|
Abstract:
|
Emotions create a number of different effects that help individuals react appropriately to the situation at hand. These effects, however, are only adaptive when they occur in the right context to the right extent. The effects of emotions include cognitive effects, in particular attentional effects. In the past, happiness has been linked to external focuses of attention, flexible processing, distractibility, and superficial processing. Sadness has been found to lead to internal focuses of attention, detail-oriented processing, and slower reaction times. Of course, there has been very little cross-cultural research investigating how emotions might have different effects on cognition depending on the cultural context. This appears to be a large oversight given the vast effects of culture on emotions in other respects.
This study is composed of two smaller studies both of which occurred in the United States. The first was simply used to verify that music chosen would effectively manipulate participants’ emotions. The second study used the Attention Network Test, a flanker test, to investigate how happiness and sadness affected the following aspects of attention: reaction time, accuracy, conflict effect, orienting effect, and alert effect. The only significant finding was that sadness was associated with a lower alert effect. Potential reasons for these findings are discussed. This study is currently being replicated in Russia to see if there are cross-cultural differences between Russians and Americans. |