Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative ...judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conveyed by affect is crucial. Tests of the hypothesis find that affective influences can be made to disappear by changing the source to which the affect is attributed. In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognitions, leading to relational processing and item-specific processing, respectively. Positive affect is found to promote, and negative affect to inhibit, many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology.
The current research challenges the common view that positive affect and negative affect generate a broadened or narrowed attentional focus, respectively. Contrary to this view, two studies found ...that the link between affect and attentional focus as measured by a traditional flanker task (Study 1) and a modified flanker task (Study 2) reflects whatever focus is momentarily dominant. Further, in these studies when neither focus was dominant, the link between affect and attentional focus vanished. These results demonstrate that, like reward, positive affect and negative affect are not dedicated to a particular broadened or narrowed attentional scope but rather provide embodied information about the value of currently accessible attentional orientations. (Contains 2 figures and 2 footnotes.)
Does Emotion Directly Tune the Scope of Attention? Huntsinger, Jeffrey R.
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
08/2013, Letnik:
22, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Considerable research supports a fixed link between affect and attentional scope, with positive affect producing a focus on the forest, so to speak, and negative affect producing a focus on the ...trees. New research, however, reveals greater flexibility in this link than is commonly assumed. Research consistent with the idea that affective feelings merely influence whether people act on briefly dominant tendencies to focus broadly or narrowly is presented. Implications of these new findings for research on affect and attention are discussed.
Despite decades of research demonstrating a dedicated link between positive and negative affect and specific cognitive processes, not all research is consistent with this view. We present a new ...overarching theoretical account as an alternative-one that can simultaneously account for prior findings, generate new predictions, and encompass a wide range of phenomena. According to our proposed affect-as-cognitive-feedback account, affective reactions confer value on accessible information processing strategies (e.g., global vs. local processing) and other responses, goals, concepts, and thoughts that happen to be accessible at the time. This view underscores that the relationship between affect and cognition is not fixed but, instead, is highly malleable. That is, the relationship between affect and cognitive processing can be altered, and often reversed, by varying the mental context in which it is experienced. We present evidence that supports this account, along with implications for specific affective states and other subjective experiences.
Four experiments found that positive and negative affect dictated whether primed social categories and trait concepts led to assimilation or contrast. This influence was further found to be flexibly ...responsive to the momentary activation of a global or local focus. When a global focus was dominant, positive affect resulted in assimilation to primed traits and social categories, and negative affect resulted in contrast. But, when a local focus was dominant, the opposite pattern of assimilation and contrast as a consequence of positive and negative affect was observed. These results are consistent with the more general view that positive and negative affect signal the value of currently accessible response tendencies and are, therefore, flexibly responsive in their influence cognition to changing situations and mental contexts.
Considerable research shows that positive affect improves performance on creative tasks and negative affect improves performance on analytic tasks. The present research entertained the idea that ...affective feelings have flexible, rather than fixed, effects on cognitive performance. Consistent with the idea that positive and negative affect signal the value of accessible processing inclinations, the influence of affective feelings on performance on analytic or creative tasks was found to be flexibly responsive to the relative accessibility of different styles of processing (i.e., heuristic vs. systematic, global vs. local). When a global processing orientation was accessible happy participants generated more creative uses for a brick (Experiment 1), successfully solved more remote associates and insight problems (Experiment 2) and displayed broader categorization (Experiment 3) than those in sad moods. When a local processing orientation was accessible this pattern reversed. When a heuristic processing style was accessible happy participants were more likely to commit the conjunction fallacy (Experiment 3) and showed less pronounced anchoring effects (Experiment 4) than sad participants. When a systematic processing style was accessible this pattern reversed. Implications of these results for relevant affect-cognition models are discussed.
When affective experiences are inconsistent with activated evaluative concepts, people experience what is called affective incoherence; when affective experiences are consistent with activated ...evaluative concepts, people experience affective coherence. The present research asked whether incidental feelings of affective coherence and incoherence would regulate persuasion. Experiences of affective coherence and incoherence were predicted and found to influence the processing of persuasive messages when evoked prior to receipt of such messages (Experiments 1 and 3), and to influence the confidence with which thoughts generated by persuasive messages were held when evoked after presentation of such messages (Experiments 2 and 3). These results extend research on affective coherence and incoherence by showing that they exert a broader impact on cognitive activity than originally assumed.
Positive moods promote a focus on the forest (global focus) and negative moods, a focus on the trees (local focus). Is this well-established link fixed or variable? Does it reflect a direct influence ...of affect, as usually assumed, or is it frequently observed simply because a global perspective is often dominant? If affect serves as information about the value of currently accessible inclinations, and a global focus is generally the default perspective, then the global focus of positive affect and local focus of negative affect might be variable rather than fixed. Two experiments tested this hypothesis using different mood inductions, different tests of global-local focus, and different methods of inducing global and local perspectives. In each, we discovered that positive affect empowered whatever focus was momentarily dominant. Thus, whether individuals in happy moods saw the forest or the trees depended only on which of the two had been primed.
The goal of the current research was to subject to empirical examination the idea that the experience of anger would narrow the separation between implicit and explicit attitudes. Specifically, the ...tendency of anger to promote a sense of certainty in one's point of view was predicted to enhance the subjective validity of implicit attitudes, and that this validation of implicit attitudes by anger should increase implicit-explicit attitude correspondence. Consistent with these predictions, across three experiments, anger, as compared with neutral emotion (Experiments 1-3) and sad emotion (Experiments 1-2), was found to increase implicit-explicit attitude correspondence. Appraisals of certainty, but not individual control, mediated the effect of anger on implicit-explicit correspondence (Experiment 3). More generally, these results imply that anger may play an essential, but until now overlooked, role in directing the interplay between spontaneous and deliberative aspects of the self.
The goal of the current research was to subject the prediction that affect and trust in intuition would interactively shape implicit and explicit attitude correspondence to empirical assessment. In ...four experiments, either trust versus distrust in intuition was measured or manipulated and positive or negative moods were induced. The outcome of interest was correspondence between implicit and explicit academic attitudes (Experiments 1–2) and self-attitudes (Experiments 3–4). As predicted, affect served as information about chronically or temporarily accessible tendencies to trust or distrust their intuitions, with positive affect validating and negative affect invalidating such tendencies, which in turn shaped correspondence between implicit and explicit attitudes. By drawing together these two seemingly unrelated lines of research, these experiments provide important insights into the sometimes mysterious circumstances in which implicit attitudes are translated into explicit attitude reports.
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