ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2015
Syllogisms delivered in an angry voice lead to improved performance and engagement of a different neural system compared to neutral voice.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural Correlates of Causal Inferences in Discourse Understanding and Logical Problem-Solving: A Meta-Analysis Study.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- The impact of moral injury-related content on reasoning and its neural correlates: Data from the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF).Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Polygenic risk for autism spectrum disorder associates with anger recognition in a neurodevelopment-focused phenome-wide scan of unaffected youths from a population-based cohort.PLoS genetics · 2020Article
- Left Amygdala and Putamen Activation Modulate Emotion Driven Decisions in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite the fact that most real-world reasoning occurs in some emotional context, very little is known about the underlying behavioral and neural implications of such context. To further understand the role of emotional context in logical reasoning we scanned 15 participants with fMRI while they engaged in logical reasoning about neutral syllogisms presented through the auditory channel in a sad, angry, or neutral tone of voice. Exposure to angry voice led to improved reasoning performance compared to exposure to sad and neutral voice. A likely explanation for this effect is that exposure to expressions of anger increases selective attention toward the relevant features of target stimuli, in this case the reasoning task. Supporting this interpretation, reasoning in the context of angry voice was accompanied by activation in the superior frontal gyrus-a region known to be associated with selective attention. Our findings contribute to a greater understanding of the neural processes that underlie reasoning in an emotional context by demonstrating that two emotional contexts, despite being of the same (negative) valence, have different effects on reasoning.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.