The influence of positive affect on sensitivity to important omissions

It is surprisingly difficult to notice when important information is missing (omission neglect) and yet, social media, advertisements, and other forms of communication typically only include one-sided information or positive attributes and omit opposing views or negative attributes. Even though it is surprisingly difficult to overcome this natural tendency, there are circumstances when decision makers are more sensitive to omissions. Understanding how and when decision makers can overcome this omission neglect tendency can be helpful to improve decision making in many situations. This paper investigates positive affect as a potential factor that can elicit sensitivity to omissions and alert decision makers to the need for additional information when important information is, in fact, missing. Four experiments use a consumer product choice situation to show that when decision makers are making an important decision, positive affect increases the likelihood that they will report a greater desire for additional product information (experiments 3 and 4) and temper their purchase interest in the target product. These results are shown using inference (experiments 1, 2, and 3) and by explicitly comparing a product choice with full and partial information (experiment 4). The results are discussed in terms of omission neglect literature as well as implications of the results for understanding the role of positive affect in information processing, judgment, and decision-making. These findings have implications for policy makers, marketers and others who are interested in message processing.

Synergistic effects of disgust and anger on amygdala activation while recalling memories of interpersonal stress: An fMRI study

Occurrence of an unpleasant interpersonal event in daily life may cause an individual to experience unpleasant emotions and recall memories regarding it. These emotions, manifesting in daily social interactions, are often complex and mixed. In the laboratory, autobiographical recall is frequently used to induce emotions; however, it often involves recalling memories associated with a specific discrete emotion (e.g., sadness). To examine the neural activity of emotions similar to real-life experiences, we examined neural activity while recalling memories of stressful interpersonal events in daily life, without specifying a discrete emotion. Of the 23 university students recruited, 21 were analyzed and asked to freely recall memories and answer a series of questions on a monitor concerning their recalled memories while their neural activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Amygdala activity increased while receiving the instructions, followed by a decrease in activity. This indicates that the participants' arousal and vigilance initially increased in response to a novel stimulus, and then decreased by habituation. Disgust and anger, which frequently occur as negative interpersonal feelings, were most prominently produced with strong associations with each other. More importantly, activation of the right amygdala while responding to questions regarding the recalled memories was positively correlated with disgust or anger only when not controlling for anger or disgust, respectively. These results indicate that responding to questions facilitated the generation of a mixed emotional response compared to during free recall alone. Furthermore, disgust and anger as a mixed emotion can synergistically activate amygdala.

Are Biasing Factors Idiosyncratic to Measures? A Comparison of Interpersonal Conflict, Organizational Constraints, and Workload

Widespread concern has been raised about the possibility of potential biasing factors influencing the measurement of organizational variables and distorting inferences and conclusions reached about them. Recent research calls for a measure-centric approach in which every measure is independently evaluated to assess what factor(s) may uniquely bias it. This paper examines three popular stressor measures from this perspective. Across three studies, we examine factors that may bias three popular measures of job stressors: The Interpersonal Conflict at Work Scale (ICAWS), the Organizational Constraints Scale (OCS), and the Quantitative Workload Inventory (QWI). The first study used a two-wave design to survey 276 MTurk workers to assess the three stressor scales, four strains, and five measures of potential bias sources: hostile attribution bias, negative affectivity, mood, neutral objects satisfaction, and social desirability. The second study used an experimental design with 439 MTurk workers who were randomly assigned to a positive, negative, or no mood induction condition to assess effects on means of the three stressor measures and their correlations with strains. The third study surveyed 161 employee-supervisor dyads to explore the convergence of results involving the three stressor measures across sources. Based on several forms of evidence we conclude that potential biasing factors affect the three stressor measures differently, supporting the merits of a measure centric approach, even among measures in the same domain.

The effect of mood on food versus non-food interference among females who are high and low on emotional eating

BACKGROUND

Emotional eating refers to overeating triggered by emotional experiences and may cause significant psychological distress and health problems. Thus, it is important to better understand its underlying mechanisms. The study examined if the ability to ignore task-irrelevant information, namely, interference control, is modulated by mood and exposure to food stimuli among females who are high and low on emotional eating.

