Abstract
Recent studies in cognitive psychology show evidence of the influence of affective content in statements relating to performance in deductive reasoning tasks. This study investigates the influence of evaluative content related to the education and professional practice of psychologists on the performance of psychology students in tasks involving categorical syllogisms. It also aims to investigate if there is a relationship between the academic integration of these students, who were evaluated by means of the “Questionário de Vivências Acadêmicas reduzido” (QVA-r), and their sensitivity to this content in logical tasks. Participants were 480 psychology students from Brazilian public universities. They were randomly assigned three evaluative content situations: neutral, appreciative and depreciative. Results suggest that depreciative content has a negative effect on the performance of female students. No relevant relationships were found between academic integration (personal, interpersonal, career, studies and institutional) and the number of valid replies to the syllogisms, which points to the effect per se of this content. The results are relevant in an academic context, since the problem-situations experienced by college students may contain evaluative content that can have an influence on deductive reasoning and other processes of a different nature.
Keywords:
Reasoning; problem-solving; affective content