The study recruited 128 participants, evenly split between 64 men and 64 women, and assigned each of them to one of three experimental conditions. In the first, known as the pleasant affective induction, participants viewed a series of images chosen to evoke positive feelings. In the second, the neutral affective induction, the images were deliberately unremarkable. In the third, the unpleasant affective induction, the pictures were selected to stir negative emotions. The images came from the International Affective Picture System, a standardized and extensively validated library of photographs rated for emotional valence and arousal, which has been adapted for Spanish-speaking populations by several research groups over the past two decades. This standardization matters: it means the emotional pull of each image is not guesswork but a quantified property, allowing experimenters to induce affective states with reasonable confidence that participants across conditions experienced genuinely different moods.

To verify that the inductions actually worked, the researchers administered the Positive and Negative Affect Scale, or PANAS, before and after the experimental session. This widely used instrument asks participants to rate the extent to which they are currently experiencing a range of feelings, from enthusiastic and inspired to distressed and jittery, yielding separate scores for positive and negative affect. The results confirmed that the manipulations shifted participants’ emotional states in the expected directions, with pleasant images raising positive affect and unpleasant images raising negative affect. The authors are careful to note, however, that the before-and-after measurements reflect a compound effect: they capture not only the influence of the images themselves but also the experience of completing the decision-making task that sat between the two assessments. Disentangling those two contributions is a persistent challenge in this line of research, and the study’s design acknowledges it openly.

The heart of the experiment was the Iowa Gambling Task, a legendary instrument in the psychology of decision-making. Developed in the 1990s by Antoine Bechara, Antonio Damasio, and colleagues to study patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex, the task presents participants with four decks of cards. Each card draw yields a monetary gain or loss, but the decks differ in their underlying payoff structures. Two decks are advantageous over the long run, offering modest rewards with occasional small penalties, while the other two are disastrous, dangling large rewards that are ultimately swamped by punishing losses. Healthy participants gradually learn to favor the good decks, often before they can articulate why, a phenomenon that helped inspire Damasio’s famous somatic marker hypothesis: the idea that emotional signals from the body guide our choices, and that decision-making without emotion is not purer reasoning but impaired reasoning.

Because the task’s rules are never explained, performance on the Iowa Gambling Task is typically decomposed into two phases. Early draws are considered decisions under conditions of ambiguity, when participants cannot yet know the consequences of their choices. Later draws, once the payoff structure has implicitly been learned, are treated as decisions under risk. This distinction is more than a technicality. Research by Brand, Recknor, Grabenhorst, and Bechara has shown that the two phases correlate with different cognitive abilities, with decisions under risk engaging executive functions and explicit knowledge to a greater degree. The Spanish team analyzed performance across both phases, and their statistical power analyses indicated the design was sensitive enough to detect even moderate interaction effects, with power reaching 0.92 for the decisions-under-risk model.

The headline finding is strikingly asymmetric. Men who had been shown pleasant images scored significantly higher on the task than both women in the same pleasant condition and men in the neutral and unpleasant conditions. In other words, positive affect acted as a performance enhancer, but only for male participants. Women’s scores, by contrast, remained stable across all three affective inductions. Whatever mood the images stirred up, their decision-making on the gambling task did not budge. The researchers interpret this pattern as evidence that men are more susceptible to the facilitative influence of positive affect, which appears to improve their decision-making performance, while women exhibit greater behavioral stability, suggesting their decision-making processes are less vulnerable to affective fluctuations.

Why might this be? The authors situate their findings within a rich theoretical landscape. Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory holds that positive emotions expand the scope of attention and cognition, encouraging exploration and flexible thinking, which could plausibly help a participant learn the hidden structure of a gambling task faster. If that mechanism operates more strongly in men, perhaps due to differences in how emotions interact with reward circuitry, the advantage becomes explicable. Hormonal evidence offers another thread: studies have linked testosterone to risk-taking on the Iowa Gambling Task specifically, and neuroimaging work has connected testosterone to activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a region central to the somatic marker framework. Meanwhile, the stability observed in women resonates with a substantial literature on sex differences in emotion regulation. Research by McRae, Ochsner, and Gross has shown that men and women recruit overlapping but not identical neural machinery when reappraising negative images, and work on emotion regulation flexibility suggests women may deploy a broader repertoire of strategies with greater context sensitivity, potentially buffering their cognition from mood swings.

