Affective cost asymmetry in task switching: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Task switching is fundamental to everyday behavior and language use but can elicit more negative experiences than those elicited by task repetition, defined as affective costs. However, whether affective costs differ between switches to dominant and non-dominant tasks remains unclear. Examining this question can help determine whether affective costs reflect general transition demands alone or also direction-specific control processes. We addressed this issue in three progressively designed experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 combined task switching and affective priming paradigms to examine general task switching and language task switching, respectively, whereas Experiment 3 used event-related potentials (ERPs) to probe the electrophysiological underpinnings. Across all experiments, switching to non-dominant tasks produced greater affective costs than switching to dominant tasks, demonstrating affective cost asymmetry. Non-dominant switches elicited larger EPN and LPP amplitudes, suggesting that early attentional capture accompanies this asymmetry and that sustained emotional processing may contribute to its formation. Together, these findings suggest that affective costs may be jointly shaped by general transition demands and direction-specific control processes, supporting a direction-sensitive account of the affective consequences of task switching.