##Project information What is the role of negative emotions in the origin and control of impulsive actions? A wide range of theories assume that an executive control monitors the actions and changes for example the response threshold when participants commit an error or a not desired outcome. For example, post-error slowing can be observed after committing an error which suggest that control processes adjust the performance in order to avoid subsequent errors. These errors induce a negative emotional state which might increase control processes. In contrast recently, researchers have found that participants speed up and initiate the next trial faster after a loss in a gambling task compared to a non-gamble baseline (Verbruggen, Chambers, Lawrence, & McLaren, 2017). ##Study/experiment information ###Research question: Participants often tend to slow down after committing an error (the so-called post-error slowing or PES). This behavioral phenomenon has been observed across many tasks and situations, and different theoretical accounts have been proposed for it (ranging from non-strategic attentional accounts to strategic cognitive control accounts, and a mixture of the two). However, the idea that individuals generally slow down after errors has been challenged by a series of findings, including from our labs. Specifically, we found across gambling studies that participants sped up after suboptimal outcomes (i.e., a loss) and initiated the next trial faster. These findings were inconsistent with the different theoretical accounts and question the idea that strategic adjustments are made after suboptimal outcomes. ###Experiment context: Code: CIA_NegEmo_StartInPES Where: online via prolific Credit-paid: Paid When: June 2020 - November 2021