EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF EMOTIONAL MANIFESTATIONS DURING A PROBLEM-SOLVING ACTIVITY

摘要

The aim of the present research was first to identify the manifestations of emotion during a problem-solving activity and then to integrate, in a foreseeable future, the emotional component of the cognitive activity into the Constraints Model, a problem-solving model developed by Richard (Richard, Poitrenaud & Tijus, 1993; Richard & Zamani, 2003). Nineteen female participants were asked to solve the well-known five-disk version of the Tower of Hanoi problem. Two classical measures of emotion were recorded during the problem-solving activity: facial expressions and spontaneous skin conductance activity. The analysis of data shows that both facial and physiological manifestations do not randomly appear in the course of the problem-solving but in some cognitive significant events like the impasse situations in which the subject have to cope with actions sequence that are not relevant in sub-goal achievement. Those results suggest that emotion plays a crucial role in decision-making mechanism and that one of its functional aspects is to regulate the system.