Eric Raymond Igou

In search of meaningfulness: nostalgia as an antidote to boredom

We formulated, tested, and supported, in 6 studies, a theoretical model according to which individuals use nostalgia as a way to reinject meaningfulness in their lives when they experience boredom. Studies 1-3 established that induced boredom causes increases in nostalgia when participants have the opportunity to revert to their past. Studies 4 and 5 examined search for meaning as a mediator of the effect of boredom on nostalgia. Specifically, Study 4 showed that search for meaning mediates the effect of state boredom on nostalgic memory content, whereas Study 5 demonstrated that search for meaning mediates the effect of dispositional boredom on dispositional nostalgia. Finally, Study 6 examined the meaning reestablishment potential of nostalgia during boredom: Nostalgia mediates the effect of boredom on sense of meaningfulness and presence of meaning in ones life. Nostalgia counteracts the meaninglessness that individuals experience when they are bored.

On Boredom and Social Identity: A Pragmatic Meaning-Regulation Approach

People who feel bored experience that their current situation is meaningless and are motivated to reestablish a sense of meaningfulness. Building on the literature that conceptualizes social identification as source of meaningfulness, the authors tested the hypothesis that boredom increases the valuation of ingroups and devaluation of outgroups. Indeed, state boredom increased the liking of an ingroup name (Study 1), it increased hypothetical jail sentences given to an outgroup offender (Study 2 and Study 3), especially in comparison to an ingroup offender (Study 3), it increased positive evaluations of participants’ ingroups, especially when ingroups were not the most favored ones to begin with (Study 4), and it increased the appreciation of an ingroup symbol, mediated by people’s need to engage in meaningful behavior (Study 5). Several measures ruled out that these results could be explained by other affective states. These novel findings are discussed with respect to boredom, social identity, and existential psychology research.

Next to a Star: Paling, Shining, or Both? Turning Interexemplar Contrast into Interexemplar Assimilation

Four studies, set in the political and marketing domain, investigated how an extreme exemplar influences the evaluation of more moderate exemplars. In Studies 1 to 3, an extremely positive exemplar (star) elicited contrast in the evaluation of more moderate exemplars. However, the contrast effect was eliminated when the shared category membership of the star and the respective exemplar was made salient. Rather than relying on categorization, Study 4 manipulated interexemplar assimilation by using comparison processes to draw attention to the features shared with an extreme exemplar. Whether the extreme exemplar caused contrast or assimilation depended on the direction of comparison with which target and context stimulus were compared. All studies, in particular Studies 3 and 4, suggest that interexemplar contrast and interexemplar assimilation work in parallel rather than alternatively.

Reducing Context Effects by Adding Context Information: The Direction and Size of Context Effects in Political Judgment

This article investigates how the activation of a specific exemplar influences the direction and the size of context effects on evaluative judgments about other specific exemplars or about a superordinate category. The activation of an untrustworthy politician decreased judgments of trustworthiness of politicians in general but increased judgments of the trustworthiness of specific exemplars. The assimilation as well as the contrast effect were attenuated when additional judgment-relevant exemplars were activated. The results suggest that the impact of a specific context information depends on the amount of other judgment-relevant information that can be used in constructing a mental representation of the judgmental target or of a comparison standard. Implications for scandal management are discussed.

Lay perspectives on the social and psychological functions of heroes

Declaring and thinking about heroes are common human preoccupations but surprisingly aspects of heroism that reinforce these behaviors are not well-understood. In four thematically consistent studies, we attempt to identify lay perspectives about the psychological functions served by heroes. In Study 1, participants (n = 189) freely generated open-ended descriptions of hero functions, which were then sorted by independent coders into 14 categories (e.g., instill hope, guide others). In Study 2, in an attempt to identify the most important functions associated with heroes, participants (n = 249) rated how each function corresponded with their personal views about heroes. Results from a confirmatory factor analysis suggested that a three-factor model of hero functions fit the data well: participants thought that heroes enhanced the lives of others, promoted morals, and protected individuals from threats. In Study 3 (n = 242), participants rated heroes as more likely to fulfill a protecting function than either leaders or role models. In Studies 4A (n = 38) and 4B (n = 102), participants indicated that thinking about a hero (relative to a leader or an acquaintance) during psychological threat fulfilled personal enhancement, moral modeling, and protection needs. In all, these findings provide an empirical basis to spur additional research about the social and psychological functions that heroes offer.

