Emotional working memory load selectively increases negativity bias

Cognitive resources are needed for successful executive functioning; when resources are limited due to competing demands, task performance is impaired. Although some tasks are accomplished with relatively few resources (e.g., judging trustworthiness and emotion in others), others are more complex. Specifically, in the face of emotional ambiguity (i.e., stimuli that do not convey a clear positive or negative meaning, such as a surprised facial expression), our decisions to approach or avoid appear to rely on the availability of top-down regulatory resources to overcome an initial negativity bias. Cognition-emotion interaction theories (e.g., dual competition) posit that emotion and executive processing rely on shared resources, suggesting that competing demands would hamper these regulatory responses towards emotional ambiguity. Here, we employed a 2x2 design to investigate the effects of load (low versus high) and domain (non-emotional vs. emotional) on evaluations of surprised faces. As predicted, there were domain-specific effects, such that categorizations of surprise were more negative for emotional than non-emotional loads. Consistent with prior work, low load (regardless of domain; i.e., domain-general) was associated with greater response competition on trials resulting in a positive categorization, showing that positive categorizations are characterized by an initial negativity. This effect was diminished under high load. These results lend insight into the resources supporting a positive valence bias by demonstrating that emotion-specific regulatory resources are important for overriding the initial negativity in response to emotional ambiguity. However, both domain-general and domain-specific loads impact the underlying processes.