Post-Error Slowing is Modulated by Emotional Words

Few things are as instantly frustrating as realizing one made a mistake. Yet, it may be precisely this uncomfortable feeling what pushes us to pay attention, adjust, and do better next time. Affective theories of control argue that the negative or arousing quality of errors serves as feedback signal to respond with more caution. To directly test this idea, we combined a temporal flanker task—a paradigm well established for eliciting response conflict and error-related adjustments—with emotional words that systematically varied in affective context. We found that both arousal (emotional versus neutral) and valence (negative versus positive) of the emotional words modulate behavior following errors, consistent across a pre-registered experiment (N = 60) and a mega-analysis pooling this dataset with data from five other experiments employing a similar design (N = 352). Specifically, results showed increased post-error slowing following negative relative to positive words, supporting the idea that negative affect amplifies the aversive signal of errors. Results also indicated greater post-error slowing following high compared to low arousing words. However, this effect declined with time on task, suggesting that the stimulus-evoked arousal initially amplified an error-related orienting response, but habituated over time. Overall, the findings provide evidence for a functional integration of emotions and control, and we discuss potential mechanisms that may account for this relationship.