The new study also converges with, and helps to refine, a growing body of work on sex differences in the Iowa Gambling Task itself. A 2024 meta-analysis by Zanini, Picano, and Spitoni in Neuropsychology Review confirmed that men and women perform differently on the task as a rule, but the sources of that difference have remained contested. Earlier findings complicated the picture further: a 2019 study by Flores-Torres and colleagues found that induced humor improved women’s performance on the task while impairing men’s, the opposite direction of the present results for positive affect. Such contradictions underscore that affect is not a single lever. Different positive states, induced by different means, may act through different pathways, and the current study’s use of standardized affective images rather than humor provides one specific and reproducible route to the effect. What both studies share is the conclusion that sex cannot be treated as a statistical nuisance variable; it moderates how emotion and cognition interact.

The practical implications stretch well beyond the laboratory. Decision-making performance on tasks like the Iowa Gambling Task has been linked to real-world outcomes ranging from relapse in stimulant dependence to financial choices and clinical conditions such as major depressive disorder. If mood shifts translate into better or worse decisions differently across sexes, then contexts that manipulate emotion, from high-pressure workplaces to trading floors to therapeutic settings, may affect men’s and women’s choices in systematically different ways. The findings also carry methodological weight for researchers: experiments that induce moods before measuring cognition should analyze sex as a moderating variable, not merely control for it, or they risk averaging away effects that are real but opposite or absent in half their sample.

The authors are candid about their study’s limits. The sample was recruited by convenience rather than by an a priori power analysis, though subsequent sensitivity analyses showed the design could reliably detect effect sizes of a moderate magnitude. The PANAS measurements cannot fully separate the effect of the mood induction from the experience of the task itself, and the study examines a single moment in time rather than tracking how durable these mood effects might be. The dataset has been made publicly available in Mendeley Data, inviting other researchers to probe the patterns independently. Still, the core message stands with unusual clarity: emotion does not act on decision-making uniformly across people. A lift in spirits may open the doors of opportunity for some minds while leaving others untouched, and understanding why may require looking not just at the brain’s emotional circuitry, but at how that circuitry is wired differently across the population. In the ongoing effort to map the tangled relationship between feeling and thinking, sex has now earned its place as a critical variable, one that future models of affective decision-making ignore at their peril.

Subject of Research: Sex differences in how induced affective states influence decision-making performance on the Iowa Gambling Task

Article Title: Sex differences in the influence of affective state on decision-making

Article References: Martínez-Maldonado, A., Makeienko, M., Ramírez, E. S., & Martín-Azañedo, C. (2026). Sex differences in the influence of affective state on decision-making. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1603. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10152-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10152-2

Keywords: decision-making, Iowa Gambling Task, sex differences, affective state, emotion regulation, positive affect, PANAS, somatic marker hypothesis, prefrontal cortex, risk-taking, Current Psychology, mood induction

The study begins from a puzzle that has long divided the literature on anxiety and effort. Cognitively demanding tasks are widely understood to be perceived as costly, and this sense of cost can lead to effort avoidance, particularly in populations whose motivation is impaired. When researchers have examined where anxiety fits into this picture, however, the results have refused to line up neatly. Some studies suggest that anxiety raises the subjective price of mental effort, making people more likely to disengage. Others indicate that anxiety can actually motivate engagement, sharpening focus or driving people to invest more when the stakes feel high. Both patterns have empirical support, which means something important must be missing from the way the field has framed the question.

Sayalı and her colleagues proposed that the missing ingredient is the interaction between two different kinds of anxiety. State anxiety refers to the transient, situational feeling of tension and apprehension that rises and falls with circumstances. Trait anxiety, by contrast, describes a stable disposition to experience such states frequently and intensely. The team hypothesized that state anxiety would enhance task engagement as task difficulty increased, and that this effect would diminish in people with higher trait anxiety. In other words, a jolt of situational anxiety might push people to try harder on harder tasks, but only up to a point, and the strength of that push would depend on the anxious disposition a person brings to the laboratory with them.

