How Does Anxiety Influence Analogical Mapping

How Does Anxiety Influence Analogical Mapping? V. Feldman (vfeldman@nbu.bg), P. Hristova (phristova@cogs.nbu.bg), B. Kokinov (bkokinov@nbu.bg) Central and East European Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology, New Bulgarian University, 21 Montevideo Street Sofia 1618, Bulgaria Abstract This paper presents an experimental study of the influence that the anxiety state may have on analogical mapping. Contrary to the well-known study of Tohill & Holyoak (2000), where the anxiety state impeded the analogical mapping, in this study participants in the anxiety state were significantly more inclined to produce a relational choice which is structurally consistent with the target, even though this alternative was more superficially dissimilar to the target. This result was obtained in a match-to-sample paradigm. The implications for the theory of how anxiety influences analogy-making are discussed and it is argued in favor of a more detailed and specific approach to studying the influence of anxiety on each component mechanism of analogy-making. Introduction Imagine that you are in a stressful situation and you feel anxious. Will that make you more or less successful in making good analogies? Some researchers believe that this emotional state will impede the analogy-making process (Tohill & Holyoak, 2000), while others (Richert, Whitehouse, Stewart, 2005) argue that you will make more or better analogies and that is why some religious rituals are deliberately designed to increase your anxiety. This controversy has motivated our study. The interplay between analogy and emotions has been studied from two opposite perspectives. Thagard and Shelley (2001) have argued that analogy may influence emotions, since people may use analogies to convey emotions to others like in the famous “Saddam is like Hitler” example (Spellman & Holyoak, 1992). This theoretical account was empirically supported in a recent study using simple proportional analogies (Bliznashki & Kokinov, 2009) which demonstrated that the negative or positive attitude towards an item in one domain can be transferred to the corresponding item in the other domain via the analogy and that this transfer is bidirectional. Several researchers explored the influence of emotions on the analogy-making process itself. Thus a series of studies was devoted to the influence of anxiety on analogy (Leon and Revelle, 1985; Keinan, 1987; Tohill and Holyoak, 2000). Why anxiety? The specific line of reasoning was that since it is well known that anxiety influences several cognitive processes, including working memory, one should expect also an influence on analogy. Thus Tohill and Holyoak (2000) provided evidence that state anxiety impedes the relational mapping and anxious participants prefer a more superficial attributive mapping. In their study anxiety was induced prior to the task by a serial subtraction task with a negative feedback. Participants were instructed to count aloud from 1000 backwards with a decrement of 13. One experimenter corrected participants’ mistakes and another – urged participants to count faster. Moreover, participants in the anxiety group were informed that they would have to repeat this task at the end of the experiment, i.e. after the analogy-making task. The influence of anxiety on analogy-making was tested with a cross-mapping task, where participants were asked to indicate which object, presented on one of the pictures “goes with” the object, pointed to by the experimenter. The trick was that the object pointed to in the first picture could “go with” two different objects in the second picture for two different reasons, i.e. with the object which is similar in its physical appearance to the pointed object or with the object that participates in similar relations as the pointed one. Based on Eysenk’s working memory restriction theory (Eysenk and Calvo, 1992) it was assumed that anxiety restricts working memory capacity which in turn impedes higher-order relational mapping needed for finding the relational mappings in the cross-mapping task used in this particular study. Correspondingly, anxious participants 1 indicated fewer relational mappings than non-anxious participants (Experiment 1) even in the presence of explicit instruction to find them (Experiment 2) (Tohill and Holyoak, 2000). It was also shown that state anxiety impedes the range of generated analogies to a given base problem (Feldman and Kokinov, 2009). Anxious participants generated a significantly smaller amount of drastically different analogies, i.e. most of their analogies belonged to one domain, while non-anxious participants were more flexible and generated analogies belonging to two or three different domains. In addition, non-anxious participants produced analogies with remote domains, while anxious ones produced mainly close analogies. At the same time no difference was found between the quality of mapping and convincingness of the analogies produced. So, no direct evidence was produced neither in favor, nor against the hypothesis that anxiety impedes analogical mapping. It was only demonstrated that anxiety impedes analogical retrieval (in an analogy generation task). On the other hand, it has been shown that people in negative mood are more likely to choose the relational match rather than the attribute matches compared to people in positive mood in a simple matching-to-sample task (Hristova, 2009). In this study both the relational and the attribute mappings were possible, but curiously people in negative mood prefer the former ones, i.e. they choose the state anxiety is used here, not trait anxiety.