Mood regulation as a shared basis for creativity and curiosity.

We extend the work of Ivancovsky et al. by proposing that in addition to novelty seeking, mood regulation goals - including enhancing positive mood and repairing negative mood - motivate both creativity and curiosity. Additionally, we discuss how the effects of mood on state of mind are context-dependent (not fixed), and how such flexibility may impact creativity and curiosity.

A Case for Neutrality: Why Neutral Affect is Critical for Advancing Affective Science.

For affective science to advance, researchers will need to develop a better understanding of neutral affect. At first glance, neutral affect may seem uninteresting to some affective scientists because the goal is to investigate hedonic experiences, not the presumed absence of them. This failure to fully consider and examine neutral affect, however, limits the field's potential for new discoveries. In this paper, I discuss how a greater understanding of neutral affect can inform researchers' views of valence, subjective well-being, and behavior. I define neutral affect and discuss evidence indicating that neutral affect is a commonly felt state that occurs independently of positive and negative affect. These data suggest that to understand the entirety of the affective landscape, researchers should move beyond traditional measures of valence and consider how positive, negative, and neutral affective states might inform their phenomenon of interest. I then illustrate how neutral affect might be a key, albeit complex, influence on subjective well-being. I also discuss how neutrality might be a fundamental and unique predictor of inaction. If affective scientists want to fully understand how feelings operate and function, it is essential that they explore the possibility that neutral affect might hold some of the essential clues needed to solve their affective puzzle.

Please and no, thank you: politeness norms alter compliance more when refusing than when making or acquiescing to a request.

Research indicates that using polite words does not enhance compliance. However, this work focuses on requests, not responses, which also are compliance-relevant behaviors that might depend on politeness. In 12 experiments (4 preregistered), we examined the role of politeness in compliance by manipulating the politeness of people's requests and responses. Polite requests increased compliance relative to what people wanted to do, d = .95. Adding a polite word to a request, however, did not significantly increase compliance, d = .11. In terms of responses, polite acceptances did not increase compliance, d = .08, but polite declines mattered. Respondents were sooner to decline a request if they could reply with "No, thank you" rather than a less polite "No," d = -.34. These data indicate that politeness norms shape compliance, but the key norm might not be whether people comply with polite others, but rather whether people can politely decline the request.

When a lack of passion intertwines with thought and action: Neutral feelings about COVID-19 are associated with U.S. presidential candidate attitudes and voting behavior.

Researchers might assume that neutrality does not shape thought and action because it signals that nothing in the environment needs attention, hence a person has little need to alter their behavior. However, feeling neutral about an issue might be consequential. The COVID-19 pandemic was a major issue during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We examined whether feeling neutral about COVID-19 was associated with attitudes about the top 2 presidential candidates (Trump vs. Biden) and behavior (i.e., whether a person voted and who they voted for). Data were collected at 2 critical time points: Study 1 was conducted immediately after the U.S. presidential election and Study 2 was conducted prior to the second Senate impeachment trial of Trump. Because feeling neutral about COVID-19 might indicate that a person views the issue as unworthy of attention, a perspective more aligned with Trump's approach, we hypothesized that feeling neutral about COVID-19 would be associated with more pro-Trump attitudes and behaviors. Even after accounting for other affects about COVID-19, in both studies, neutrality was associated with more favorable attitudes toward Trump, less favorable attitudes toward Biden, being less likely to vote, and if a person did vote, being more likely to vote for Trump. In Sudy 2, neutrality was associated with less support for impeaching Trump. Overall, in contrast to the view that neutral affect exerts little influence, neutrality can be critically intertwined with thought and action. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Does Neutral Affect Exist? How Challenging Three Beliefs About Neutral Affect Can Advance Affective Research.

Researchers interested in affect have often questioned the existence of neutral affective states. In this paper, we review and challenge three beliefs that researchers might hold about neutral affect. These beliefs are: (1) it is not possible to feel neutral because people are always feeling something, (2) neutrality is not an affective state because affect must be positively or negatively valenced, and (3) neutral affect is unimportant because it does not influence cognition or behavior. We review the reasons these beliefs might exist and provide empirical evidence that questions them. Specifically, we argue that neutral affect is a felt experience that provides important valence-relevant information, which influences cognition and behavior. By dispelling these beliefs about neutral affect, we hope to shine a light on the assumptions that researchers hold about the nature of affect and to provide novel theoretical and methodological perspectives that help advance our understanding of the affective landscape.

