Short Research Note Effect of Emotions in a Lexical Decision Task A Diffusion Model Analysis Hélène Maire 1 , Renaud Brochard 2 , Jean-Luc Kop 1 , Vivien Dioux 3 , and Daniel Zagar 1 1 InterPsy Laboratory (EA 4432), University of Lorraine, France 2 CSGA Laboratory (UMR CNRS/INRA 6265), University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté, France 3 SPMS Laboratory, University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté, France DOI 10.1024/1421-0185/a000193 Abstract. This study measured the effect of emotional states on lexical decision task performance and investigated which underlying compo- nents (physiological, attentional orienting, executive, lexical, and/or strategic) are affected. We did this by assessing participants’ performance on a lexical decision task, which they completed before and after an emotional state induction task. The sequence effect, usually produced when participants repeat a task, was significantly smaller in participants who had received one of the three emotion inductions (happiness, sadness, embarrassment) than in control group participants (neutral induction). Using the diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) to resolve the data into meaningful parameters that correspond to specific psychological components, we found that emotion induction only modulated the pa- rameter reflecting the physiological and/or attentional orienting components, whereas the executive, lexical, and strategic components were not altered. These results suggest that emotional states have an impact on the low-level mechanisms underlying mental chronometric tasks. Keywords: lexical decision task, diffusion model, emotions, sequence effect Emotions are affective states accompanied by certain cogni- tions, physiological changes, and behaviors (Yik, Russell, & Steiger, 2011), and that influence cognitive processing (e.g., see Clore & Huntsinger, 2007; Schwarz, 2012). Although previous research examined a variety of mental chronometric tasks (e.g., pronunciation tasks, Niedenthal, Halberstadt, & Setterlund, 1997; evaluation and categorization tasks, Storbeck & Clore, 2008), studies involving the manipulation of emotions through priming or induction have tended to focus on lexical decision tasks (LDTs). Most of these studies have reported a congruency effect between the emotional valence of a presented word and the valence of the emotional context. For example, reaction times (RTs) are generally shorter when words related to happi- ness are presented visually to happy participants or when words related to sadness are presented to sad participants (e.g., Ferraro, King, Ronning, Pekarski, & Risan, 2003). However, some studies failed to find such congruency effects (e.g., Piercey & Rioux, 2008). Others found a congruency effect only in spe- cific cases, for example, with positive words, but not with neg- ative words (Challis & Krane, 1988), or only with similarly val- enced words belonging to the same semantic category (e.g., Niedenthal et al., 1997). In addition, previous research hinted at a more global influence of emotion on LDT performance that goes beyond these congruency effects. Little attention has been given to whether emotional state has a general effect on RTs for emotionally neutral words in LDTs. A number of studies measured lexical-decision RTs for participants in “natural” emotional states such as depression (Siegle, Granholm, Ingram, & Matt, 2001) or anxiety (Hill & Kemp-Wheeler, 1989; White, Ratcliff, Vasey, & McKoon, 2010a, 2010b) and found no main effect of emotion on RTs. However, very few studies in which emotional state was ma- nipulated addressed this issue even indirectly, and those that did address this issue produced conflicting results. For exam- ple, when using an LDT with neutral words only, Corson (2002; 2006, Experiment 1) reported that participants who had been induced to feel sad or happy had slower RTs than those in a neutral state, whereas Sereno, Scott, Yao, Thaden, and O’Donnell (2015) reported the opposite pattern, that is, control participants had slower RTs. Other studies found no significant differences in the RTs of participants in happy ver- sus neutral states (Hänze & Hesse, 1993; Hänze & Meyer, 1998; Moriya, Takeichi, & Nittono, 2013) or between partic- ipants who had been induced to feel sad, angry, or frightened (Corson, 2006, Experiment 2). However, because these stud- ies were not designed to investigate the effects of emotions per se on processing, they did not examine this aspect of their results in depth. In addition, they generally lack a baseline measure, as participants did not perform an LDT prior to the emotion induction. However, these contrasting results do not mean that emo- tional states have no impact on information processing in LDTs: They may affect one or more specific components of processing even if this is not apparent in global RTs. Hence, the main goal of the present study was to ascertain whether emotions influence performance on an LDT involving emotion- ally neutral material. In a second stage of our analysis, we ex- amined our data in light of the diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) to determine which processing components are likely to be af- fected by emotional states. © 2017 Hogrefe Swiss Journal of Psychology (2017), 76 (2), 71–79 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.