Masked affective stimuli moderate task difficulty effects on effort‐related cardiovascular response

Abstract

This experiment investigated the combined effect of masked affective stimuli and task difficulty on effort-related cardiovascular response. Cardiovascular reactivity (ICG, blood pressure) was recorded during a baseline period and performance of an easy or difficult attention task in which participants were exposed to masked sad vs. happy facial expressions. As expected, participants in the sad-faces/easy and happy-faces/difficult conditions showed stronger sympathetic nervous system discharge to the heart and vasculature--shorter preejection period, higher systolic blood pressure--indicating more effort than participants in the sad-faces/difficult and happy-faces/easy conditions. Total peripheral resistance reacted similarly as preejection period and systolic blood pressure. The findings are compatible with the effects of consciously experienced affect on effort-related cardiovascular response.

How emotion context modulates unconscious goal activation during motor force exertion

“…not too high however, as successful performance was still possible and justified; if subjective demand was too high, we would have observed low effort exertion due to disengagement (Silvestrini and Gendolla, 2011b). In keeping with an effect of unpleasant-inaction stimuli on motivational processes regulating effort exertion, our fMRI results showed increased activity in regions known to play a role in processing incentive cues and behavioural relevance of sensory events.…”

“…Implicit emotional primes are thought to automatically activate mental representations determining the subjective experience associated with task demands. For example, implicit sadness primes promotes the subjective experience of task difficulty, while happiness primes are associated with ease (Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2011;Silvestrini and Gendolla, 2011b). Together, these studies support the general premise that action-inaction concepts and emotional signals can encourage goal pursuit and modulate effort exertion.…”

Implicit activation of the aging stereotype influences effort-related cardiovascular response: The role of incentive

“…Also in our previous studies on affect priming, we have only sometimes found prime effects on subjective demand ratings (e.g., Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2011;Lasauskaite et al 2013, Lasauskaite Schüpbach et al, 2014Silvestrini and Gendolla, 2011b), or subjective effort (e.g., Chatelain and Gendolla, 2015). Other studies revealed the expected effort effects without significant effects on these self-report measures (e.g., .…”

“…Without high incentive, high demand should lead to effort withdrawal due to disengagement. Importantly, previous research has shown that the implicit activation of the difficulty concept by sadness or fear primes during an objectively difficult cognitive task in fact leads to effort withdrawal when no high success incentive is provided (Blanchfield et al, 2014;Lasauskaite Schüpbach et al, 2014;Silvestrini and Gendolla, 2011b). However, high success incentive could eliminate this effort mobilization deficit and boosted effort-related cardiovascular response .…”

Influence of positive subliminal and supraliminal affective cues on goal pursuit in schizophrenia

“…Positive subliminal cues are thought to decrease the perceived difficulty of a task and consequently reduce effort mobilization (Niedenthal, 2008;Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2011;Silvestrini and Gendolla, 2011;Gendolla, 2012), which may result in decreased performance (Zemack-Rugar et al, 2007). Positive subliminal cues represent a sign that goal pursuit is easy and induce coasting.…”