Poster 4

Effects of Emotional Priming on Performance in Physical and Mental Tasks

Sumaiya Muhammad, Serene Rahman, and Savion Simon

In order to reach our maximum potential, it helps to know what conditions we can control to improve our performance. As such, this study explores whether priming positive emotions can improve performance in both physical and mental tasks, forming a baseline in a field of research with few other studies currently available. We sampled 57 undergraduates from Ramapo College of New Jersey, and primed them with either a positive or negative emotion-inducing survey before having them do both a mirror drawing task and a word search. We found no significant results to support our research hypothesis that priming positive emotions can improve performance in either a physical and/or emotional task, but this may be a result of the specific nature of priming, as well as when and how the emotions were evoked. Future studies should aim to either widen the scope of tasks observed, or the method in which emotions are invoked.

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