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

Emotion is an important factor that affected cognitive activities. Many scholarshave studied the relationship between mood and perception, attention, memory,judgment and so on. But the relationship between mood and inference is few bothdomestic and overseas. This study focuses on the influence of different emotionalsituations on analogical reasoning and their mechanisms of eye movementExperiment explores individual’s reasoning results and mechanisms of eyemovement in different emotional states by manipulating the emotional situations toinduce different emotional states. We use the figure analogical reasoning items asexperiment materials. There are24subjects who are freshmen. Experiment uses4(emotional state: positive, negative, neutral and control group)×3(task difficultylevel: low, medium, high) two-factor mixed design. The former are between-subjectsfactors, the latter are within-subjects factors, and the subjects’ reasoning scores andeye movement data are dependent variable.By analyzing the every factor’s main effects and their interactions, theexperiment indicated that: there is significant difference on total score in the figureanalogical reasoning among subjects of the different emotional state groups, positiveand negative state inhibit the analogical reasoning. However, there is no significantdifference between the neural and control group. Another result is that, differentemotional states have different influences on task difficulty levels. For low difficultytask, there is no significant inhibition, but for medium and higher difficulty task,inhibition effect is so significant.