**The present project aims to test whether and how two different emotions influence planning and execution of goal-directed actions**
The exact way in which emotions impact on action planning is largely unknown. In fact, although current results support the notion that emotional and motor processes are strongly interrelated, the empirical findings are often contradictory. In my view, the most important confounding factor of most studies is that the emotional content of the stimuli is incidental with respect to the task demands.
In order to directly compare equivalent decision-making processes underlying actions generation cued by emotional stimuli of different valence, I devised a new version of an emotional go/no-go task in which participants were required to move when emotional face stimuli with the same arousal values but with opposite valences were presented, and to withhold their responses on neutral faces. In addition, to control for the effects of stimulus features on motor readiness, I ran a control task where the same face stimuli were shown, but this time participants were requested to move according to the facial gender disregarding the emotional values.
***I found that just when the emotional stimuli were task-relevant an interference effect occurred***, as participants were slower and less accurate when the go-signal was a fearful face than when it was a happy face. These findings suggest that fearful facial stimuli capture and hold attention more strongly than faces expressing happiness, deeply interfering with reaching arm planning and execution.
I MUST apologize as at present I have only 10 of the raw data files out of 80 due to a crash of a computer on which most data were stored. I am currently looking for any backup copy. In any case, we have already replicated the behavioral result and we are recording the fMRI of healthy subjects. In addition, we are just running a new behavioral experiment in which both happy and fear conditions are included. As soon as possible all the new data will be made available in this platform. Again I deeply apologize.
