title: Independent effects of relevance and arousal on deductive reasoning.
abstract: Emotional content can have either a deleterious or a beneficial impact on logicality. Using standard deductive-reasoning tasks, we tested the hypothesis that the interplay of two factors - personal relevance and arousal - determines the nature of the effect of emotional content on logicality. Arousal was assessed using measures of skin conductance. Personal relevance was manipulated by asking participants to reason about semantic contents linked to an emotional event that they had experienced or not. Findings showed that (1) personal relevance exerts a positive effect on logicality while arousal exerts a negative effect, and that (2) these effects are independent of each other.
authors.affiliation: a EA 7352 Chrome , Université de Nîmes , Nîmes , France.
authors.forename: Serge
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Caparos
authors.affiliation: b Département de Psychologie , Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières , Trois-Rivières , Canada.
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Blanchette
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000069586:Adult Survivors of Child Adverse Events / Q000523:psychology*; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D012649:Self Concept; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Reasoning; cognition; emotion; relevance; trauma