The Effect of Positive vs. Negative Emotion on Multitasking

Abstract

Emotions have been shown to affect cognition and performance on a multitude of individual tasks; however, people increasingly choose (or are required) to perform multiple tasks simultaneously (multitask¹). How, then, do emotions affect multitasking performance? This question was assessed in an experiment wherein participants first multitasked in a Baseline phase, watched a video designed to induce a positive, neutral, or negative emotion, and then resumed multitasking for two additional phases. The results indicated that both the positive and neutral video conditions were superior to the negative condition; however, a marginally significant interaction indicated that the neutral condition was equivalent to negative at the final multitasking phase. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and applied aspects of these findings.