Abstract
Previous studies adopting immediate priming paradigms show that cognitive conflict has task-specific effects on emotion: perceiving conflict is negative, but this valence disappears or reverses for resolving conflict. We investigated whether emotional valence (i.e., positive or negative) has bi-directional effects on cognitive control. If either positive or negative emotion facilitates cognitive control (e.g., detection or resolving conflict), the response time cost of cognitive conflict (e.g., the Stroop effect) should be reduced. In two experiments, participants were primed by viewing a smiling (positive emotion) or angry (negative emotion) face before they performed the typical color Stroop task (Experiment 1) or explicitly identified the congruency of a color Stroop stimulus without necessarily resolving the conflict (Experiment 2). Stroop effect magnitude (i.e., the difference between congruent and incongruent conditions) was not modulated by prime valence in either experiment. These results are inconsistent with a previous study that showed that stimuli associated with positive emotion facilitated cognitive control. We argue that the emotion-to-cognitive control transfer may be stimulus-specific rather than stimulus-general. In forthcoming experiments, the target color Stroop task is substituted for a gender Stroop task to assess the effect of emotional valence on cognitive control within the same domain of stimuli as well as a stimulus-specific experiment.