New Psychology Research Indicates That General Cognitive Ability is Lined to Reduced Emotional Responding
New Psychology Research Indicates That General Cognitive Ability is Lined to Reduced Emotional Responding
According to new research published in the journal Intelligence, people with higher general cognitive ability display distinctive emotional response patterns characterized by slower and less intense peaks compared to those with lower cognitive ability. In other words, their emotional reactions start more slowly, don’t get as intense, and change more gradually.
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General cognitive ability, often referred to as “g-factor” or simply “intelligence,” encompasses a range of cognitive skills like reasoning, problem-solving, abstract thinking, and logical deduction. It is often assessed through standardized tests such as scholastic achievement tests like the SAT and ACT. General cognitive ability has been shown to strongly predict outcomes in educational settings (school performance) and the workplace.
The authors behind the new study were interested in understanding how individual differences in cognitive ability might extend to emotional responses and regulation. They aimed to investigate whether individuals with higher cognitive ability exhibit different patterns of emotional reactivity compared to those with lower cognitive ability.
“Being an intellectual by profession, I became curious about the effects of cognitive activity on the emotion system,” explained study author Michael D. Robinson, a professor of psychology at North Dakota State University. “We had also seen previous results suggesting that people with higher cognitive ability seemed less in tune with their affective reactions. We wanted to apply these ideas to a consideration of the momentary time course of emotional reactions (in the literature, these are called “emotion dynamics”).”
The researchers conducted two studies to explore how general cognitive ability might influence emotional processing.
Study 1 consisted of four separate experiments that primarily aimed to investigate the relationship between general cognitive ability and emotion dynamics in response to visual stimuli. Participants were recruited from a Midwestern University in the United States and were primarily undergraduate students seeking psychology class credit. The samples comprised 102, 151, 135, and 119 participants. The participants’ ages ranged from 15 to 34 years across the studies, with mean ages of approximately around 18.8 to 18.95 years.
The experimental setup involved participants completing a Dynamic Affect Reactivity Task (DART), which presented them with emotionally valence images and asked them to rate their affective reactions using a computer mouse continuously. The DART aimed to capture momentary patterns of affect change, including emotional onsets, peak intensities, and the velocity of affect change. The DART protocol was implemented across the four studies with slight variations in the number of stimuli, timing parameters, and image presentation.
Additionally, participants provided demographic information, completed additional measures, including personality traits and tendencies toward socially desirable responses, and reported their ACT scores. The ACT is a standardized test commonly used for college admissions in the United States. It assesses a student’s English, math, reading, and science knowledge and skills.
Source: New psychology research indicates that general cognitive ability is linked to reduced emotional responding (msn.com)
