Internal consistency and test-retest reliability of an affective task-switching paradigm
Affective flexibility refers to the flexible adaptation of behavior or thought given emotionally relevant stimuli, tasks, or contexts. Individual differences in affective flexibility have received increased interest in the past years, as they may relate to differences in the efficiency of emotion regulation and dealing with stress and adversity. One way to assess individual differences in affective flexibility is to assess the behavioral costs (in terms of increased response times or errors rates) of switching between affective and neutral tasks. However, behavioral task measures like switch costs can only be treated as trait-like individual difference characteristics if their psychometric quality has been established. To this end, we developed an affective task switching paradigm and report an analysis of the test-retest reliability (inter-session interval two weeks) as well as internal consistencies of affective switch costs. Our results show strong response time switch costs, both for switching from the neutral to the emotion task and vice versa, excellent internal consistency estimates for both measures from both sessions (Spearman-Brown corrected r = .92), and good test-retest reliabilities (ICC(2,1) of .78 and .82, respectively). Effect sizes and reliability estimates were substantially lower for switch costs calculated from error rates, which is consistent with previous literature discussing the psychometric properties of task-based cognitive measures. In conclusion, our results indicate that response time-based switch costs are well-suited as a measure of individual differences in the efficiency of affective flexibility, i.e., of dynamically adjusting behavior and thought in the context of emotional task demands.