To test this, the researchers ran two online experiments with independent samples. In both, they assessed participants’ self-reported anxiety and manipulated their affective state experimentally, allowing them to examine how induced changes in anxious mood altered engagement with tasks of varying difficulty. The design is notable for its scale and its ecological reach: rather than bringing volunteers into a physical laboratory, the team collected data online, which permitted a much larger second sample and a more diverse participant pool than many effort-based decision studies typically achieve.

The results of the first experiment, conducted with 107 participants, came as a surprise. Contrary to the hypothesis, participants with low trait anxiety reported reduced task engagement when they were under high state anxiety, but this effect appeared only for easy tasks. When the tasks were easy, a spike in situational anxiety seemed to push low-trait-anxious individuals away from the task, prompting disengagement precisely where the effort required was smallest. Meanwhile, this pattern was attenuated in participants with higher trait anxiety, whose engagement was less sensitive to the state anxiety manipulation. The predicted interaction between state and trait anxiety was there, but its direction and its boundary conditions were not what the team expected.

Experiment 2, with a substantially larger sample of 572 participants, put the finding to a replication test. The key interaction partially replicated: the negative effect of state anxiety on engagement was again attenuated in individuals with higher trait anxiety. But there was an important difference in scope. In the second experiment, the negative effect of state anxiety on engagement was observed across all task difficulty levels rather than being restricted to easy tasks. The core signature held, namely that higher trait anxiety blunted the impact of state anxiety on disengagement, yet the first experiment’s restriction of the effect to easy tasks did not generalize to the larger sample.

What does it mean that trait anxiety appears to buffer, or at least dampen, the disengaging effect of state anxiety? The authors draw a provocative conclusion from their data: trait anxiety may reflect a reduced impact of state anxiety on disengagement. On this reading, people high in trait anxiety are not simply people who experience more anxious states; they are people whose engagement with cognitive work is less perturbed by those states when they arise. Someone who lives with a chronically anxious disposition may have, in effect, a decoupling between the transient feeling of anxiety and the motivational machinery that decides whether a task is worth continuing. For low-trait individuals, by contrast, a surge of state anxiety arrives as an unfamiliar signal that can knock them off even a lightly demanding task.

This framing helps explain why the earlier literature seemed contradictory. Studies that measured only state anxiety, or only trait anxiety, or that examined tasks of a single difficulty level, would each capture a different slice of what is fundamentally an interactive system. A study of anxious states in a low-trait sample might find that anxiety increases effort cost and promotes avoidance. A study in a high-trait sample might find that anxiety motivates engagement, because the state manipulation simply has less traction on disengagement in those individuals. Task difficulty adds a further layer, with the first experiment suggesting the disengagement effect may be most visible when the task demands little and the perceived cost-benefit balance is otherwise favorable.

The work also speaks to a broader theoretical conversation about cognitive effort as something the brain evaluates like a cost, weighing the demands of a task against its value. Effort avoidance is a well-documented phenomenon, and it is often amplified in populations with motivational impairments. Anxiety has been a candidate modulator of this cost calculus, but the present findings suggest it cannot be treated as a single dial. The same anxious state can carry different motivational meaning depending on the dispositional context in which it occurs, and the same trait disposition can alter how strongly moment-to-moment mood steers behavior. Any model of effort-based decision making that treats anxiety as a unitary input is likely to be incomplete.

There are, of course, limits to what these two experiments can establish. The manipulations were delivered online, the engagement measures were self-reported, and the partial replication indicates that some details of the phenomenon, such as the role of task difficulty, remain unsettled. The authors are transparent that their hypothesis was not confirmed as stated, and the divergence between the two experiments on the difficulty question is itself informative, showing that the easy-task specificity seen in the smaller sample was not robust. Still, the consistency of the trait anxiety attenuation across both samples gives the central finding considerable weight, and the large second sample lends confidence that the interaction is not a statistical fluke.

The implications reach beyond the laboratory. If momentary anxiety differentially disrupts engagement depending on a person’s trait anxiety, then interventions aimed at keeping anxious people on task may need to be tailored to disposition rather than applied uniformly. Educational settings, workplaces, and clinical contexts all involve cognitively demanding work performed under emotionally loaded conditions, and the assumption that anxiety always undermines effort may lead well-intentioned support strategies astray for some individuals. For the researchers themselves, the study is a reminder of why hypothesis-driven science matters even when the hypothesis fails: the team predicted an interaction, found one with a different shape, and in doing so uncovered a candidate redefinition of trait anxiety, not as the tendency to feel anxious more often, but as the tendency for those feelings to matter less when it comes time to decide whether to keep working.

