Mood states determine the degree of task shielding in dual-task performance

Abstract

Current models of multitasking assume that dual-task performance and the degree of multitasking are affected by cognitive control strategies. In particular, cognitive control is assumed to regulate the amount of shielding of the prioritised task from crosstalk from the secondary task. We investigated whether and how task shielding is influenced by mood states. Participants were exposed to two short film clips, one inducing high and one inducing low arousal, of either negative or positive content. Negative mood led to stronger shielding of the prioritised task (i.e., less crosstalk) than positive mood, irrespective of arousal. These findings support the assumption that emotional states determine the parameters of cognitive control and play an important role in regulating dual-task performance.

Induced Positive Mood and Cognitive Flexibility: Evidence from Task Switching and Reversal Learning

“…Both sets of analyses had enough power to detect effect sizes from similar studies in this literature; a posthoc power analysis indicated that we had 80% power to detect a partial eta squared of 0.06-0.10, depending on the specific analysis. This is within the same range as effect sizes reported in the mood/CF literature (e.g., Wang, Chen, & Yue, 2017;Zwosta et al, 2013;Nadler, Rabi, & Minda, 2010). There are several possible explanations for failing to reject the null hypothesis in this study.…”

“…However, this flexibility came at the cost of increased distractibility; that is, participants were better able to adapt to changes that occurred, but that came at the cost of being more susceptible to interference (Dreisbach & Goschke, 2004). A similar conclusion is supported by results from Zwosta et al (2013) who found that a positive mood induction increased vulnerability to interference in a task switching protocol. Phillips and colleagues (2002) found that those in a happy mood were significantly slower on a switching condition of a traditional Stroop task, and López-Benítez et al (2017) found that trait positive mood did not influence task switching.…”

“…The primary task switching analyses were done on RT. Incorrect trials and those where the RT was below 150 ms or above 2,000 ms were removed prior to analysis, resulting in the loss of 6.72% of trials (as is standard for task switching studies, e.g., Zwosta et al, 2013). To assess CF, a difference score was created (the RTs for all switch trials minus the RTs for all stay trials).…”

Meditation and Metacontrol

“…Negative mood, in turn, has been reported to increase top-down control, as in states of dysphoria induced by acute tryptophan depletion in remitted depressed patients (Booij et al 2005). Along the same lines, inducing negative mood increases the shielding of a prioritized task against competing tasks, as indicated by a reduction of cross talk between tasks (Zwosta et al 2013). Taken altogether, there is systematic evidence that positive-going mood drives metacontrol towards flexibility and some evidence that negative-going mood promotes persistence.…”

Emotion does not influence prefrontal cortex activity during a visual attention task. A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.

“…At the behavioral level emotion has been shown to influence multiple aspects of cognition including working memory [1], task shielding [2], attentional control [3], and visual attention [4,5,6]. At the neural level research has shown that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is involved in emotional processing during cognitive task completion; see [7,8] for recent compressive reviews of this research area.…”