Emotion
How do emotions and anxiety affect our logical reasoning?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People think less logically when they are in a positive or negative mood, and highly specific fears can further disrupt reasoning about the feared topic.
Key findings
In the initial experiments, participants in a neutral mood made fewer errors than those in induced positive or negative moods. In the spider study, spider-phobic participants performed worst on logic puzzles containing spider-related words, making errors on 43.06% of those tasks compared to 34.72% on general negative tasks. However, in the exam anxiety study, both exam-anxious and non-anxious participants performed poorly on exam-related logic questions, meaning the specific anxiety-matching impairment did not replicate for test anxiety.
Methodology
Researchers conducted four experiments to test how emotional states and problem topics influence logic. In the initial studies, 30 participants had their moods manipulated with false intelligence test feedback before solving logical puzzles like the Wason selection task. In later studies, the researchers tested how preexisting phobias affected logic, comparing 9 spider-phobic participants and 17 exam-anxious participants to controls as they solved reasoning problems containing neutral, negative, or anxiety-triggering words.
Limitations
First, the sample sizes for the phobia studies were extremely small, with only 9 spider-phobic participants in the spider phobia study, which severely limits statistical power. Second, the study uses a sample exclusively of university students, meaning these findings might not generalize to older adults or clinical populations with more severe, non-academic disorders. Finally, because the exam-anxiety task disrupted both anxious and non-anxious students, the experiment cannot cleanly separate the effects of clinical test anxiety from general student stress related to exams.
How this study connects
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