Monday’s seminars welcome Patrick Lemaire, Professor Déphy’s team (https://lemairepatrick13.wixsite.com/psychology/publications)

When: May 11st-  11 am

Where: Salle des VoĂ»tes 

Welcoming coffee 15’ minutes before.


Title : Lifes-span changes in emotion-cognition interactions

Astract:  Do emotions influence cognition? Yes. Does cognition influence emotions? Yes. To what extent and when have been investigated over the past 20 years, such that we now know the conditions under which emotions and cognition interact. For example, emotions affect cognitive performance 

  • when it is relevant to the task (e.g., Veterans from Vietnam war have better memory for narratives of war than for other emotionally negative narratives; victims of rape have better memory for narratives of rape relative to memory for other negatively valenced narrratives), 
  • when emotions have beneficial effects (e.g., memory for emotionally negative movies is better than for emotionally neutral movies;  we are more creative under postive emotions but less good in arithmetic problem solving) or deleterious effects (e.g., memory under fear or sadness is poorer). 
  • Effects of emotions on cognition are modulated by task, stimuli, and situation characteristics, as well as by the type of emotions. 
  • The same parameters modulate effects of cognition on emotional experiences.
  • Participants’ characteristics appear to be a powerful moderator of emotion-cognition interactions, such that for example, we are more and more influenced by positive emotions (and less and less by negative emotions) as we age during adulthood (the reverse holds during childhood). 

Unknown are the mechanisms underlying emotion-cognition interactions. In this talk, I will make a proposal on how to best investigate emotion-cognition interactions to further our understanding of these mechanisms. I will then present data that we collected to test this proposal. The findings show how an appropriate conceptual and methodological framework of emotion-cognition interactions greatly advances our knowledge regarding mutual influences of emotions and cognition as well as how such influence changes with participants’ characteristics like adults’ and children’s age.