Subject of Research: The interaction between state and trait anxiety in cognitive effort evaluation and task engagement

Article Title: Anxiety state-related task disengagement varies with trait anxiety

Article References: Sayalı, C., Heling, E., & Cools, R. (2026). Anxiety state-related task disengagement varies with trait anxiety. Communications Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00545-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44271-026-00545-1

Keywords: anxiety, trait anxiety, state anxiety, cognitive effort, task engagement, effort avoidance, motivation, cognitive control, psychology, decision making, affective state, task difficulty

The pilot study was conducted during the summer of 2023 at two very different UK institutions: the small Fenn Bell Conservation Project in Kent, where 76 visitors observed a pair of Asian small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinereus), and the much larger Twycross Zoo in the Midlands, where 155 visitors studied two Rothschild giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi). Participants were recruited through posters with QR codes at the enclosures and asked to watch the animals for two minutes before completing an online questionnaire built on a pre-defined ethogram, a structured list of species-typical behaviours including positive, negative and neutral welfare indicators. The questionnaire also invited optional sections on how the animals seemed to be feeling, what animal welfare meant to the visitors themselves, and how they had found the citizen science experience.

Technically, the design was deliberately cautious. Because visitor observations could not be paired with simultaneous video observations from the same individual, and because the two data sources differed in duration, the researchers did not treat the comparison as a validation exercise. Instead, they used systematically coded CCTV footage as a reference dataset, applying instantaneous scan sampling with one-minute intervals between 11am and 3pm, and summarising both datasets as hourly and daily presence or absence records. At the daily level, both data sources captured walking or running in the otters on all study days and chewing the cud, eating and drinking, standing and locomotion in the giraffe, while the largest discrepancies appeared for infrequent or harder-to-identify behaviours such as grooming and social interactions.

The psychological results proved equally instructive. Visitors scored the animals on eight qualitative terms, including content, relaxed, agitated, frustrated, comfortable, wary, confident and distressed, and then gave an overall welfare rating from 1 to 10. Spearman’s rank correlations revealed a coherent pattern at both sites: welfare scores rose alongside positively valenced adjectives such as content, comfortable, confident and lively or engaged, and fell alongside negative terms such as frustrated, agitated and wary. For the otters, the correlation with contentment was particularly strong, while for the giraffe even wary and agitated scores tracked downward with welfare ratings. Although participants were told in advance which terms indicated positive or negative welfare, the authors note these exploratory associations provide preliminary evidence of construct validity in public assessments of animal affective states.

Perhaps the most encouraging finding concerned how visitors conceptualised welfare itself. Asked to define or describe animal welfare, most respondents produced answers that mapped cleanly onto the Five Domains model, the contemporary framework covering nutrition, environment, health, behaviour and mental state. At Fenn Bell, 86 percent referenced physiological welfare, 64 percent mental state and 41 percent behaviour; at Twycross the figures were 93, 54 and 24 percent respectively. Fifteen otter visitors and thirteen giraffe visitors touched on all three broad themes, offering definitions such as meeting an animal’s emotional, physical, mental and health needs as naturally as possible through diet, environment and enrichment. The researchers observed, however, that visitors leaned towards input-based measures such as food and space rather than output-based measures such as behaviour, and that behavioural domains were the hardest for the public to articulate.

Where visitors learned their welfare concepts also carried a clear message for the zoo sector. Zoos themselves ranked among the most frequently cited sources of knowledge, with 45 of the Twycross respondents attributing their understanding to that zoo alone, ahead of television documentaries and educational facilities. The authors interpret this as evidence that educational material provided by zoos is being positively received, and they recommend that zoos place greater emphasis on positive behavioural interactions within their welfare science communication. Given that negative public perceptions of welfare can erode trust in zoos and reduce willingness to engage in conservation efforts, effective communication of welfare science is not a luxury but a strategic necessity for modern institutions.

