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 ...本研究采用双任务范式，让被试完成两项任务：一项为空间位置工作记忆任务，另一项为针对渐变形情绪面孔（中性~恐惧）的迫选式知觉决策任务（需判断面孔为中性或恐惧）。在空间工作记忆编码阶段，实验人员对任务无关词汇干扰物（负性、中性及对照组词汇）进行了实验操控。本研究提出假设：若情绪知觉会受到工作记忆任务引发的并发认知负荷的影响，则任务无关情绪干扰物将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，当任务无关工作记忆干扰物为中性或负性情绪词汇时，被试更频繁地报告知觉到恐惧面孔，但该效应仅在渐变形面孔的情绪强度较高时显著。此外，由负性情绪干扰物引发的情绪知觉偏差，与工作记忆任务表现的下降呈显著相关。综上，本研究……