Different Levels Of Objective And Subjective Task Difficulties Elicit Different Valence Of Emotion

Psychologists have long been interested in the impact of cognition on emotion. Lazarus suggests that emotion reflects cognition, or in other words, emotion is resulted from cognitive processes. As we know, emotion is of vital importance to us. Positive emotion can promote the cognitive processes and is necessary for keeping mental health, whereas negative emotion can impede cognitive activities and is harmful for social adaptation and mental health. Therefore, it is significant to get a deep understanding in the impacts of cognitive processes on different valence of emotion.According to the Hedonic Fluency Model, which is suggested by Winkielman and Cacioppo, individual’s meta-cognition would monitor cognitive processes and provide the information of fluency to the system of emotion; high fluency may indicate good progress of a cognitive activity and lead to positive affect as a reward. The information of fluency includes objective fluency and subjective fluency, and they both play a key role in evaluation and judgment.In spite of evidences supporting the Hedonic Fluency Model, there are some contradictory findings. Previous research always uses very easy tasks in experiments. Moreover, objective fluency and subjective fluency are not tested respectively. We suggest that these may be the reasons why the Hedonic Fluency Model cannot explain some contradictory findings. And the Hedonic Fluency Model may be only suitable for comparisons within one group of the same difficulty level rather than comparisons between groups of different difficulty levels. The current research includes two experiments concerning to perceptual processes and semantic processes, respectively. In every experiment, we examined the impacts of different difficulty levels on different valence of emotion, testing objective task difficulty (objective fluency) and subjective task difficulty (subjective fluency) respectively. Two experiments demonstrated that:(1) when task difficulty was medium, individuals’emotion evaluations were most positive;(2) when task difficulty was high, individuals’emotion evaluations were declined;(3) when task difficulty was low, individuals’emotion evaluations were declined to negative;(4) in the condition that individuals could give right answers, the higher subjective task difficulty was, the higher emotion evaluation would be;(5) in the condition that individuals could not give right answers, the higher subjective task difficulty was, the lower emotion evaluation would be;(6) the effect of subjective task difficulty was consistent with that of objective task difficulty, and it was mediated by objective task difficulty;(7) compared to that in perceptual processes, subjective task difficulty had a stronger effect in the regression of emotion evaluation. The current research reveals implications of meta-cognition, and provides reference for training of meta-cognition.