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How do people answer the question "How do you feel?" In the present work, participants were given 2 tasks in each trial. They first indicated whether a picture made them feel pleasant (or was supposed to be felt as pleasant, in another group), and then made gender decisions regarding faces. Evidence accumulation modeling showed that (a) reporting genuine feeling is qualitatively different from reporting the supposed feeling; (b) reporting one's feeling is remarkably similar to gender decisions; and (c) evidence regarding negative feelings accumulates more quickly than in positive feelings. These results support the assumption that when asked, participants report genuine as opposed to supposed feelings and strengthen the analogy between feeling reports and perceptual decisions.

In popular belief, emotions are regarded as deeply subjective and thus as lacking truth value. Is this reflected at the behavioral or brain level? This work compared counter-normative emotion reports with perceptual-decision errors. Participants (university students; N = 29, 16, 40, and 60 in Experiments 1–4, respectively) were given trials comprising two tasks and were asked to (a) report their pleasant or unpleasant feelings in response to emotion-invoking pictures (emotion report) and (b) indicate the gender of faces (perceptual decision). Focusing on classical error markers, we found that the results of both tasks indicated (a) post-error slowing, (b) speed/accuracy trade-offs, (c) a heavier right tail of the reaction time distribution for errors or counter-normative responses relative to correct or normative responses, and (d) inconclusive evidence for error-related negativity in electroencephalograms. These results suggest that at both the behavioral and the brain levels, the experience of reporting counter-normative emotions is remarkably similar to that accompanying perceptual-decision errors.

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