The Effect Of Motivation And Valence Of Retrospective Emotion On Sense Of Agency

Sense of agency is the experience of controlling our own voluntary actions,and,through them,events in the outside world.It is an important part of self-awareness of human.Emotion is an important factor that affects the level of sense of agency.The past researches of the impact of retrospective emotional clues on sense of agency have found that positive outcomes enhanced sense of agency.However,it remains controversial in the effect of negative emotional outcomes on sense of agency.Present study is based on the inconsistency of the negative emotions on sense of agency,and explores the reasons for this divergence from the perspective of motivational dimensional model of affect.Three experiments are conducted.Experiment 1 is a confirmatory experiment,aiming to verify the effectiveness of interval-estimation paradigm.The results are consistent with previous studies.That is,action–effect interval estimates were significantly shorter in the voluntary action condition.The intentional binding effect decreases with the increase of interval.Experiment 2 explored the characteristics of the impact of different emotions on sense of agency.we used three negative emotional stimuli such as Anger,disgust and sadness.These emotional stimuli are presented as retrospective emotional cues.The arousal of these emotional stimuli is consistent but the motivation is inconsistent.In experiment 3 we added the emotion of happy,to investigate whether participants have different levels of sense of agency when showing happy,angry and sad emotional outcomes with consistent arousal.Summing up all the results of three experiments,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)Interval-estimation paradigm is an effective paradigm to measure sense of agency.(2)Positive emotional outcomes can enhance the sense of agency,but negative emotional outcomes do not always reduce the sense of agency.Different motivation of emotional stimuli have different effect on sense of agency.(3)Anger is a high motivational intensity negative emotion,like high intensity motivational positive emotion,can enhance the sense of agency.(4)The valence and motivation of retrospective emotional cues all have impact on the sense of agency.Emotional motivation is another important variable that influences the sense of agency.