METHOD

The study's sample included 80 women who were high (N = 40) or low (N = 40) on an emotional eating scale. Participants were divided to a negative or neutral mood induction group. Following the mood induction, they completed a food-flanker task that allowed assessing attentional interference caused by food and non-food stimuli separately.

RESULTS

The low emotional eating group had significantly greater food compared to non-food interference, suggesting difficulty at ignoring food stimuli while attending a neutral target. In the high emotional eating group, there was no difference between food and non-food interference. However, higher levels of emotional eating predicted lower levels of food interference.

CONCLUSION

The pattern of results suggests a food-avoidance attentional tendency among those with higher levels of emotional eating. The mood manipulation did not influence food-related interference in either group. The lack of an effect of mood on food-related interference questions the impact of negative emotions on basic attentional processes among individuals with emotional eating.

The effect of anger on intentionality bias

More than a decade of research on emotions has demonstrated the role of affect in social judgments. Emotions influence the way individuals make inferences about others' behavior. Building on these previous findings, the present research investigates the effects of anger and sadness on the attribution of intentionality. In Experiment 1, angry, sad, or neutral participants read a series of sentences describing simple actions and had to indicate whether the actions were done intentionally or accidentally. Results showed that anger significantly predicted the proportion of intentional judgment when participants were asked to interpret ambiguous sentences. In Experiment 2, the effect of anger on intentionality was replicated. Angry participants endorsed more intentional explanations than neutral participants. This finding helps explain how anger increases the inclination to make hostile inferences.

Emotions Induced by Recalling Memories About Interpersonal Stress

The emotions that people experience in day-to-day social situations are often mixed emotions. Although autobiographical recall is useful as an emotion induction procedure, it often involves recalling memories associated with a specific discrete emotion (e.g., sadness). However, real-life emotions occur freely and spontaneously, without such constraints. To understand real-life emotions, the present study examined characteristics of emotions that were elicited by recalling “stressful interpersonal events in daily life” without the targeted evocation of a specific discrete emotion. Assuming generation of mixed and complex emotions, emotional groups with relatively strong correlation of multiple emotions according to surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness were expected. Seventy-two university students (35 males, mean age: 19.69 ± 1.91 years; 37 females, 20.03 ± 2.42) participated in the study. In the emotion induction procedure, participants freely recalled memories as per the instructions on a monitor, and then responded silently to a series of questions concerning any one recalled incident. Assessments of emotional states using emotion scales and another item indicated that validated emotional changes had occurred during the task. Inter-correlations between six emotions demonstrated an emotional group consisting of disgust and anger, which frequently occur as negative interpersonal feelings, and that of fear and sadness. This indicated generation of mixed and complex emotions as experienced in social life. Future studies concerning relationships between these emotions and other factors, including neurophysiological responses, may facilitate further understanding about relationships between mental and physiological processes occurring in daily life.

Order effects in the recall of autobiographical memories: evidence for an organisation along temporal and emotional features

Investigating the recall process of autobiographical memories (AMs) and, particularly, the order in which AMs are recalled has the potential to shed light on the organisation of autobiographical memory. However, research on order effects in the recall of AMs is relatively rare. Moreover, to date, no study addressed the question of where emotion fits into the organisation. The present study aimed to close this gap by examining whether emotional valence serves as one organising principle. Data come from 117 older adults (M = 74.11; SD = 7.06) who reported up to 39 AMs. The use of a multivariate multilevel model with autoregressive effects allows us to analyse the order effect within one person, as well as how the order effect differs between persons. The results replicated a temporal first-order effect that has been shown in previous studies and moreover, demonstrated a temporal second-order effect. Furthermore, our results indicated an emotional first-order effect that was even stronger than the temporal first-order effect and an emotional second-order effect. In addition, both first-order effects differed reliably between persons. Thus, the present study emphasises the need for considering emotion in current theoretical formulations of autobiographical memory and also of considering individual differences in the order of AMs recalled.

