Bumpy ride ahead: Anticipated effort as emotional evidence?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Affective Science

Background:

• Subjective feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness are often modeled as accumulating evidence.
• Previous models lacked clear definitions of 'evidence' and verification of genuine emotional reporting.
• Distinguishing experienced feelings from expected feelings is crucial for accurate affective reporting.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of anticipated cognitive effort in the accumulation of evidence for affective feelings.
• To test whether participants report genuinely experienced (un)pleasant feelings or expected feelings.
• To examine how task difficulty influences the accumulation of evidence for emotional valence.

Main Methods:

• A preregistered experiment using emotion-evoking pictures.
• Participants reported (un)pleasant feelings during anticipated low-effort (feature visual search) or high-effort (feature-conjunction search) tasks.
• The Linear Ballistic Accumulator model was fitted to the feeling report data.

Main Results:

• Anticipated high effort was linked to a faster accumulation of unpleasant evidence.
• This effect occurred specifically when viewing normatively unpleasant images, not pleasant ones.
• Genuine emotional responses appear to contribute to subjective feeling reports.

Conclusions:

• Anticipated cognitive effort can serve as a source of evidence influencing affective judgments.
• The findings support the contribution of genuinely felt emotions in subjective reports.
• Effort's influence on affective reporting is valence-dependent and context-specific.