Data from: The influence of a working memory task on affective perception of facial expressions

In a dual-task paradigm, participants performed a spatial location working memory task and a forced two-choice perceptual decision task (neutral vs. fearful) with gradually morphed emotional faces (neutral ~ fearful). Task-irrelevant word distractors (negative, neutral, and control) were experimentally manipulated during spatial working memory encoding. We hypothesized that, if affective perception is influenced by concurrent cognitive load using a working memory task, task-irrelevant emotional distractors would bias subsequent perceptual decision-making on ambiguous facial expression. We found that when either neutral or negative emotional words were presented as task-irrelevant working-memory distractors, participants more frequently reported fearful face perception - but only at the higher emotional intensity levels of morphed faces. Also, the affective perception bias due to negative emotional distractors correlated with a decrease in working memory performance. Taken together, our findings suggest that concurrent working memory load by task-irrelevant distractors has an impact on affective perception of facial expressions.

在双任务范式（dual-task paradigm）中，被试完成两项任务：一项为空间位置工作记忆（working memory）任务，另一项为针对从中性到恐惧逐渐渐变的情绪面孔的迫选知觉决策任务（需判断面孔为中性或恐惧）。实验过程中，在空间工作记忆编码阶段，设置了与任务无关的词汇干扰物，涵盖负性、中性与对照三类。本研究提出如下假设：若情绪知觉会受到工作记忆任务引发的同时性认知负荷的影响，则与任务无关的情绪干扰物会对后续针对模糊面部表情的知觉决策产生偏差效应。研究结果显示：当以负性或中性情绪词汇作为与任务无关的工作记忆干扰物时，被试更倾向于报告感知到恐惧面孔，但该效应仅出现于面孔情绪强度较高的渐变面孔中。此外，由负性情绪干扰物引发的情绪知觉偏差，与工作记忆任务成绩的下降呈显著相关。综上，本研究结果表明：由任务无关干扰物引发的同时性工作记忆负荷，会对面部表情的情绪知觉产生影响。