Pupil Constrictions and Their Associations With Increased Negative Affect During Responses to Recalled Memories of Interpersonal Stress

Abstract. Pupil diameter change is indicative of emotional processing. Most previous findings regarding pupillary response and emotion have reported that the pupil enlarges in response to the presentation of emotional perceptual stimuli (e.g., visual images) within several seconds. It is considered that such stimuli activate the sympathetic nervous system, leading to pupil dilation. In order to examine the effects of emotions similar to daily emotional experiences of mood, the present study examined pupil diameter changes and their relationships with subjective emotional changes while recalling a topic of stressful interpersonal events in daily life. The data of 20 university students (11 males, Mage = 20.36 ± 2.38 years; 9 females, Mage = 22.33 ± 3.57) were analyzed. In the experimental task, participants were instructed to recall their memories concerning the topic through instructions and questions presented on a monitor, which proceeded at their own pace, through a key press. Subsequently, after baseline and instruction periods, participants were instructed to freely recall their memories. They were then asked to respond silently to a series of questions concerning the freely recalled memories. In the analysis, we compared the pupil diameters between these different periods and observed that pupil diameters significantly decreased during the response period relative to the free recall or baseline periods. Furthermore, pupil constrictions during the response period were negatively correlated with increases in negative affect scale scores. Pupil constriction, which is indicative of decreased arousal level and parasympathetic activation, was presumably caused by multiple factors including less cognitive difficulty and a relatively long experimental task period. As the result of a less tonic mode in the response period, the attention of participants might be more successfully focused on ongoing tasks, which might lead to optimal performance in recalling memories, possibly leading to correlations between pupil diameter and negative emotional changes.

Mood and the Regulation of Mental Abstraction

Individuals can apply different processing strategies to deal with situations they encounter. One central question in social-cognition research refers to the factors that determine reliance on different processing strategies. Parting from a functional perspective, which holds that processing strategies need to be adjusted to the requirements of the situation, we argue that individuals’ mood carries information about the benign versus problematic nature of the situation and thus that mood can regulate cognitive processing. Focusing on mental abstraction, we propose that positive mood contributes to a processing style characterized by reliance on prior knowledge in the form of general knowledge structures, whereas negative mood elicits a processing style characterized by attention to details and consideration of new situation-specific information.

Effect of Emotions in a Lexical Decision Task

Abstract. This study measured the effect of emotional states on lexical decision task performance and investigated which underlying components (physiological, attentional orienting, executive, lexical, and/or strategic) are affected. We did this by assessing participants’ performance on a lexical decision task, which they completed before and after an emotional state induction task. The sequence effect, usually produced when participants repeat a task, was significantly smaller in participants who had received one of the three emotion inductions (happiness, sadness, embarrassment) than in control group participants (neutral induction). Using the diffusion model ( Ratcliff, 1978 ) to resolve the data into meaningful parameters that correspond to specific psychological components, we found that emotion induction only modulated the parameter reflecting the physiological and/or attentional orienting components, whereas the executive, lexical, and strategic components were not altered. These results suggest that emotional states have an impact on the low-level mechanisms underlying mental chronometric tasks.

Positive Mood and the Perception of Variability Within and Between Groups

Three experiments investigated the effects of positive mood on perceptions of variability within and between groups. Participants formed impressions of two different and highly variable groups under a neutral or positive mood. When participants expected to learn about both groups, positive mood increased perceived intergroup similarity but did not affect perceived intragroup variability. In contrast, when participants expected to learn about only one group, judgments of intergroup and intragroup similarity were both affected by mood. Mood and the intergroup context influenced the nature and degree of information processing and resultant judgments of variability in social groups.

Effects of the Activation of Affective Information on Stereotyping: When Sadness Increases Stereotype Use

Two studies explored the impact of mere activation of affective information on the use of stereotypes in social judgment. These studies provided consistent results showing that the activation of information related to sadness increases reliance on stereotypes, whereas the activation of information related to happiness decreases it. These results were obtained in the absence of affective state changes among the participants and with the use of two different priming procedures (Study 1: scrambled sentences, Study 2: subliminal priming) and two different judgment tasks (Study 1: impression formation, Study 2: guilt judgment). Complementing the informational view of affective states, it is suggested that affective information of which people are not conscious activates behavioral tendencies of approach or of avoidance associated with the related emotion.

