Affect and Cognition: Three Principles.

Affect and its object are separable, so that the same affective reaction can have different effects. Relevant principles from the affect-as-information approach include: (1) The impact of affect depends on implicit attributions -- what it appears to be about. (2) Affect is always taken to be about whatever is currently mentally accessible. Affective reactions can therefore serve as appraisals of objects of judgment or of initial thoughts and opinions about such objects, when they are more accessible. During problem solving, affect can serve as appraisals of thought style rather than thought content. Then, (3) positive and negative affect serve as go and stop signals for current inclinations. Affective influences on cognition are therefore not fixed, but malleable and context-dependent.

The myth of pure perception.

Firestone & Scholl (F&S) assume that pure perception is unaffected by cognition. This assumption is untenable for definitional, anatomical, and empirical reasons. They discount research showing nonoptical influences on visual perception, pointing out possible methodological "pitfalls." Results generated in multiple labs are immune to these "pitfalls," suggesting that perceptions of physical layout do indeed reflect bioenergetic resources.

The affective control of thought: malleable, not fixed.

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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Does stress enhance or impair memory consolidation?

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that stress-induced arousal enhances long-term memory for experiences associated with arousing events. Contrary to expectations, in each experiment exposure to a stressor (arm immersion in ice water) interfered with, rather than enhanced, long-term memory for associated material. Despite varying the stimuli (words, pictures), their emotional value (positive, negative, neutral), the time between learning and stress inductions (0 to 1 minute), and opportunities for post-learning rehearsal, each experiment produced a significant reversal of the hypothesised effect. That is, in each experiment, exposure to a stressor interfered with, rather than enhanced, long-term memory for associated material. We conclude that the relationship between stress and memory consolidation is more bounded than previously believed.

Psychological Construction in the OCC Model of Emotion.

This article presents six ideas about the construction of emotion: (a) Emotions are more readily distinguished by the situations they signify than by patterns of bodily responses; (b) emotions emerge from, rather than cause, emotional thoughts, feelings, and expressions; (c) the impact of emotions is constrained by the nature of the situations they represent; (d) in the OCC account (the model proposed by Ortony, Clore, and Collins in 1988), appraisals are psychological aspects of situations that distinguish one emotion from another, rather than triggers that elicit emotions; (e) analyses of the affective lexicon indicate that emotion words refer to internal mental states focused on affect; (f) the modularity of emotion, long sought in biology and behavior, exists as mental schemas for interpreting human experience in story, song, drama, and conversation.

The faintest speck of dirt: disgust enhances the detection of impurity.

Purity is commonly regarded as being physically embodied in the color white, with even trivial deviations from whiteness indicating a loss of purity. In three studies, we explored the implications of this "white = pure" association for disgust, an emotion that motivates the detection and avoidance of impurities that threaten purity and cleanliness. We hypothesized that disgust tunes perception to prioritize the light end of the light-dark spectrum, which results in a relative hypersensitivity to changes in lightness in this range. In studies 1 and 2, greater sensitivity to disgusting stimuli was associated with greater ability to make subtle gray-scale discriminations (e.g., detecting a faint gray stimulus against a white background) at the light end of the spectrum relative to ability to make subtle gray-scale discriminations at the dark end of the spectrum. In study 3, after viewing disgusting images, disgust-sensitive individuals demonstrated a heightened ability to detect deviations from white. These findings suggest that disgust not only motivates people to avoid impurities, but actually makes them better able to see them.

Affective facilitation and inhibition of cultural influences on reasoning.

Research in South Korea and the United States examined how affective states facilitate or inhibit culturally dominant styles of reasoning. According to the affect-as-information hypothesis, affective cues of mood influence judgements by serving as embodied information about the value of accessible inclinations and cognitions. Extending this line of research to culture, we hypothesised that positive affect should promote (and negative affect should inhibit) culturally normative reasoning. The results of two studies of causal reasoning supported this hypothesis. Positive and negative affect functioned like "go" and "stop" signals, respectively, for culturally typical reasoning styles. Thus, in happy (compared to sad) moods, Koreans engaged in more holistic reasoning, whereas Americans engaged in more analytic reasoning.

Sometimes happy people focus on the trees and sad people focus on the forest: context-dependent effects of mood in impression formation.

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods should maintain and unhappy moods should inhibit situationally dominant thinking styles. Participants completed an impression formation task that included categorical and behavioral information. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, no fixed relation between mood and processing emerged. Whether happy moods led to judgments reflecting category-level or behavior-level information depended on whether participants were led to focus on the their immediate psychological state (i.e., current affective experience; Studies 1 and 2) or physical environment (i.e., an unexpected odor; Study 3). Consistent with research on socially situated cognition, these results demonstrate that the same affective state can trigger entirely different thinking styles depending on the context.

Emotion and perception: the role of affective information.

Visual perception and emotion are traditionally considered separate domains of study. In this article, however, we review research showing them to be less separable than usually assumed. In fact, emotions routinely affect how and what we see. Fear, for example, can affect low-level visual processes, sad moods can alter susceptibility to visual illusions, and goal-directed desires can change the apparent size of goal-relevant objects. In addition, the layout of the physical environment, including the apparent steepness of a hill and the distance to the ground from a balcony can both be affected by emotional states. We propose that emotions provide embodied information about the costs and benefits of anticipated action, information that can be used automatically and immediately, circumventing the need for cogitating on the possible consequences of potential actions. Emotions thus provide a strong motivating influence on how the environment is perceived. WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 676-685 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.147 This article is categorized under: Psychology > Emotion and Motivation.

