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Updated: Feb 18, 2026

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Impairing Effect of Emotion on Cognition
Published on: February 1, 2012
Effects of task-irrelevant emotional information on deception
Jing Liang1,2,3, Yu-Hsin Chen2,4, Wen-Jing Yan2,4
1a State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science , Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Beijing , People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Deception has been reported to be influenced by task-relevant emotional information from an external stimulus. However, it remains unclear how task-irrelevant emotional information would influence deception. In the present study, facial expressions of different valence and emotion intensity were presented to participants, where they were asked to make either truthful or deceptive gender judgments according to the preceding cues. We observed the influence of facial expression intensity upon individuals' cognitive cost of deceiving (mean difference of individuals' truthful and deceptive response times). Larger cost was observed for high intensity faces compared to low intensity faces. These results provided insights on how automatic attraction of attention evoked by task-irrelevant emotional information in facial expressions influenced individuals' cognitive cost of deceiving.
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