Abstract

It is well-documented that emotional stimuli impact both the cognitive and motor aspects of “goal-directed” behavior. However, how emotional distractors impact motor performance remains unclear. This study aimed to characterize how movement quality was impacted during emotional distractors. We used a modified oddball paradigm and documented the performance of pure movement. Participants were designated to draw a triangle or a polygon, while an emotional stimulus was presented. Speed was assessed using reaction time and movement time. The quality and precision of movement were assessed by calculating the accuracy and root-mean-square error (RMSE). Compared to drawings of triangles, polygons had higher accuracy under negative stimuli, but lower RMSE under positive stimuli. The results indicate that distracting emotional stimuli impact different aspects of movement quality, with movement complexity influencing accuracy under negative distractors and precision under positive distractors. This study provides further evidence that movement precision is an important feature of emotional embodiment that should be incorporated in future studies.

Highlights

  • It is well-documented that emotional stimuli impact both the cognitive and motor aspects of “goaldirected” behavior (Beatty et al, 2016; Lu et al, 2017)

  • The post-hoc tests showed that there was no difference in the accuracy among the three emotional stimuli for the DP; while for the DT, the accuracy with a negative stimulus (0.783 ± 0.139) was significantly less than with a positive (0.833 ± 0.087, p = 0.012) or neutral stimulus (0.881 ± 0.084, p < 0.001)

  • There was no significant difference in the accuracy between DP and DT with a neutral or positive stimulus, while the difference was significant with a negative stimulus (p < 0.001)

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Summary

Introduction

It is well-documented that emotional stimuli impact both the cognitive and motor aspects of “goaldirected” behavior (Beatty et al, 2016; Lu et al, 2017). Emotional distraction is disruptive to goal-directed behavior. Processing these task-irrelevant emotional stimuli interferes with the performance of a cognitive performance, including working memory and visual searches (Dolcos et al, 2006; Pedale et al, 2019). When an individual is scared by a spider, it might impact their movement when they were moving a mug from one side of their body to the other This emotional effect would vary depending on the complexity of the moving task. We speculated that the effects of distracting emotions on motor performance could be modulated by the complexity of the movement

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