Sca 7 Affective (And Motivational) Influences On Social Cognition

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Gratitude

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- Positive emotion linked to situations in which one perceives that another person has intentionally given (or attempted to give) one something of value

- Being grateful is also part of religious traditions/rituals

- Keeping a gratitude diary seems to significantly increase well-being in a longitudinal design (compared to a control, Emmons & McCullough, 2003)

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Gratitude and helping
Research Example: Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006

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- Interaction of two individuals (confederate & actual participant) during study

Conditions:
1) Gratitude: confederate helped participant to solve a technical problem
2) Amusement: video from Saturday Night Live
3) Control

- DV: willingness of the actual participant to help confederate with another study (and how long participant helped)

- Interesting additional finding (Study 3)
-> Making participants aware of the fact that gratitude drives their behavior eliminates the effect
-> Correction process -> Dual process models!!

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Helping behavior and other affective states

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Front 4

Mood congruence effects

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- State-dependency: recall is improved when individuals are in the same mood during encoding and retrieval

- Traditional view (Bower, 1987)
-> Mood congruent recall of information
-> Logic is derived from traditional associative network models
-> Affective states supposedly function as central nodes in such networks

- Mood-congruent recall of information: material with an affective tone matching the current mood are more likely to be recalled
-> However, only weak support for mood congruent recall hypothesis (a number of additional factors need to be in place to obtain such findings)

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Affective influences on Emotion Perception
How do a perceiver’s emotions influence the detection of other people’s facial expression of emotion?Niedenthal et al. (2000)

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- Affect induction:
-> Happy vs. sad vs. neutral movies clips at the beginning of the study
-> Happy vs. sad music during the actual experimental task (no music in control condition)

- Experimental task:
-> Decisions when an initial affective facial expression disappears from a face in series of morphed photographs.

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Reliable mood congruence effects

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- Bargh & Tota (1988): Depressives have negative constructs with regard to the self and those are chronically accessible. They do not necessarily judge others more negatively, though


- Seligman (1975). Depressives have a chronic pessimistic explanatory style. Negative events are explained
a) Personally – Failures are about me! (me versus external causes)
b) Permanence- Failures are always about me!! (permanent versus flexible)
c) Pervasiveness – I am always too stupid to do right things, I mean, really all things. (global versus specific)!!!

-> Therapy: change explanatory style; give back feeling of internal control (learned helplessness)

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The affect infusion model

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Front 8

How does mood influence cognition?

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- When information is processed heuristically:
Affect as information

- When information is processed systematically:
Selective attention/encoding/retrieval/association

- No influence is expected a previous judgment is directly available, or when a motivation to pursue a goal exists

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Affective influences can be very subtle

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- Mere exposure research shows that familiarity with an object increases liking
-> This familiarity can be artificially created
-> Standard paradigm: Affective Priming task

- Ease of retrieval/processing
Social cognition versus Social Cognition (in fancy letters)

- Perceptual fluency

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Affective Priming

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Underlying idea behind “ease effect”

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- Subjective experiences (ease, difficulty, fluency) have a strong impact on how we evaluate stimuli (metacognitive experiences)

- Difficult to read/hear/understand messages tend to be evaluated as less important/less true/less valuable

- Easy to read/hear/understand messages tend to be evaluated as more important/more/more valuabe

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Mood (affect) as information

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- Happy people might in general be more likely to rely on their mood when making judgments or evaluations

- Subtle affective cues might also be experimentally induced, or the reliance on them can be manipulated

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Mood (affect) as information
Research Example: Schwarz & Clore (1983)

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- Participants were approached by phone and asked about their mood.

Four conditions:
1) Half of Pps were approached on a rainy day.
2) Half of Pps were approached on a sunny day.
A) Half of Pps were not asked about the weather.
B) Half of Pps were asked about the weather.
-> 2 (Day: rainy vs sunny) x 2 (Weather question: yes vs no)

- Link between the weather and judgments of general life satisfaction (as an indicator of happiness) does not seem as straightforward as researchers initially thought.

- Lots of methodological complexities

- Lucas et al. (2013): Large 5 year study with a huge representative sample from all 50 American states (more than 1 million participants)
-> No effect between weather and satisfaction with life

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Do different negative affective states have the same impact on social judgment?

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Comparison of anger and sadness
-> Anger = associated with immediate threat, disruptive for systematic thinking
-> Sadness = more prone to detailed (systematic processing)

- Mood as information would suggest no difference
- Emotion theorists would expect a difference between the two

Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer (1994):
- Manipulation of angry, sad, or neutral affect
-> Vividly recalling an episode from the own life (12 min)
-> Next participants read a scenario regarding a legal decision (alleged misconduct) in which a stereotypic name was either mentioned or not mentioned

- Idea behind the study:
-> If participants rely on the stereotypic name a key cue than they should attribute more guilt to the person.
-> This would be seen as indicator of more heuristic proessing

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Trustworthiness of the source
Bodenhausen et al., 1994, Study 3

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- Trustworthiness of the source of a message can also be seen as the basis for a quick heuristic response

- Mood induction (angry, sad, neutral)

- Evaluation of an essay advocating banning meat from the university residence hall menu

- Manipulation of source:
1) Student Government League (high in trustworthiness)
2) Student Vegetarian League (low in trustworthiness)

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Affect and cognition - separate systems?

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- The key question underlying many dual systems models

- Early research suggested indeed that affective reactions are primary, basic, inescapable, irrevocable, implicating the self, difficult to vebalize etc.
-> Several lines of research support this claim

- However:
-> Critique from appraisal researchers
-> Objections based on newer findings on automatic (rapid) cognitions

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New proposel about affect and cognition by J. Russell (2003)

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- Core affect as a neurophysiological state that is consciously accessible as a non-reflective feeling

- Mood: prolonged core affect

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Action phase model

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Cognitive aspects of goal pursuit

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- Two distinct phases:
1)Motivational phase linked to deliberative mind-set

2)Volitional phase linked to an implementation mind-set


- The distinct phases are linked to different cognitions

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Mindsets for planning behaviour

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Goal-shielding

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- After a goal has been selected it inhibits the accessibility of alternative goals

- Typical paradigm (e.g. Shah, Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2002):
- Activation of a focal goal through priming procedure (+ control primes)

- Measurement of accessibility of goal-related constructs through a modified lexical decision task:
-> Goal-word (focal or competing goal) or control word
-> Target word (compatible with focal goal, or with competing goals)

- Idea: focal goal would inhibit the accessibility of competing goal words but not of control words

- Response times for trials where prime was a different goal or a control word
Competing goals are inhibited

- Effect was driven by participants who showed a high goal commitment

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Goal versus implementation intentions

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- Simply having the intention to pursue a goal is oftentimes not sufficient to show the corresponding behavior

- Implementation intentions are much better predictors of actual behavior
Implementation intentions: specific if-then plans

- Important distinction in all areas of psychology that focus on behavioral change (i.e. health psychology)

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Goals can be primed

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- Goal priming follows a different pattern than other form of priming (e.g. Voodoo-doll study, Denzler et al., 2009

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Goal activation and the Zeigarnik effect

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- Goal activation increases as long as the goal has not been competed
- Completion not only leads to a decrease in goal activation but also a temporal inhibition of goal related concepts

- Applications of these findings
-> Aggressive thoughts: Catharsis?
-> Regrets about past events: a result of continued goal activation?

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Attitudes that contribute to a high attitude-behaviour consistency

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