A. Peter McGraw

Can people feel happy and sad at the same time

The authors investigated whether people can feel happy and sad at the same time. J. A. Russell and J. M. Carrolls (1999) circumplex model holds that happiness and sadness are polar opposites and, thus, mutually exclusive. In contrast, the evaluative space model (J. T. Cacioppo & G. G. Berntson, 1994) proposes that positive and negative affect are separable and that mixed feelings of happiness and sadness can co-occur. The authors both replicated and extended past research by showing that whereas most participants surveyed in typical situations felt either happy or sad, many participants surveyed immediately after watching the film Life Is Beautiful, moving out of their dormitories, or graduating from college felt both happy and sad. Results suggest that although affective experience may typically be bipolar, the underlying processes, and occasionally the resulting experience of emotion, are better characterized as bivariate.

The Agony of Victory and Thrill of Defeat: Mixed Emotional Reactions to Disappointing Wins and Relieving Losses

Because of counterfactual comparisons, good outcomes that could have been better (i.e., disappointing wins) and bad outcomes that could have been worse (i.e., relieving losses) elicit relatively middling ratings on bipolar emotion scales. We conducted two experiments with gambles to examine whether such outcomes elicit neutral emotions, sequentially mixed emotions of positive and negative affect, or simultaneously mixed emotions. In Experiment 1, static unipolar measures of positive and negative affect revealed that disappointing wins and relieving losses elicit mixed emotions, rather than relatively neutral emotions. In Experiment 2, participants provided continuous unipolar measures of positive and negative affect by pressing one button whenever they felt good and another button whenever they felt bad. Results revealed that disappointing wins and relieving losses elicit positive and negative affect simultaneously, rather than in alternation.

Further Evidence for Mixed Emotions

Emotion theorists have long debated whether valence, which ranges from pleasant to unpleasant states, is an irreducible aspect of the experience of emotion or whether positivity and negativity are separable in experience. If valence is irreducible, it follows that people cannot feel happy and sad at the same time. Conversely, if positivity and negativity are separable, people may be able to experience such mixed emotions. The authors tested several alternative interpretations for prior evidence that happiness and sadness can co-occur in bittersweet situations (i.e., those containing both pleasant and unpleasant aspects). One possibility is that subjects who reported mixed emotions merely vacillated between happiness and sadness. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 1-3 by asking subjects to complete online continuous measures of happiness and sadness. Subjects reported more simultaneously mixed emotions during a bittersweet film clip than during a control clip. Another possibility is that subjects in earlier studies reported mixed emotions only because they were explicitly asked whether they felt happy and sad. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 4-6 with open-ended measures of emotion. Subjects were more likely to report mixed emotions after the bittersweet clip than the control clip. Both patterns occurred even when subjects were told that they were not expected to report mixed emotions (Studies 2 and 5) and among subjects who did not previously believe that people could simultaneously feel happy and sad (Studies 3 and 6). These results provide further evidence that positivity and negativity are separable in experience.

Benign Violations Making Immoral Behavior Funny

Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation. We tested the benign-violation hypothesis in the domain of moral psychology, where there is a strong documented association between moral violations and negative emotions, particularly disgust. Five experimental studies show that benign moral violations tend to elicit laughter and amusement in addition to disgust. Furthermore, seeing a violation as both wrong and not wrong mediates behavioral displays of humor. Our account is consistent with evolutionary accounts of laughter, explains humor across many domains, and suggests that humor can accompany negative emotion.

Feeling Close: Emotional Intensity Reduces Perceived Psychological Distance

The results of six experiments indicate that emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance. People who described events emotionally rather than neutrally perceived those events as less psychologically distant, including embarrassing autobiographical events (Experiment 1), past and future dentist visits (Experiment 2), positive and negative events (Experiment 3), and a national tragedy (Experiment 6). People also perceived an event (dancing in front of an audience) as less psychologically distant when they were in a more emotionally arousing social role (of performer) than in a less emotionally arousing social role (of observer, Experiment 4). Two findings bolster the causal role of emotional intensity in reducing perceived psychological distance. First, reported emotional intensity was negatively correlated with perceived psychological distance, and statistically mediated the effect of being in an emotionally arousing social role on perceived psychological distance (Experiment 4). Second, providing people with an alternative interpretation of their emotions (emotionally ambiguous whale “songs�?) significantly reduced, even reversed, the negative correlation between self-reported emotional intensity and perceived psychological distance (Experiment 5). These findings about emotional intensity are consistent with the broader idea that perceived psychological distance is grounded in and influenced by the phenomenology of objective distance. Implications for theories of psychological distance, emotionality, and choice are discussed.

