Emotions need a face

Description

The present refers to a study that investigated whether facial identity and emotional expressions impose different cognitive demands during working memory updating and maintenance, how emotional information decays, and whether different emotions differentially affect performance. Fifty-six healthy adults completed an n-back task in which they monitored facial identity, emotional expression, or both simultaneously under three levels of cognitive load. Accuracy and response times were analyzed as indices of working memory performance. Results revealed that performance was significantly lower when emotion was the only relevant information, indicating that emotional information requires greater cognitive resources to be maintained and updated. Interestingly, processing both identity and emotion simultaneously resulted in better performance than processing emotional information alone, suggesting a potential binding mechanism between facial identity and emotional expression. Furthermore, longer response times were associated with lower accuracy independently of cognitive load, a pattern consistent with time-based accounts of working memory decay. Finally, no significant differences in performance emerged among different facial expressions. These findings suggest that emotional information imposes greater working memory demands than identity alone or emotion-identity combined, support a main role of temporal factors in the decay of social-emotional information, and indicate that the maintenance of emotional expressions in working memory may be relatively insensitive to differences in emotional valence.

Institutions

• University of Milano-Bicocca

  Lombardy, Milan

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