A different kind of pain: affective valence of errors and incongruence

Abstract

People hiss and swear when they make errors, frown and swear again when they encounter conflicting information. Such error- and conflict-related signs of negative affect are found even when there is no time pressure or external reward and the task itself is very simple. Previous studies, however, provide inconsistent evidence regarding the affective consequences of resolved conflicts, that is, conflicts that resulted in correct responses. We tested whether response accuracy in the Eriksen flanker task will moderate the effect of trial incongruence using affective priming to measure positive and negative affect. We found that responses to incongruent trials elicit positive affect irrespective of their accuracy. Errors, in turn, result in negative affect irrespective of trial congruence. The effects of conflicts and errors do not interact and affect different dimensions of affective priming. Conflicts change the speed of evaluative categorisation while errors are reflected in categorisation accuracy. We discuss the findings in light of the "reward value and prediction" model and the "affect as a feedback for predictions" framework and consider the possible mechanisms behind the divergent effects.

Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict

“…When participants responded correctly, they demonstrated a more positive reaction in incongruent trials compared to congruent ones. This effect was also replicated by Ivanchei and colleagues (Ivanchei et al, 2019).…”

“…However, although the effect disappeared over time, it never reversed, as in the studies of Schouppe and colleagues (2015) and Ivanchei and colleagues (2019) where correct responses to incongruent stimuli were found to induce positive affect. Schouppe and colleagues (2015) and Ivanchei and colleagues (2019) also used additional practice with the Stroop task prior to the "Stroop + target evaluation" trials (i.e., 24 trials in Schouppe et al, 2015; and until criterion in Ivanchei et al, 2019). Therefore, observing a more positive evaluation following correct responses to incongruent trials (relative to congruent trials) may necessitate more experience with the conflict task.…”

“…With this hypothesis in mind, we re-analyzed previous experiments where the conflict positivity effect was observed (Ivanchei et al, 2019;Schouppe et al, 2015). When we analyzed only the first 90-100 trials of these studies, we also failed to observe conflict positivity: F (1, 24) = 0.05, p = 0.829 (Ivanchei et al, 2019); F (1, 17) = 0.23, p = 0.635 (Schouppe et al, 2015, Experiment 2A). Instead, the effect becomes apparent only later in the experiment (see Figure 1).…”

Temporal dynamics of error-related corrugator supercilii and zygomaticus major activity: Evidence for implicit emotion regulation following errors

“…For example, behavioral studies using affective priming paradigms have shown that passively viewing a conflicting stimulus (e.g. Stroop) leads to faster detection of negative relative to positive stimuli (Dreisbach & Fischer, 2012), while actively and correctly responding to conflict produced the reversed pattern with faster detection of positive relative to negative stimuli after conflict (Schouppe et al, 2015;Ivanchei et al, 2018). Similarly, while passive viewing of conflict stimuli for short durations led to more negative evaluations, increased viewing time led to more positive evaluations, suggesting that initial negative valence is counteracted by emotion regulation with sufficient time (Fritz & Dreisbach, 2015; see also Pan, Shi, Lu, Wu, Xue, & Li, 2016, Exp.…”

Diagnostics of Perceptive and Emotional Components of Psychological Readiness for Self-Regulation in Professional Activity

“…According to the authors of the technique, the subject with a higher readiness to interpret the signals they receive as stressful and dangerous will identify these words faster, which will be reflected in the objective criterion, i.e. shorter recognition time (Ivanchei et al, 2019;Shcherbakova et al, 2018). Plutchik et al (1979) method "Diagnostics of psychological defense typology" adapted to Russian sample (as cited in Fetiskin et al, https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2020.10.04.16 Corresponding Author: Anna Valerevena Emelyanenkova Selection and peer-review under Folkman and Lazarus's (1988) "Coping test" adapted to Russian sample by Kryukova and Kuftyak (2007) were used as subjective methods.…”