Differential effects of rejection and acceptance on feeling shocked, numb, and neutral.

According to the numbness hypothesis, rejection may not result in negative affect, but rather create several "nonvalenced" feelings, including feeling shocked, neutral, and numb. These feelings are hypothesized to lessen the extent to which people respond emotionally to various situations (emotional responsiveness). This project investigates (a) whether rejection produces these rarely assessed "nonvalenced" states, (b) to what extent these states are similar to one another and not negative, and (c) whether these states account for rejected individuals' lack of emotional responsiveness. In 3 experiments, participants experienced 3 different rejection manipulations. Participants reported their positive, negative, and "nonvalenced" feelings (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), and completed measures of emotional responsiveness (Experiments 2 and 3). A meta-analysis across the 3 experiments indicated that rejection increased negative affectivity, anger, hurt feelings, sadness, shock, and numbness, and decreased happiness, but did not significantly alter neutrality, positive affectivity, nor anxiety. In line with the view that these nonvalenced states are discriminable from each other, but in contrast with the numbness hypothesis, shock and numbness were positively correlated with negative affective states; whereas neutrality displayed weaker to null associations with them. Lastly, neither shock, neutrality, nor numbness mediated the link between rejection and emotional responding. In fact, increased negative and positive affect mediated the association between rejection and enhanced emotional responding. Overall, the data are inconsistent with the numbness hypothesis; albeit rejection produces shock and numbness, these 2 states are highly associated with increased negative affect and did not dampen emotional responsiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Scope of Our Affective Influences: When and How Naturally Occurring Positive, Negative, and Neutral Affects Alter Judgment.

To determine how naturally arising affect alters judgment, we examined whether (a) affective states exert a specific, rather than a general, influence on valenced-specific judgments; (b) neutral affect is associated with increased neutral judgments, independent of positive, negative, and ambivalent affects, and whether neutral judgments are associated with behavioral disengagement; and (c) the informational value of naturally arising states may be difficult to alter via salience and relevance manipulations. The results support several conclusions: (a) Affective states exerted a judgment-specific effect-positive affect was most strongly associated with positive judgments, negative affect with negative judgments, and neutral affect with neutral judgments. (b) Neutral affect influenced judgments, taking into account positive, negative, and ambivalent affects; and neutral judgments predicted behavioral disengagement. (c) With the exception of negative affect, naturally arising affective states typically influenced judgments regardless of their salience and relevance.

Happily putting the pieces together: a test of two explanations for the effects of mood on group-level information processing.

Research on mood and information processing reveals two explanations for how moods might influence decision-making in a group. Moods may alter group decision making because happy moods are more likely than sad moods to (a) increase people's reliance on accessible knowledge or (b) broaden people's focus so they can build on their knowledge. Consistent with the hypothesis that happy moods broaden-and-build on people's knowledge, across two experiments, happy moods promoted group performance more than sad moods because happy moods helped group members move beyond their initial preferences and focus broadly on the full range of information that each group member could provide. Experiment 2 built on these findings by demonstrating that the effects of mood on group performance were particularly strong when the critical information was uniquely, rather than commonly, distributed to group members. These experiments clarify the role of mood in group decision making and suggest that a differential focus on unique/critical information relative to common/non-critical information may be a key mechanism in understanding the effects of mood on group decision making.

Attending to the big picture: mood and global versus local processing of visual information.

Two experiments employed image-based tasks to test the hypothesis that happier moods promote a greater focus on the forest and sadder moods a greater focus on the trees. The hypothesis was based on the idea that in task situations, affective cues may be experienced as task-relevant information, which then influences global versus local attention. Using a serial-reproduction paradigm, Experiment 1 showed that individuals in sad moods were less likely than those in happier moods to use an accessible global concept to guide attempts to reproduce a drawing from memory. Experiment 2 investigated the same hypothesis by assessing the use of global and local attributes to classify geometricfigures. As predicted, individuals in sad moods were less likely than those in happier moods to classify figures on the basis of globalfeatures.