The evaluative space grid: a single-item measure of positivity and negativity

The authors introduce the evaluative space grid (ESG), a two-dimensional grid that provides a single-item measure of positivity and negativity. In Study 1, ESG ratings of gamble outcomes were highly correlated with those obtained from conventional, less-efficient, unipolar measures, thus providing evidence for the grids convergent validity. In Study 2, participants rated their moment-by-moment evaluative reactions to gamble outcomes with the grid every 100 ms; results replicated earlier findings that some outcomes elicit only positivity or negativity whereas others simultaneously elicit positivity and negativity. In Studies 3 and 4, the difference between the grids positive and negative ratings of several types of stimuli and bipolar valence ratings were highly correlated, thus demonstrating the grids generalisability and predictive validity. Study 4 also showed that ESG ratings predicted facial electromyographic activity, particularly in tasks involving strongly affective stimuli. Taken together, results indicate that the grid provides efficient, valid indices of positivity and negativity.

Comparing Gains and Losses

Loss aversion in choice is commonly assumed to arise from the anticipation that losses have a greater effect on feelings than gains, but evidence for this assumption in research on judged feelings is mixed. We argue that loss aversion is present in judged feelings when people compare gains and losses and assess them on a common scale. But many situations in which people judge and express their feelings lack these features. When judging their feelings about an outcome, people naturally consider a context of similar outcomes for comparison (e.g., they consider losses against other losses). This process permits gains and losses to be normed separately and produces psychological scale units that may not be the same in size or meaning for gains and losses. Our experiments show loss aversion in judged feelings for tasks that encourage gain-loss comparisons, but not tasks that discourage them, particularly those using bipolar scales.

Emotional Accounting: How Feelings About Money Influence Consumer Choice

Mental accounting posits that people track their expenditures using cognitive categories or “mental accounts.” The authors propose that this cognitive process can be complemented by an approach that examines how feelings about a sum of money, or the moneys “affective tag,” influence its consumption. When people receive money under negative circumstances, this tag can include a negative affect component, which people aim to reduce by engaging in strategic consumption. The authors investigate two such strategies, laundering and hedonic avoidance, and demonstrate their effect on consumption of windfalls. The authors find that people avoid spending their negatively tagged money on hedonic expenditures and prefer to make utilitarian or virtuous expenditures to reduce, or “launder,” their negative feelings about the windfall. The authors call this tagging process and strategic consumption “emotional accounting.”

From the Commercial to the Communal: Reframing Taboo Trade-Offs in Religious and Pharmaceutical Marketing

Although consumers typically expect organizations to profit from marketing goods and services, they also believe that certain organizations, like those that focus on religion and health, should prioritize communal obligations. Indeed, consumers may find it morally distressing when communally focused organizations use overtly commercial marketing strategies like rebranding or value-based pricing. We demonstrate how moral distress and consumer backlash result from such taboo trade-offs and investigate when communal-sharing rhetoric for religious and pharmaceutical marketing reduces distress. Communal justifications used by communally focused organizations are particularly effective when consumers are not closely monitoring the motives of the organization or when the product is need-based. However, communal justifications become less effective and market-pricing justifications become more effective when consumers are attuned to the persuasive intentions of the organization. Implications for consumer goals are discussed.

Values and preferences: defining preference construction.

Extensive research in the values and preferences literature suggests that preferences are sensitive to context and calculated at the time of choice. This has led to the view that preferences are constructed. Recent work calls for a better understanding of when preferences are constructed and when they are not. We contend that the answer to this question depends on the meaning of the term constructed. Constructed can mean that a preference changes across contexts. If construction is synonymous with context sensitivity, we contend that preferences are always constructed because context influences nearly every aspect of the judgment and choice process. As a motivating example, we show that preferences are influenced by goals and goals are highly context sensitive. Constructed, however, can mean instead that a preference is calculated or formulated during the judgment and choice process. If construction is synonymous with calculation, we contend that many preferences are calculated and the more important question is to what degree preferences are calculated. We review the literature that shows that the degree to which decision makers calculate preferences is influenced by goals, cognitive constraints, and experience. WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 193-205 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.98 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.