Applying a dual process model of self-regulation: The association between executive working memory capacity, negative urgency, and negative mood induction on pre-potent response inhibition

This study tested a dual-process model of self-control where the combination of high impulsivity (negative urgency - NU), weak reflective / control processes (low executive working memory capacity - E-WMC), and a cognitive load is associated with increased failures to inhibit pre-potent responses on a cued go/no-go task. Using a within-subjects design, a cognitive load with and without negative emotional load was implemented to consider situational factors. Results suggested that: (1) high NU was associated with low E-WMC; (2) low E-WMC significantly predicted more inhibitory control failures across tasks; and (3) there was a significant interaction of E-WMC and NU, revealing those with low E-WMC and high NU had the highest rates of inhibitory control failures on all conditions of the task. In conclusion, results suggest that while E-WMC is a strong independent predictor of inhibitory control, NU provides additional information for vulnerability to problems associated with self-regulation.

Influence of emotional valence and arousal on the spread of activation in memory

Controversy still persists on whether emotional valence and arousal influence cognitive activities. Our study sought to compare how these two factors foster the spread of activation within the semantic network. In a lexical decision task, prime words were varied depending on the valence (pleasant or unpleasant) or on the level of emotional arousal (high or low). Target words were carefully selected to avoid semantic priming effects, as well as to avoid arousing specific emotions (neutral). Three SOA durations (220, 420 and 720 ms) were applied across three independent groups. Results indicate that at 220 ms, the effect of arousal is significantly higher than the effect of valence in facilitating spreading activation while at 420 ms, the effect of valence is significantly higher than the effect of arousal in facilitating spreading activation. These findings suggest that affect is a sequential process involving the successive intervention of arousal and valence.

Happiness as alchemy: Positive mood leads to self-serving responses to social comparisons

People in a positive mood process information in ways that reinforce and maintain this positive mood. The current studies examine how positive mood influences responses to social comparisons and demonstrates that people in a positive mood interpret ambiguous information about comparison others in self-benefitting ways. Specifically, four experiments demonstrate that compared to negative mood or neutral mood participants, participants in a positive mood engage in effortful re-interpretations of ambiguously similar comparison targets so that they may assimilate to upward comparison targets and contrast from downward comparison targets.

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.

First thought, best thought: positive mood maintains and negative mood degrades implicit-explicit attitude correspondence

Two studies investigate the effect of mood on the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes toward African Americans (Experiment 1) and implicit and explicit academic attitudes (Experiment 2). Because explicit and implicit attitudes are more related when people validate their automatic attitudes as true (the associative-propositional evaluation model) and because people tend to validate their immediate reactions when they are in positive rather than negative moods (the affect-as-information model), the authors predicted a stronger implicit-explicit attitude correspondence among positive versus negative mood participants. As predicted, in both studies, participants exhibited a significant correspondence between implicit and explicit attitudes when in positive moods but not when in negative moods.

Chewing on It Can Chew You Up: Effects of Rumination on Triggered Displaced Aggression

Ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood of displaced aggression following a minor annoyance (trigger). In Study 1, provoked participants who ruminated for 25 min were more aggressive toward a fumbling confederate than were distracted participants. Provocation-induced negative affect was positively related to aggression but only among those who ruminated. Study 2 conceptually replicated Study 1 and also found that the more negatively people reacted to the trigger, the more likely the trigger was to increase displaced aggression. Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by using an 8-hr rumination period. All 3 studies suggest that ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood that a minor triggering annoyance will increase displaced aggression.

Judgment under emotional certainty and uncertainty: the effects of specific emotions on information processing

The authors argued that emotions characterized by certainty appraisals promote heuristic processing, whereas emotions characterized by uncertainty appraisals result in systematic processing. The 1st experiment demonstrated that the certainty associated with an emotion affects the certainty experienced in subsequent situations. The next 3 experiments investigated effects on processing of emotions associated with certainty and uncertainty. Compared with emotions associated with uncertainty, emotions associated with certainty resulted in greater reliance on the expertise of a source of a persuasive message in Experiment 2, more stereotyping in Experiment 3, and less attention to argument quality in Experiment 4. In contrast to previous theories linking valence and processing, these findings suggest that the certainty appraisal content of emotions is also important in determining whether people engage in systematic or heuristic processing.