Emotion and Reasoning

Isabelle Blanchette

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848721180
• eBook ISBN: 9781134548262
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The interaction between emotion and cognition is a fundamental issue which has only recently been reintroduced as a legitimate object of study in experimental psychology. This book examines the significant impact that affective processes have on reasoning, and demonstrates how emotional reasoning cannot simply be equated with faulty reasoning.

Emotion and Reasoning presents contributions from leading researchers from a variety of disciplines, including experimental cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, clinical neuropsychology, and experimental psychopathology. The opening chapters consider how emotions affect reasoning processes in individuals living with psychopathology. A second section focuses upon experimental investigations of emotion and basic reasoning processes, and a final section explores the physiological bases of emotion-reasoning interaction. Together, the chapters in this volume provide a multidisciplinary overview of key topics on emotion and reasoning, and a survey of recent research in this area.

Emotion and Reasoning will be of great interest to advanced students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, and affective neuroscience.

1 Does emotion affect reasoning? Yes, in multiple ways

Isabelle Blanchette

Summary

Intuitively, whether emotion affects reasoning seems like an important question. Both emotion and reasoning are likely to be involved when there are important things occurring in our lives. Despite this, little empirical research had examined the effect of emotion on reasoning until recently. The first studies used classic reasoning paradigms to examine the effect of emotional state or emotional content. Results were surprisingly coherent, showing that both emotional state and content had a detrimental effect on normatively correct reasoning. Since then, research efforts have multiplied, research methods have diversified, and questions have become more refined. This chapter presents key findings from the current literature on emotion and reasoning at the moment, through an overview of the different chapters included in the book. This overview illustrates the multiple ways in which emotions affect reasoning. The second part of the chapter identifies central theoretical issues that should be addressed in a mechanistic account of the effect of emotion on reasoning. One important consideration is that there are multiple pathways through which emotion impacts reasoning. Emotions provide information that can be used in reasoning, they are associated with physiological changes, and they influence other cognitive processes that have an impact on reasoning. Another important issue is the reciprocal influence between emotion and reasoning. Finally, the questions of adaptation and rationality are evoked in the context of emotion–reason interactions.

In 1995, I was starting a PhD at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I was one of a few francophone students, at an anglophone institution, in a French-speaking province with an important English-speaking minority, in an officially bilingual country. Still following?¹ In October 1995, there was a referendum about whether Québec should separate from the rest of Canada and become an independent country. This led to heated discussions. The final outcome was a vote against separation, with only 50.58% of votes, and a record participation level of 93.5%. Of course, this was an emotional issue. A number of my friends and colleagues at McGill were not from the province, many were American. In discussions, it was often implied that of course, I couldn’t really reason about this rationally, because I was too emotionally involved. As a budding cognitive psychologist, I wondered whether they were right, whether there was any empirical evidence that would support this common, often unquestioned assumption that emotions impair “proper” reasoning.

Setting aside the difficult issue of rationality and what constitutes “proper” reasoning for a moment, there was little empirical research at the time on emotion and reasoning. There was an important literature on reasoning, particularly deductive reasoning, that had built up since the 1960 and 1970s and now presented well-established paradigms, robust empirical effects, sophisticated theoretical models, as well as extensive theoretical debates about rationality and, indeed, what constitutes “proper” reasoning. However, that literature hardly mentioned emotions. There were reasons for that silence. One may have been that providing an account of reasoning, and trying to determine whether it is rational or not, is complicated enough considering only cognitive factors, without adding emotion into the equation. Another reason is that this neglect of emotion was not specific to the reasoning literature, but characterized cognitive psychology more generally. For a long period, emotion was thought to lie outside the realm of what could be studied experimentally, and thus was excluded from experimental cognitive psychology. Reasoning research was no exception.

One early paper had reported an empirical comparison of syllogistic reasoning with emotional and non-emotional contents. Lefford (1946) observed that participants made more errors when reasoning about syllogisms that included emotional contents and concluded that “in dealing with subject matter which arouses an emotional reaction the subject does not retain his capacity for correct reasoning.” For the following decades, there was a paucity of research directly examining emotions,² until the 1990s, when a few papers on emotion and reasoning were published. In those papers, including the seminal work of Oaksford and colleagues (Oaksford, Morris, Grainger, & Williams, 1996), reasoning was compared while participants were in different experimentally induced moods (see also Melton, 1995; Palfai & Salovey, 1993). A few years later, other experiments compared reasoning about emotional and neutral contents (Blanchette, 2006; Blanchette & Richards, 2004; Goel & Dolan, 2003).

