Decision mechanisms underlying mood-congruent emotional classification

Corey N. White, Elad Liebman, Peter Stone
2017 Cognition & Emotion  
There is great interest in understanding whether and how mood influences affective processing. Results in the literature have been mixed: some studies show moodcongruent processing but others do not. One limitation of previous work is that decision components for affective processing and responses biases are not dissociated. The present study explored the roles of affective processing and response biases using a drift-diffusion model (DDM) of simple choice. In two experiments, participants
more » ... ed if words were emotionally positive or negative while listening to music that induced positive or negative mood. The behavioural results showed weak, inconsistent mood-congruency effects. In contrast, the DDM showed consistent effects that were selectively driven by an a-priori bias in response expectation, suggesting that music-induced mood influences expectations about the emotionality of upcoming stimuli, but not the emotionality of the stimuli themselves. Implications for future studies of emotional classification and mood are subsequently discussed. ARTICLE HISTORY
doi:10.1080/02699931.2017.1296820 pmid:28271732 fatcat:wdfzywrklfdbvbf2oksjuude3i