Engagement levels were striking. At Twycross, where a researcher was present at the enclosure to encourage participation, an average of 27 visitors per day completed the survey; at the smaller Fenn Bell site, where participation was self-directed, the mean was 3.4 per day. Across both sites, 93 to 95 percent of respondents said they would take part in a similar activity again, and 79 percent overall described the process as rewarding. Crucially, the majority of participants were infrequent zoo visitors, with the largest group attending less than once a year, suggesting that citizen science could reach beyond the committed membership base of season-pass holders. Most participants also expressed confidence in their ability to identify the behaviours on the ethogram, which the researchers attribute to the deliberately simple design of the observation task.

The study is candid about the limitations of visitor-generated behavioural data. The otters were out of sight of the cameras for 67 percent of video observations, and both visitors and cameras faced blind spots and varying viewing opportunities. Behaviours that were infrequent or complex, such as positive social interactions in the otters or grooming in the giraffe, showed the greatest divergence between the two datasets. The authors stress that their analyses are exploratory descriptions of behavioural occurrence rather than measures of observer accuracy or reliability, and they call for future studies using time-matched designs, cameras positioned to replicate the visitor’s view, and controlled comparisons with trained observers to enable formal inter-rater reliability assessment. Training, structured prompts and simplified measures such as active versus inactive states are proposed as ways to improve data quality.

Beyond the data, the researchers argue, the process itself may deliver benefits that matter to the mission of the modern zoo. Watching animals closely is known to foster empathy and a sense of connectedness, visiting zoos has been linked to improved human wellbeing, and citizen science participation has been associated with gains in scientific understanding. Longer dwell times at exhibits may not automatically translate into learning, but they can deepen the visitor experience and support lasting connections with nature. As biodiversity losses reach unprecedented levels and conservation science becomes an ever more urgent discipline, the authors conclude that engaging zoo visitors in behavioural citizen science deserves far wider consideration, both as a source of data on how animals spend their opening hours and as a pathway to a more empathetic, conservation-minded public.

The study sits within a broader rethinking of what zoos are for. Traditional frameworks described zoos through four pillars of conservation, education, research and recreation, but more recent models have proposed adding a fifth pillar of wellbeing that applies to both animals and people, alongside a ‘sphere of influence’ recognising that zoos operate at local, national and global scales. Within that framing, communicating welfare science to the public is not peripheral but central, since public trust depends heavily on whether visitors believe the animals they are watching are thriving.

Citizen science itself is usually understood as having two distinct strands. In one, the priority is collecting usable data at scale, as in large wildlife monitoring programmes; in the other, the priority is engaging citizens, with data quality a secondary concern. The zoo project deliberately straddled both, and the tension between them explains much of the authors’ caution about the behavioural records. Previous zoo-based citizen science in the UK, such as campaigns encouraging visitors to log native species seen on site, has built ecological awareness but stopped short of fostering connections with the zoo’s own animals, a gap this study sought to address.

The choice of study species was pragmatic rather than incidental. Asian small-clawed otters and Rothschild giraffe were selected because they were consistently visible from public viewing areas, attracted longer dwell times, and could accommodate camera installations allowing simultaneous remote observation. Behavioural research is already the dominant form of zoo science, valued for capturing real-time information about animal experiences at low cost, yet large-scale data collection can be impractical for busy animal care staff. Distributing observation across millions of annual visitors offers one possible solution, provided questions of validity and reliability are resolved.

Earlier work also suggests the timing matters: visitors report more positive experiences and stronger feelings of connection after watching animals, particularly active ones, meaning the observation task itself may amplify the very engagement the projects aim to cultivate.

Subject of Research: Citizen science engagement of zoo visitors in animal behaviour and welfare assessment

Article Title: Exploring citizen science as a tool for engaging zoo visitors with animal welfare

Article References: Stephens, D., Wright, D., Rowden, L., Frost, N., Carter, A., Ward, S. J., & Williams, E. (2026). Exploring citizen science as a tool for engaging zoo visitors with animal welfare. Discover Animals, 3(1), Article 85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44338-026-00247-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44338-026-00247-2

Keywords: citizen science, zoos, animal welfare, animal behaviour, Five Domains model, ethogram, visitor engagement, giraffe, Asian small-clawed otter, conservation education, public engagement, affective state