The Influence Of Emotion On Conditional Reasoning: The Moderating Role Of Semantic Relevance

The discussion of the relationship of emotion and rationality is from the times of ancient Greece,many hold the view that logical reasoning ability can be seen as a criterion to judge the degree of humans’ rationality.In the research of psychology,the effect of emotion on cognition is a continuing unabated issue,this field was not short of researches about this topic in the past long time,however,due to the complexity of these two psychological activities,it is really hard to achieve a consistent conclusion.According to the analysis of previous studies,it is not difficult to discover that the affect of emotion on individual reasoning ability may be different in different cases,and the semantic relevance between emotion state and the content of conditional reasoning may play moderating role,base on this assumption,this research is intended to provide a empirical evidence to confirm the validity of these hypotheses.Clinical observations and quasi-experiments in previous studies suggested that there exist s many subjects in negative emotion are able to reasoning better than average ones in dealing with some specific sort of reasoning tasks,this research introduce a new variable-semantic relevance,and use utility conditionals,which is closer to our daily life,as experimental materials,meanwhile,participants are asked to appreciate several video clips to inducing specific emotion state,they are presented reasoning stimulates through E-prime,the correction and response time will be recorded by computer automatically too.The purpose of this research is to determine the variation of individual reasoning ability when induced emotion and conditional reasoning content related or not.The experiment results showed that:1.Emotion can affect the individual conditional reasoning ability,but we can’t generally summarized that emotion play a certain inhibiting role or promoting role;2.When the content of conditional reasoning is related to emotion state,reasoners achieve higher correct score than average,their response time will also be greater,therefore,it is reasonable to conclude that in this relevant case,emotion promote individual conditional reasoning ability so that it is more often for them to think more logically;3.When the content of conditional reasoning and emotion state is irrelevant,participants’ correct score are significantly lower than control group,their response time are also less than control group significantly,therefore,it is reasonable to conclude that in this irrelevant case,emotionweaken individual conditional reasoning ability,causing their reason not logically;4.this study suggests that the relevance between the content of conditional reasoning and emotion is able to integrate inconsistent conclusion of previous studies,semantic relevance play a moderating role in the affect of emotion on conditional reasoning.