Affect influences false memories at encoding: evidence from recognition data.

Memory is susceptible to illusions in the form of false memories. Prior research found, however, that sad moods reduce false memories. The current experiment had two goals: (1) to determine whether affect influences retrieval processes, and (2) to determine whether affect influences the strength and the persistence of false memories. Happy or sad moods were induced either before or after learning word lists designed to produce false memories. Control groups did not experience a mood induction. We found that sad moods reduced false memories only when induced before learning. Signal detection analyses confirmed that sad moods induced prior to learning reduced activation of nonpresented critical lures suggesting that they came to mind less often. Affective states, however, did not influence retrieval effects. We conclude that negative affective states promote item-specific processing, which reduces false memories in a similar way as using an explicitly guided cognitive control strategy.

Psychology and the Rationality of Emotion.

Questions addressed by recent psychological research on emotion include questions about how thought shapes emotion and how emotion, in turn, shapes thought. Research on emotion and cognition paints a somewhat different picture than that seen in traditional discussions of passion and reason. This article reviews several aspects of this research, concentrating specifically on three views of rationality: Rationality as Process, Rationality as Product, and Rationality as Outcome.

Mood and global-local focus: priming a local focus reverses the link between mood and global-local processing.

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.

Affective regulation of stereotype activation: it's the (accessible) thought that counts.

Prior research has found that positive affect, compared to negative affect, increases stereotype activation. In four experiments the authors explore whether the link between affect and stereotype activation depends on the relative accessibility of stereotype-relevant thoughts and response tendencies. As well as manipulating mood, the authors measured or manipulated the accessibility of egalitarian response tendencies (Experiments 1 and 2) and counterstereotypic thoughts (Experiments 2 through 4). In the absence of such response tendencies and thoughts, people in positive moods displayed greater stereotype activation-consistent with past research. By contrast, in the presence of accessible egalitarian response tendencies or counterstereotypic thoughts, people in positive moods exhibited less stereotype activation than those in negative moods. Implications of these results for existing affect-cognition models are discussed.

The color of sin: white and black are perceptual symbols of moral purity and pollution.

Three studies examined automatic associations between words with moral and immoral meanings and the colors black and white. The speed of color naming in a Stroop task was faster when words in black concerned immorality (e.g., greed), rather than morality, and when words in white concerned morality (e.g., honesty), rather than immorality. In addition, priming immorality by having participants hand-copy an unethical statement speeded identification of words in the black font. Making immorality salient in this way also increased the moral Stroop effect among participants who had not previously shown it. In the final study, participants also rated consumer products. Moral meanings interfered with color naming most strongly among those participants who rated personal cleaning products as especially desirable. The moderation of the moral Stroop effect by individual differences in concerns about personal cleanliness suggests that ideas about purity and pollution are central to seeing morality in black and white.

Contagion without contact: anticipatory mood matching in response to affiliative motivation.

We investigated whether the desire to have a smooth and pleasant interaction with an anticipated interaction partner caused participants' moods to become similar to their imminent partners' moods. We found evidence of anticipatory mood matching when participants were motivated to affiliate with a partner through goal priming (Experiments 1 and 2) and outcome dependency (Experiment 3). Prior research has demonstrated mood contagion arising from actual social interaction but these experiments establish contagion without contact, an outcome evident regardless of whether mood was assessed via self-report (Experiments 1 through 3) or information-processing style (Experiment 3).

AFFECTIVE GUIDANCE OF INTELLIGENT AGENTS: How Emotion Controls Cognition.

Emotions and moods color cognition. In this article, we outline how emotions affect judgments and cognitive performance of human agents. We argue that affective influences are due, not to the affective reactions themselves, but to the information they carry about value, a potentially useful finding for creators of artificial agents. The kind of influence that occurs depends on the focus of the agent at the time. When making evaluative judgments, for example, agents may experience positive affect as a positive attitude toward a person or object. But when an agent focuses on a cognitive task, positive affect may act like performance feedback, with positive affect giving a green light to cognitive, relational processes. By contrast, negative affect tends to inhibit relational processing, resulting in a more perceptual, stimulus-specific processing. One result is that many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology occur readily in happy moods, but are inhibited in sad moods.

How the Object of Affect Guides its Impact.

In this article, we examine how affect influences judgment and thought, but also how thought transforms affect. The general thesis is that the nature and impact of affective reactions depends largely on their objects. We view affect as a representation of value, and its consequences as dependent on its object or what it is about. Within a review of relevant literature and a discussion of the nature of emotion, we focus on the role of the object of affect in governing both the nature of emotional reactions and the impact of affect and emotion on cognition and action. Although emotion is always about the here and now, the capacity for abstract thought means that the human here and now includes imagination as well as perception. Indeed, the hopes and fears that dominate human lives often involve things only imagined.

A Reply to Commentaries on "How the Object of Affect Guides Its Impact"

Commentaries focused on the emotional appraisal part of our article. Cunningham and Van Bavel argued for distinguishing core disgust from moral disgust, and we describe how the theory might accommodate their proposal. They also suggested that temporal and other comparisons could account for emotional variety. We concur, but see such comparisons as inherent in the different emotional objects. Winkielman emphasized unconscious affect, but we suggest its power flows from the absence of situational constraints on its meaning. He characterized our appraisal model as coldly cognitive rather than embodied, but the complaint is misdirected, as the model addresses emotional structure, not emotional process. Indeed, embodied accounts will still require structural accounts to determine why one emotion rather than another is elicited.