Age-Related Differences in How Fear, Disgust, and Sadness Influence Strategic Aspects of Arithmetic Performance

How different negative emotions influence cognitive processes in general, and arithmetic in particular, remains poorly understood, and even less is known about how these effects change with aging in adulthood. The present study investigated whether disgust, fear, and sadness exert distinct effects on strategy selection and execution in arithmetic, and whether these effects vary across the adult lifespan. Young and older participants were asked to choose between two strategies (Experiment 1) and to execute instructed strategies (Experiment 2) to estimate the products of two-digit multiplication problems. Interestingly, how fear, disgust, and sadness influence strategy selection and strategy execution differed in young and older adults. Discrete negative emotions differentially influenced strategic aspects of arithmetic performance in young adults, whereas none modulated strategy selection or execution in older adults. These findings have important implications for furthering our understanding of emotion-cognition interactions as well as age-related changes in these interactions.