Effects of irrelevant emotionally negative stimuli on strategy selection and eye-fixation correlates

This study investigated the influence of negative emotions on strategy selection using eye movements. Participants were asked to find the better estimates of two consecutive two-digit multiplication problems (e.g. 86 × 21) in each trial. They could choose between a rounding-down (i.e. doing 80 × 20 = 1600) or a rounding-up (i.e. doing 90 × 30 = 2700) strategy on each problem. The first problem in a trial appeared on emotionally neutral pictures and the second problem on neutral or negative pictures. Negative pictures increased repetitions of strategies across successive problems, even when the better strategy differed across problems. Eye movements indicated that participants spent less time on unit digits and longer on decade digits under emotionally negative pictures compared to neutral pictures. This suggests that they spent less time efficiently encode crucial problem features for better strategy selection. These findings shed important lights on how attentional capture by negative emotions influences strategy selection during arithmetic problem-solving.