Smiles make it easier and so do frowns: Masked affective stimuli influence mental effort.

Abstract

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that exposure to masked emotional expressions during the performance of cognitive tasks influences effort mobilization. In support of the predictions, participants who processed masked sad faces during task performance under "do your best" instructions showed stronger sympathetic nervous system discharge to the heart (shorter pre-ejection period, higher systolic blood pressure) than participants who were exposed to masked smiling faces or angry faces. Assessed task appraisals suggest that these effects on effort-related cardiovascular reactivity occurred because the masked emotional stimuli influenced the level of experienced task difficulty. The findings are compatible with the effects of consciously experienced affect on effort-related cardiovascular response.

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

“…Several studies have supported this systematic impact of implicitly processed affect primes on effort-related cardiovascular response in cognitive tasks (e.g., Chatelain and Gendolla, 2015;Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2011;Lasauskaite et al, 2013). The present research applied a similar logic to explain how the aging stereotype can influence effort mobilization.…”

“…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., .…”

How emotion context modulates unconscious goal activation during motor force exertion

“…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.…”

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.…”