Your Smile, My Success: Faces Associated With Positive Emotion Facilitate Cognitive Flexibility and Stability

The emotional valence of surroundings affects behavior of the beholder. While previous research investigated the effect of task-relevant affect cues, many of the applications of emotion rely on more subliminal, task-irrelevant cues—for example, making rooms calming or bright colors to influence mood without having people explicitly say how happy the walls make them. Advertisers, too, are aware that irrelevant emotional cues influence decision-making, as in the case of associating their products with positively-valenced stimuli. Specifically, in the recent literature, emotional valence of task-relevant stimuli affects cognitive control. In an attempt at greater ecological validity, our research determines whether previous research showing facilitation of cognitive stability by negative emotion and cognitive flexibility by positive emotion holds for task-irrelevant emotion. In Experiment 1, participants responded to the apparent gender of a face ignoring a congruent or incongruent gender word. Always frowning actors, as opposed to always smiling actors, prompted a larger congruency effect, a hindrance to distractor inhibition, implying that positively-associated faces facilitated cognitive stability. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants switched between identifying age and gender. The smaller task switch cost, a marker of increased cognitive flexibility, for smiling faces shows further facilitation of cognitive control. Our results imply that faces with positive emotion can promote better cognitive stability and flexibility than faces with negative emotion, as demonstrated in a gender Stroop task (that requires maintaining a high level of cognitive control to reduce distractor interference) and a task-switching paradigm (that necessitates cognitive flexibility to switch between tasks). Our very ability to use controlled and flexible attention may depend on our emotional associations with stimuli in the environment.