How Disgust and Fear Influence Strategic Aspects of Arithmetic Performance in Children and Adolescents

This study is the first to combine a strategy perspective with a typological approach to emotions to determine how disgust and fear influence arithmetic performance in children and adolescents. In Experiment 1, 10-11-year-old (N = 32) and 14-15-year-old (N = 32) participants were asked to choose between two rounding strategies, whereas in Experiment 2, a different sample of 10-11-year-old (N = 32) and 14-15-year-old (N = 32) participants executed instructed rounding strategies to estimate the sums of two-digit addition problems following either emotionally neutral or negative (disgust- or fear-inducing) pictures. Negative emotions led participants to select the better strategy less frequently and different patterns of associations between problem characteristics and better-strategy selection were observed across emotion conditions: whereas selection was associated with the difference of deviations, a diagnostic strategy-selection cue, in the neutral condition, it was associated with problem-magnitude information in the negative-emotion condition. Negative emotions also slowed strategy execution, with participants being slower under disgust than under fear. Moreover, disgust reduced response accuracy relative to the neutral condition in 10-11-year-old children but not in 14-15-year-old adolescents. In contrast, the effects of negative emotions on better-strategy selection and strategy execution latencies did not significantly differ between age groups. These findings have important implications for furthering our understanding of how negative emotions influence arithmetic performance in particular, and cognitive performance in general, both in children and adolescents.