In the classic television show “Star Trek”, the Vulcan character Mr. Spock was able to think and act more logically than his human shipmates because he did not experience emotions. The implication of course is that human emotions somehow interfere with thinking logically. But is this true?
There have been many experiments designed to find out whether emotions interfere with something called “cognitive control”, which is the ability to ignore irrelevant information that would otherwise interfere with performing an important cognitive task. Results from these experiments have been confusing, so Zhang and colleagues decided to see if a meta-analysis of 71 of these studies would clear things up. Their results show that the kinds of emotions that can be studied in a laboratory setting don’t interfere much with cognitive control and may, under the right circumstances, even help. So perhaps Vulcans don’t have such a big advantage over us emotional humans after all.
Abstract
How do emotional stimuli change the way we control our behavior? The interaction between emotion and behavior-shaping, cognitive control mechanisms remain little understood in psychological science. The present meta-analysis addresses this controversy by means of a quantitative review. We analyzed data from 71 studies published through December 2018 that investigated control in conflict tasks, like the Stroop, Simon, and/or flanker tasks, which are well-known tools for psychologists in various subdisciplines used to probe cognitive control mechanisms. We considered studies that experimentally manipulated emotional stimulus presentation and asked how perception of emotional stimuli modulates the size of the congruency effect (CE), as an index of control. Results of two primary meta-analyses found no clear evidence that emotional stimuli modulate cognitive control in general. Yet, moderator analysis suggested that specific aspects of the task, stimuli, and testing conditions show reduced CE for emotional stimuli. Thus, at a theoretical level, emotional stimuli can facilitate control under specific conditions, supporting views that attribute enhanced control either to overload of perceptual distractor processing or to increased amplification of target information and/or suppression of distractor information.
Citation
Zhang, J., Bürkner, P.-C., Kiesel, A., & Dignath, D. (2023). How emotional stimuli modulate cognitive control: A meta-analytic review of studies with conflict tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 149(1-2), 25–66.
Dr Martin Fracker 