Negative Mood Impairs Updating of Affective Information

NRU Higher School of Economics , 2020.

Mohammed A., Lyusin D.

Updating is an important executive function that is vital for the attainment of goals such as cognitive tasks, daily activities and the regulation of emotion. The ability to update affective content in working memory is said to be influenced by mood. However, little is known regarding influences of mood on the valence of the affective content. We hypothesized that first, negative mood would impair updating of affective information. Second, this impeding impact would be weaker for the updating of negative information due to mood congruence effect. Sixty-three Russian speaking participants were recruited for the experiment. Half of the participants were induced into negative mood by negative pictures; the other half were presented with neutral pictures. All participants performed the affective 2-back task before and after mood induction. The results showed that negative mood impaired the accuracy rates of updating. However, the mood congruence effect was not observed in the updating of positive and negative materials. We recommend that more experiments be conducted with varied affective stimuli and across different populations.

Keywords: обновление, индукция эмоций, mood induction, эмоциональная конгруэнтность, updating, n-back task, negative mood, mood congruence, отрицательное настроение

Publication based on the results of: The interaction between the bottom-up and top-down streams of information processing in cognitive task performance (2020)