The Implicit-Affect-Primes-Effort model

According to the Implicit-Affect-Primes-Effort model (Gendolla, 2012, 2015), implicitly processed affective cues can influence mental effort in the context of a cognitive challenge—

such as a performance context—through their impact on experienced difficulty. According to this model, affect primes automatically activate mental representations of specific affective states—called implicit affect. The IAPE model posits that people learn in everyday life that coping with challenges is easier in some affective states than in others—for instance, people have learnt through their personal history that coping is easier when they are in a happy mood than in a sad mood (e.g., De Burgo & Gendolla, 2009). That way ease and difficulty become features of the mental representations of different affective states which can become accessible by implicitly processed affective stimuli. The IAPE model predicts that the mere activation of affective states is sufficient to influence subjective demand and thus effort during a cognitive task.

More precisely, the IAPE model posits that rendering this affect knowledge accessible during task performance by implicitly processed affect primes leads to experiences of low or high task demand. Sadness and fear are associated with low coping potential and thus increased accessibility of the difficulty concept and in turn, increased subjective demand and

increased effort mobilization as long as success is possible and worthwhile. On the other hand, happiness and anger are posited to be associated with high coping potential leading to associate happiness and anger with performance ease, which will reduce the level of subjective demand and effort mobilization as well. The IAPE model predictions are depicted in Figure 5.

Figure 5. The basic assumptions of the IAPE model regarding a link between implicit affect and effort mobilization through its impact on subjective demand if no further context variables are manipulated. Figure from Gendolla (2012) and affect primes from the Averaged Karolinska Directed Faces (AKDEF) database (Lundqvist & Litton, 1998).

Several studies from our laboratory have found replicated evidence for the systematic impact of implicitly processed affect primes on effort mobilization in cognitive tasks. The experimental paradigm used to test the IAPE model was basically as follows for all of studies:

First, self-report measures for assessing current mood before exposure to the affect primes were administered. Then, participants’ cardiovascular activity at rest—habituation period—

was evaluated while they were watching a hedonically neutral documentary film (8 min). Next,

participants received task instructions and performed practice trials followed by the main task. During the task (5 min), participants were briefly exposed to emotional faces—affect primes. Each trial started with a fixation cross (1000 ms), followed by an emotional expression (27 ms) backwardly masked (133 ms). After the task, the same mood items as at the beginning were administered to control for possible affective prime effects on conscious fillings.

Moreover, participants rated subjective task difficulty and importance of successful completion of the task. To finish, a debriefing procedure was conducted in order to control whether participants were able to discriminate the content of the affect primes and the purpose of the study.

In support of the IAPE model predictions, Gendolla and Silvestrini (2011) have shown that exposure to briefly flashed sad faces during attention and short-term memory tasks led to stronger cardiovascular reactivity than exposure to happy or angry faces. The reason for this is that implicit sadness should increase the accessibility of the difficulty concept and in turn increase subjective demand and effort. On the other hand, implicit happiness and anger should increase the accessibility of the ease concept and thus reduce subjective demand and effort without eliciting conscious emotional feelings. Moreover, Chatelain and Gendolla (2015) completed the existing evidence for the basic assumptions of the IAPE model by demonstrating the predicted pattern for fear primes as well. Accordingly, exposition to fear and sad faces led to stronger effort mobilization than exposure to happy or angry faces.

In order to further investigate the IAPE model predictions, Silvestrini and Gendolla (2011a) tested the moderation of the affect primes’ impact on effort mobilization by objective task difficulty. The authors contrasted the effect of sadness and happiness primes with an ease and a difficult version of an attention task (Brickenkamp & Zillmer, 1998) and demonstrated that, when the task was easy, participants exposed to sadness primes showed stronger effort-related cardiovascular response than when they were exposed to happiness primes. On the other hand, when the task was difficult, participants exposed to happiness primes showed stronger cardiac reactivity whereas exposition to sadness primes led to disengagement.

Participants’ ratings of task demand further supported the idea that the affect primes and the information about objective task difficulty had an additive effect on subjective demand.

Freydefont, Gendolla, and Silvestrini (2012) showed this moderated effect of affect primes by objective task difficulty for implicit sadness as well. In this study, anger vs. sadness primes were briefly flashed in a short-term memory task that was objectively easy vs. difficult. As

predicted, anger primes had a similar effect as happiness primes, leading to weaker cardiac reactivity in the easy condition than in the difficult condition. Chatelain, Silvestrini, and Gendolla (2016), demonstrated that objective task difficulty also moderated the previously found impact of implicit fear on effort mobilization. Correspondingly, fear primes led to stronger cardiac reactivity in the easy condition but to weaker reactivity in the difficult condition due to disengagement because task appeared to be unjustified too difficult.

Beside objective task difficulty, affect primes’ impact on effort mobilization is also moderated by potential motivation—the maximally justified effort to attain a goal. In a study of Freydefont and Gendolla (2012), participants were primed with implicit anger vs. sadness during a difficult short-term memory task, while potential motivation was manipulated with monetary incentive. Participants either expected to gain low vs. high monetary incentive for correctly responding in at least 90% of the trials. As it was expected, according to the IAPE model (Gendolla, 2012, 2015) and its integration with the principles of the motivational intensity theory (Brehm & Self, 1989), they found the weakest reactivity in the sadness-prime/low-incentive condition, whereas the strongest reactivity in the sadness-prime/high-incentive condition with the anger-prime conditions falling in between these cells. This pattern was expected, because sadness primes should increase subjective demand. Thus, low incentive would not justify the subjectively high necessary effort, resulting in disengagement.

However, high incentive should boost effort mobilization by justifying the very high subjectively necessary effort. In the anger-prime cells, subjective demand should be lower because the task should appear difficult but still feasible making the increase of justified effort unnecessary. Chatelain and Gendolla (2016) investigated the impact of fear vs. anger primes in a difficult short-term memory task, while manipulating potential motivation with monetary incentive. As it was predicted, they found the weakest effort mobilization when incentive was low because subjectively high necessary effort was not justified, whereas the strongest effort mobilization when incentive was high because high incentive justified the subjectively high necessary effort in this condition. The anger-prime conditions fell again in between these cells.