，而唤醒度则产生负向抑制效应；其二，这两种效应彼此相互独立，不存在交互影响。