Affective states and task performance in naive and prompted children

Using a mental imagery procedure, positive or negative emotions were experimentally induced in 5- and 10-year-old children. In the case of the younger children, the induced emotions influenced their performance on a subsequent memory task, i.e. happy children did better than sad ones. Ten-year-olds, however, seemed to perform at an optimal level in both emotional circumstances. It was argued that these older children, with the help of their firmly established general knowledge about the possible effects of emotion on performance, spontaneously countered the effects of the emotion induction procedure. Activation of the young children’s latent knowledge of these effects, simply by questioning them on this point beforehand, produced, even in their case, an optimal performance in both the happy and sad conditions.