Emotion and cognition integration – The effect of anger on working memory

Emotions have always captured attention of philosophy, psychology and recently neuroscience. Through the history, emotions were considered as separate entity from thinking and cognition. It was mostly related with irrationality. Descartes claimed emotions were part of soul, based on his dualism theory. However, the period started with James-Lange changed this perspective. Together with cognitivist views, it has been understood that emotions have significant influence on cognitive functions. This focus towards relation between emotions and cognition led researchers to pay attention interaction concept. Neuroscience studies took this concept and strengthened with integration theory. It has been shown in many studies that emotions have significant effect on cognitive functions. In this study I have given studies to show how this integration with perception, decision making, memory, attention and working memory studies. Visual working memory and attention were mostly used to show this influence. However, findings of emotion influences on cognitive functions showed inconsistency. We wanted to see how one specific emotion, anger, affect visual working memory with regulated version of Recency-Probe Paradigm. We used memory sets with violent and neutral items and gave a recognition task to participants. Anger is relatively less studied emotion compared to others due to its difficult to measure and induce. We expected that anger-induced participants’ reaction times and accuracy rates should differentiate with participants without induction. Even though there were slightly difference, we found no significant difference between reaction times of control and experimental group. In terms of accuracy also did not show significant difference. However, there was significant difference between reaction times to violent and neutral items inside the groups. We also found that results show inconsistency for emotion effect to cognitive functions.