More caution or more lenient: deciphering the role of negative affect in recognition and inference

When individuals encounter familiar situations, they may apply behaviors from past experiences. This could be due to recognizing similarities between the situations or inferring characteristics from the past to the present, leading to similar responses. Recognition becomes more cautious in negative contexts, showing increased discrimination and ability to discern differences, known as the "negative affective effect of recognition". Conversely, generalized inference in negative situations tends to overgeneralize past attributes to current contexts, termed the "negative affective effect of inference". This study examines how recognition and inference interact under different affective states and their impact on cognitive processing. It employed an symmetrical design with affective contexts (positive, neutral, negative) to evaluate performance in two task sequences: inference-recognition and recognition-inference, using Signal Detection Theory under varying time pressures. The findings reveal that the sequence of cognitive tasks influences the magnitude of negative affective effects in recognition and inference, particularly indicating a complex, bidirectional interaction between these processes.