The results of these initial studies quite clearly seemed to validate my friends’ view that I could not reason properly because the issue was for me highly emotional. The first few studies examining the impact of emotion on reasoning showed that reasoning about emotional topics, or while in an emotional state leads to more “errors” in reasoning.³ A book on emotion and reasoning in 2005 would have been quite succinct, not only because there were few studies on the topic, but because the conclusions seemed quite straightforward and undisputed: Emotion leads to faulty reasoning. Less than ten years later, the picture has changed dramatically. The field of emotion and reasoning now includes a very broad range of empirical and theoretical work that paints a much more nuanced, more complex, and more interesting portrait of the effect of emotion on reasoning. Representative examples are presented in this book. With 300 papers published annually including the keywords “emotion” and “reasoning,” it is impossible to keep abreast of all recent developments. This book is intended to provide an up-to-date overview of key topics and a synthesis of recent progress. It is also the perfect time to suggest concerted avenues for further investigation.

I was lucky that my invitation to contribute to this book was accepted by the most eminent, creative, interesting researchers conducting work on emotion and reasoning at the moment. All the chapters in this book present the important and exciting recent empirical and theoretical developments in research on emotion and reasoning. One stimulating feature that characterizes the field of emotion and reasoning is that it genuinely brings together different research traditions and subdisciplines. This book includes work from the fields of experimental cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, clinical neuropsychology, psychophysiology, and experimental psychopathology. Developments in recent years have been driven by common research questions rather than by methodological approach. The book reflects this.

In this chapter, I provide an overview of key topics and empirical findings by introducing the different chapters included in this book. It serves to present the current state of knowledge on emotion and reasoning and gives a clear answer to the question Does emotion affect reasoning? This is followed by a discussion of the main theoretical themes that are recurrent throughout the chapters, an attempt at integration, and suggestions for future directions. This section starts to approach the question of How does emotion affect reasoning? Reading this book should make it clear that my friends (and indeed Lefford’s over-general conclusions) were not right. Maybe not surprisingly, it’s not that simple: emotional reasoning is not simply faulty reasoning.

I hope that, this introduction and this book illustrate why the topic of emotion and reasoning should be of interest to a broad range of researchers. From a fundamental point of view, considering the interaction between reasoning and emotion is crucial in understanding adaptation, rationality, and what promotes them. From an applied perspective, findings on the effect of emotion on reasoning have important implications for improving treatments of psychopathologies, but also for education, marketing, ergonomics, and a number of other applied areas where individuals must use their higher-level cognitive functions while experiencing emotional responses. Finally, because reasoning and emotion are complex systems, they implicate a number of constituent processes such as attention, language processing, working memory, semantic memory, hormonal responses, arousal, etc. and thus are likely to indirectly implicate a broad range of researchers.

Overview of key topics and empirical findings

The work reported in this book aims to understand the interaction between emotion and reasoning. This work is diverse in terms of the forms of reasoning it investigates, the outcome measures examined, and the populations studied. Reasoning is the psychological process through which individuals organize, structure, and draw inferences from information, helping them make sense of the world around them and envisage hypothetical situations. The different chapters in this book present what is currently known about various forms of reasoning, and how they are affected by emotion. The types of tasks examined investigate formal and informal reasoning, using conditional statements (If …), categorical syllogisms (Some X are Y. Some Y are not …), linear syllogisms (X is bigger than Y. Y is bigger than …), analogical reasoning (X is like Y…) and belief evaluation. Typical outcome measures in these tasks include responses and reaction time (RTs). These are supplemented with a range of indirect measures including psychophysiological indices such as skin conductance and pupil dilation, as well as brain imaging. There is a very fertile cross-talk between studies using non-clinical and clinical populations, including patients living with psychopathologies such as social phobia, anxiety disorders, hypochondria, and major depression, as well as individuals with specific brain lesions.

Though there are different theoretical approaches to reasoning (and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to present them all here), one theoretical paradigm that is used in many of the chapters in this book is the dual process model of reasoning. Dual process models postulate a distinction between heuristic and analytic processes in reasoning (Evans, 2007; Stanovich, 2004). Heuristic (or System 1 processes, in dual systems theories) are thought to be more implicit, automatic, associative, and intuitive, to be largely contextualized and based on prior knowledge. Reasoning based on heuristics is thought to require little cognitive resources. By contrast, analytic processes (or System 2 processes) are thought to be more effortful, explicit, rule-based, as well as slower. Reasoning analytically is thought to require the allocation of cognitive resources, or working memory capacity. The impact of emotion on both types of reasoning processes is examined in this book.

The key concepts of emotion, mood, and affect are employed throughout this book. Emotion is generally used to refer to a specific episode where there is a reaction to an internal or external event generating physiological changes, expressive behaviour (facial expressions, voice, posture, etc.), and an explicit subjective feeling state (Fox, 2008). Mood is used to refer to more diffuse and longer-lasting affective states that are typically not intentional, in the sense that they are not about something; they are not targeted towards a particular elicitor, in contrast to emotions (Martin & Clore, 2001). Affect is generally used as an umbrella term that denotes anything that is valenced (i.e., has a positive or negative value), and it includes both moods and emotion.

