title: Socially triggered negative affect impairs performance in simple cognitive tasks.
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.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstr. 31, 93053, Regensburg, Germany, mail@svenjaboettcher.de.
authors: Svenja
authors: S
authors: Böttcher
authors: Gesine
authors: G
authors: Dreisbach
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D012931:Social Environment; D055815:Young Adult