The Influence Of Emotion On Conditional Reasoning: Evidence From Eye-Movement

Emotion is the important factor that affected cognitive activities. Many scholars have studied the relationship between mood and perception, attention, memory, judgement and so on. But the relationship between mood and inference is few both domestic and overseas. This study focuses on the influence of two emotional situations on reasoning and their mechanism of eye movement:(1) the influence of individual's own emotional state on reasoning; (2) the influence of reasoning materials with different emotional valence on individual reasoning results.Experiment one explores individual's reasoning results and eye movement mechanisms in different emotional states by manipulating the emotional situations to trigger different emotional states. Experiment uses 4 (emotional state:positive, negative, neutral and control group)×4 (reasoning forms:MP, MT, DA, AC)×2 (interest area: the premise and conclusion) three-factor mixed experimental design. The emotional states are serving as between-subjects factors, reasoning forms and regions of interest as within-subjects factors, and the subjects' reasoning results and eye movement data as dependent variable.Experiment two study the impact of material emotion on individual reasoning and eye movement mechanisms by designing reasoning materials with different emotional valence. This study uses 3 (material emotion: positive emotional valance, negative emotional valance, neutral emotional valance)×4 (reasoning forms:MP, DA, AC, MT)×2 (interest area: the premise and conclusion) three-factor repeated measures experimental design. Material emotion, reasoning forms and regions of interest are serving as within-subjects factors, the subjects'reasoning results and eye movement data as dependent variable.Through the research we draw the following several conclusions:(1) Positive and negative emotions inhibit the individual's reasoning, for the positive and negative emotions may lead resources being allocated to extra-task processing and therefore take up working memory capacity. The results support the inhibition hypothesis. (2) In conditional reasoning, the form of Modus Ponens (MP) is simplest; then is Modus Tollens (MT); Denying the Antecedent (DA) and Affirming the Consequent (AC) are most difficult. (3) The differences of eye-movement in conditional reasoning mainly exist in the premise interest area; in conclusion interest area, there is no significant differences.