Emotion and cognition integration – The effect of anger on working memory

Emotions have always captured the attention of philosophy, psychology, and recently neuroscience. Throughout history, emotions were considered a separate entity from thinking and cognition. It was mostly related to irrationality. Descartes claimed emotions were part of the soul, based on his dualism theory. However, the period started with James-Lange changed this perspective. Together with cognitivist views, it has been understood that emotions have a significant influence on cognitive functions. This focus on the relationship between emotions and cognition led researchers to pay attention interaction concept. Neuroscience studies took this concept and strengthened it with integration theory. It has been shown in many studies that emotions have a significant effect on cognitive functions. In this study, I have given studies to show how this integration with perception, decision making, memory, attention, and working memory studies. Visual working memory and attention were mostly used to show this influence. However, findings of emotional influences on cognitive functions showed inconsistency. We wanted to see how one specific emotion, anger, affects visual working memory with the regulated version of the Recency-Probe Paradigm. We used memory sets with violent and neutral items and gave a recognition task to participants. Anger is a relatively less studied emotion compared to others due to its difficulty to measure and induce. We expected that anger-induced participants' reaction times and accuracy rates should differentiate from participants without induction. Even though there was a slight difference, we found no significant difference between the reaction times of the control and experimental group. In terms of accuracy also did not show a significant difference. However, there was a significant difference between reaction times to violent and neutral items inside the groups. We also found that results show inconsistency for the emotional effect on cognitive functions.