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Socially triggered negative affect impairs performance in simple cognitive tasks

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Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate the influence of a social-evaluative context on simple cognitive tasks. While another person present in the room evaluated photographs of beautiful women or landscapes by beauty/attractiveness, female participants had to perform a combination of digit-categorization and spatial-compatibility task. There, before every trial, one of the women or landscape pictures was presented. Results showed selective performance impairments: the numerical distance effects increased on trials that followed women pictures but only, if another person concurrently evaluated these women pictures. In a second experiment, using the affective priming paradigm, the authors show that female pictures have a more negative connotation when they are concurrently evaluated by another person (social-evaluative context) than when they are not evaluated (neutral context). Together, these results suggest that the social-evaluative context triggers mild negative affective reactions to women pictures which then impair performance in an unrelated task.

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Notes

  1. Eliminating one shortcoming of our previous study, this time, we already presented both picture types in Block 1 of the cognitive task (landscape evaluation).

  2. This larger compatibility effect in the social-evaluation might be taken as evidence for a general distraction by the concurrent evaluation at the beginning of the experiment.

  3. Note however, that Aharon et al. (2001) found the effect for male participants only.

  4. The reason why we used a different outlier correction procedure in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1 was that the tasks used in both experiments are qualitatively different: in two-choice RT tasks, like the digit task in Experiment 1, it is common practice to use cutoff procedures based on the individual distributions (in our case a 3-SD cutoff). In contrast, due to the automaticity of the evaluation processes underlying the affective priming paradigm, it is common to use stricter cutoff values (e.g., Wentura, 1999; Strick et al. 2009). Therefore, the fact that the main results of Experiment 2 would not be significant anymore, if the 3 SD-criterion from Experiment 1 was used instead of the fixed < 2,000-ms cutoff, does not pose any problem to the validity of our results. Applying the 2,000-ms cutoff to Experiment 1 before the 3-SD cutoff did not have any qualitative effect on the data pattern.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstr. 31, 93053, Regensburg, Germany

    Svenja Böttcher & Gesine Dreisbach

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  1. Svenja Böttcher
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  2. Gesine Dreisbach
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Correspondence to Svenja Böttcher.

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We would like to thank Michaela Brandl, Julia Fritz and Constanze Schreiner for data collection.

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Böttcher, S., Dreisbach, G. Socially triggered negative affect impairs performance in simple cognitive tasks. Psychological Research 78, 151–165 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-013-0488-6

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