In the emotion literature, there are two general approaches that are used in thinking about emotions, and both are reflected in this book on emotion and reasoning. One is a dimensional approach, where emotions are thought to be characterized by different dimensions such as valence, arousal, and maybe control (there are other possible dimensions) (Rubin & Talerico, 2009). For instance, happiness is characterized by positive valence and high arousal while contentment is positive but low arousal. Fear is negative, high arousal, and low control, while sadness may be negative, low arousal and low control. According to this approach, differences between emotions are continuous, rather than discrete, and the underlying mechanisms that are responsible for the effect of emotion (on reasoning, for instance) would be linked to these dimensions. Another approach to emotion is the categorical approach (Fox, 2008; Niedenthal, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2006). This approach posits a sharp distinction between discrete emotions, postulating separate categories of basic emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, happiness, etc. According to this view, different emotions are qualitatively different, produce distinct effects on information processing, and are associated with different neural networks. Work examining the influence of emotion on reasoning has implicitly used both dimensional and categorical approaches. For instance, some work compares reasoning under high and low arousal, other work contrasts the effects of discrete emotions such as anger and fear on reasoning strategies.

Though books typically go from order to disorder, presenting basic processes followed by psychopathology, this book starts with three chapters on emotion and reasoning in psychopathology. This is because each of these chapters illustrates a fundamental aspect of the effect of emotion on reasoning, both in clinical and non-clinical populations. De Jong and Vroling (Chapter 2) present the differential effects of reasoning about danger and safety. Individuals tend to use confirmation strategies when reasoning about danger and falsification when reasoning about safety. They label this the “better safe than sorry” pattern. They review empirical evidence for this in clinical and non-clinical populations, using tasks such as hypothesis testing, conditional reasoning, and linear syllogisms. De Jong and Vroling ask whether these patterns of thinking play a role in the development or maintenance of anxiety disorders, and present results from studies including individuals with phobias, social anxiety, hypochondriasis, and panic disorder. Their evidence is discussed in the context of a dual process model of anxiety disorders.

Gangemi, Mancini, and Johnson-Laird (Chapter 3) also study reasoning processes in individuals with different psychopathologies. They present their hyper-emotion theory which suggests that it is not faulty reasoning, but rather emotions of aberrant intensity that are at the origin of psychological illness. They report data illustrating how patients suffering from different disorders tend to reason more logically, not less, about emotional topics related to their condition. Their research examines formal reasoning, using tasks such as categorical syllogisms, but they have also asked individuals merely to list the possibilities compatible with premises (Johnson-Laird, Mancini, & Gangemi, 2006). Gangemi and colleagues propose that the improvement in logicality results from the fact that emotional contents will be more easily retrieved from memory, which increases the number of alternative possibilities considered while reasoning and facilitates logical verification. The authors also present data showing that specific basic emotions, as well as specific strategies of reasoning are associated with different disorders, and that these reasoning strategies can be identified independently of semantic contents. For instance, a dialectical style is associated with obsessive compulsive disorder, and a type of extreme confirmation bias can be observed in hypochondria. The work of Gangemi, Mancini, and Johnson-Laird directly challenges the commonsensical notion that emotional reasoning necessarily leads to errors in logicality.

Berenbaum and Boden (Chapter 4) focus on beliefs, emotions, and reasoning. Their central proposition is that hedonic motivations initiate belief formation and change. People are likely to change their beliefs as a result of emotion, often with the goal of minimizing negative emotions. They suggest that beliefs serve to account for and regulate emotions as well as to accurately represent the world. They report a number of studies on more or less adaptive or accurate beliefs, including peculiar beliefs (suspiciousness, the belief that a baseball team is cursed, delusions, body image). They examine the role of emotional awareness and emotional salience in this process, which seems to differ in controls and psychiatric patients. Generally, when emotions provide accurate information (when they are elicited by an external event and are proportional to the importance of the event), attending to emotion (emotional awareness) increases the accuracy of beliefs and promotes adaptation. When beliefs or emotions (or both) are not adaptive (e.g., self-deprecating beliefs, exaggerated emotions), emotional awareness is associated with increased distress. The chapter by Berenbaum and Boden illustrates the important relationship between beliefs, emotions, reasoning and adaptation, a theme I return to in the following section.

The following two chapters present basic experimental work on reasoning in non-clinical populations. Chapter 5 by De Neys centers on the dual process approach to reasoning. In this context, De Neys discusses the idea of a logical gut feeling. Despite the fact that individuals often fail to provide normatively correct analytical responses, they nevertheless often show evidence of having detected a conflict between heuristics and normative principles. This comes from indirect measures such as skin conduc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Does emotion affect reasoning? Yes, in multiple ways
• 2. Better safe than sorry: threat-confirming reasoning bias in anxiety disorders
• 3. Emotion, reasoning, and psychopathology
• 4. Emotions, beliefs, and psychopathology
• 5. Conflict, arousal, and logical gut feelings
• 6. Emotion as an argumentative strategy: how induced mood affects the evaluation of neutral and inflammatory slippery slope arguments
• 7. Reasoning and emotion in the body
• 8. Pupil size reflects cognition emotion interactions in analogical reasoning
• 9. What is the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in emotional influences on reason?
• Index