The Influence of Emotions on Cognitive Flexibility.

Abstract

Cognitive flexibility is important for creativity, for learning when reward contingencies change, and for redirecting our attention. Previous research has shown that creative behavior improves with positive mood, but researchers disagree about whether other behaviors under the umbrella term “cognitive flexibility” are similarly facilitated. Also, the outcomes of positive mood might depend on the particular positive emotion. In my dissertation research, I contribute to the current debate on this issue by assessing which emotional states influence which types of cognitive flexibility. Three types of flexibility are differentiated: Associative flexibility is the ability to generate unusual associations, regulative flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing reward contingencies, and attentional flexibility is the ability to shift attention. The dissertation presents a meta-analysis and three empirical studies. The influence of emotions on associative flexibility was examined with a meta-analysis, and was assessed in an experiment with an idea generation and a remote associate task. Regulative flexibility was assessed with a reversal learning task, and attentional flexibility with a California Card Sorting Test (Delis, Squire, Bihrle, & Massman, 1992). Overall, the results showed that happiness increased associative flexibility and impaired regulative flexibility. While there was some indication that attentional flexibility is impaired under happiness, the evidence was somewhat weak, and more research is required before conclusions can be drawn with certainty. The influence of affect on flexibility differed across emotions. Unlike happiness, relief did not influence flexibility. Depending on the situation (e.g., performance goals), negative emotions could increase associative flexibility similar to positive affect, but they had no effects on regulative flexibility. The meta-analysis identified several moderators in the emotion-cognition link. The experimental research used a mediation analysis to show that happiness impaired reversal learning independent of goal maintenance and global processing. The integration of research identifying types of flexibility and differentiating among emotions of the same valence is a fruitful avenue for future research. A taxonomy of tasks to assess different types of flexibility is proposed that may help guide this process.