Experimental studies of the impact of emotional information on analogical reasoning

Cognitive models of psychopathology propose that psychological illness results not from undesirable events themselves but from how individuals interpret these events and form beliefs. Analogical reasoning is central to belief formation, as it allows people to draw inferences by connecting new information to existing knowledge. Examining the effect of emotion can provide insights into how distorted beliefs about the self, the world, and the future develop in psychological disorders. My prior research revealed that emotional information affects analogical reasoning based on its relevance: task-relevant emotional content enhances reasoning, whereas task-irrelevant content impairs it. Furthermore, the Learning and Inferences with Schemas and Analogies (LISA) symbolic-computational model of analogical reasoning simulated these effects, revealing that emotional stimuli influences reasoning by attracting attention and decreasing an error penalty when individuals attended to task-irrelevant emotional information. For my dissertation, I conducted two interconnected studies to further investigate the effect of emotion on analogical reasoning. The first study investigated how mood influences these attention-based effects, exploring whether an unpleasant mood enhances the benefits of task-relevant emotional information or exacerbates the impairments caused by task-irrelevant information. The second study examined the neurobiological of the attention-related mechanisms proposed by LISA, using event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine whether emotional stimuli attract attention in ways that affect analogical reasoning. Together, these studies aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of how emotional information and mood states influence analogical reasoning. In the first study, I tested whether unpleasant mood would moderate the effect of emotional content (i.e., others’ emotional facial expressions) by enhancing either: (a) the benefit of the relevant facial expressions; or (b) the harm of the irrelevant facial expressions. Following an unpleasant or neutral mood induction, undergraduate students (N = 269) completed the Emotional Faces People Pieces Task, an analogical reasoning task in which the task characters displayed emotional or neutral facial expressions. The emotional faces were relevant or irrelevant to the task. Irrelevant information was either congruent or incongruent with the correct response. Participants in the unpleasant mood condition benefited more from emotionally relevant faces (relative to neutral faces) than did participants in a neutral mood, F(2, 133) = 3.67, p < .05, η_p^2 = .05. In the second study, I developed a modified version of the Emotional Faces People Pieces task, tailored to an ERP paradigm by presenting characters sequentially. Seventy University of Illinois students participated. Behavioral results replicated prior findings (Castro et al., 2023), demonstrating that emotional facial expressions enhance reasoning accuracy when relevant but impair reasoning when irrelevant. This replication using a novel version of the EFPP task underscores the robustness of the findings and the task’s potential utility in ERP research. The novel sequential presentation method aligns well with ERP analysis, although some ERP interpretations were affected by eye-movement artifacts, highlighting areas for methodological refinement in future research. The goal of my future research is to extend present findings to clinical populations characterized by elevated moods. Additionally, I aim to collaborate with mentors who specialize in physiological methods to explore neural markers of the effects of emotion on analogical reasoning.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Castro Leon, Ariana Andrea

Contributors dc:contributor

• Berenbaum, Howard
• Kwapil, Thomas Richard
• Hummel, John E
• Federmeier, Kara
• Dolcos, Florin

• Emotion
• Psychopathology
• Mood
• Reasoning

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Ariana Castro Leon

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130111

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/130111