How Negative Emotions Influence Arithmetic Performance: A Magnetoencephalography Study

Abstract In this study, we used magnetoencephalography and adopted a strategy approach to determine how negative emotions influence arithmetic performance. Forty-eight participants had to find estimates of two-digit multiplication problems, while their strategies were monitored for each problem. Problems were displayed superimposed on emotionally negative or neutral pictures. Behavioral results showed that negative emotions had a deleterious influence on arithmetic performance, especially while executing the harder strategy. Magnetoencephalography data showed decreased activations under negative emotions in brain regions known to specifically underlie arithmetic neural processes, such as left parietal regions (i.e., intraparietal sulcus, superior parietal lobule, precuneus), and no effects of emotions in regions involved in domain-general mechanisms, such as prefrontal regions. Interestingly, decreased activations occurred very early after the onset of the arithmetic problems (i.e., 100–250 msec) and were not found in later time windows. These results suggest that negative emotions impair the early domain-specific processes (such as encoding arithmetic problems), possibly as a result of competing resources between emotional and arithmetic processing. These findings have important implications for further understanding of neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying effects of negative emotions in arithmetic and for further investigating how emotions influence cognition.