The Effect of Negative Emotion on Deductive Reasoning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In three experiments, we explore the link between peripheral physiological arousal and logicality in a deductive reasoning task. Previous research has shown that participants are less likely to provide normatively correct responses when reasoning about emotional compared to neutral contents. Which component of emotion is primarily involved in this effect has not yet been explored. We manipulated the emotional value of the reasoning stimuli through classical conditioning (Experiment 1), with simultaneous presentation of negative/neutral pictures (Experiment 2), or by using intrinsically negative/neutral words (Experiment 3). We measured skin conductance (SC) and subjective affective ratings of the stimuli. In all experiments, we observed a negative relationship between SC and logicality. Participants who showed greater SC reactivity to negative stimuli compared to neutral stimuli were more likely to make logical errors on negative, compared to neutral reasoning contents. There was no such link between affective ratings of the stimuli and the effect of emotion on reasoning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".