Mood as a resource in structuring goal pursuit

J.P. Forgas, C.L. Wyland, S.M. Laham, Hearts and Minds: An Introduction to the Role of Affect in Social Cognition and Behavior. Part 1. Basic Approaches to Affect and Social Behavior. M.G. Haselton, T. Ketelaar, Irrational Emotions or Emotional Wisdom? The Evolutionary Psychology of Affect and Social Behavior. P. Winkielman, J.T. Cacioppo, A Social Neuroscience Perspective on Affective Influences on Social Cognition and Behavior. H. Bless, K. Fiedler, Mood and the Regulation of Information Processing and Behavior. C.A. Smith, B. David, L.D. Kirby, Emotion-Eliciting Appraisals of Social Situations. Part 2. Affect and Social Cognition. E. Eich, D. Macaulay, Cognitive and Clinical Perspectives on Mood-Dependent Memory. G.L. Clore, J. Storbeck, Affect as Information about Liking, Efficacy, and Importance. R.F. Baumeister, K.D. Vohs, D.M. Tice, Emotional Influences on Decision Making. D. Keltner, E.J. Horberg, C. Oveis, Emotions as Moral Intuitions. E.W. Dunn, S.M. Laham, Affective Forecasting: A Users Guide to Emotional Time Travel. Part 3. Affect and the Social Self. C. Sedikides, T. Wildschut, J. Arndt, C. Routledge, Affect and the Self. Y. Trope, E.R. Igou, C.T. Burke, Mood as Resource in Structuring Goal Pursuit. F.A. Huppert, Positive Emotions and Cognition: Developmental, Neuroscience, and Health Perspectives. R. Erber, S. Markunas, Managing Affective States. Part 4. Affect and Social Behavior. J.P. Forgas, Affective Influences on Interpersonal Behavior: Towards Understanding the Role of Affect in Everyday Interactions. J. Ciarrochi, J.T. Blackledge, Emotional Intelligence and Interpersonal Behavior: A Theory and Review of the Literature. J.R. Kelly, J.R. Spoor, Affective Influence in Groups. J.G. Holmes, D.B. Anthony, Affect and the Regulation of Interdependence in Personal Relationships.

Eaten up by boredom: consuming food to escape awareness of the bored self

Research indicates that being bored affectively marks an appraised lack of meaning in the present situation and in life. We propose that state boredom increases eating in an attempt to distract from this experience, especially among people high in objective self-awareness. Three studies were conducted to investigate boredom’s effects on eating, both naturally occurring in a diary study and manipulated in two experiments. In Study 1, a week-long diary study showed that state boredom positively predicted calorie, fat, carbohydrate, and protein consumption. In Study 2, a high (vs. low) boredom task increased the desire to snack as opposed to eating something healthy, especially amongst those participants high in objective self-awareness. In addition, Study 3 demonstrated that among people high in objective self-awareness, high (vs. low) boredom increased the consumption of less healthy foods and the consumption of more exciting, healthy foods. However, this did not extend to unexciting, healthy food. Collectively, these novel findings signify the role of boredom in predicting maladaptive and adaptive eating behaviors as a function of the need to distant from the experience of boredom. Further, our results suggest that more exciting, healthy food serves as alternative to maladaptive consumption following boredom.

Making sense of standardized survey questions: The influence of reference periods and their repetition

To provide an informative answer to a question, communicators need to determine its intended meaning which often requires extensive inferences based on contextual information. The current studies test if a given piece of contextual information is more influential when it is unique to the question asked rather than shared by several questions. Two experiments demonstrate that respondents draw on the length of the reference period in interpreting frequency questions. When the same question is presented with a long reference period (six months), respondents interpret it as pertaining to less frequent and more extreme instances of a behavior than when it is presented with a short reference period (one day). As predicted, however, this influence of the reference period on question interpretation is only observed when the reference period is unique to the target question. When the same reference period is repeatedly used in multiple questions, its use is no longer considered informative and its influence on question interpretation is eliminated. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

Metacognition and action: a new pathway to understanding social and cognitive aspects of expertise in sport

For over a century, psychologists have investigated the mental processes of expert performers – people who display exceptional knowledge and/or skills in specific fields of human achievement. Since the 1960s, expertise researchers have made considerable progress in understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie such exceptional performance. Whereas the first modern studies of expertise were conducted in relatively formal knowledge domains such as chess, more recent investigations have explored elite performance in dynamic perceptual-motor activities such as sport. Unfortunately, although these studies have led to the identification of certain domain-free generalizations about expert-novice differences, they shed little light on an important issue: namely, experts’ metacognitive activities or their insights into, and regulation of, their own mental processes. In an effort to rectify this oversight, the present paper argues that metacognitive processes and inferences play an important if neglected role in expertise. In particular, we suggest that metacognition (including such processes as “meta-attention,” “meta-imagery” and “meta-memory,” as well as social aspects of this construct) provides a window on the genesis of expert performance. Following a critique of the standard empirical approach to expertise, we explore some research on “metacognition” and “metacognitive inference” among experts in sport. After that, we provide a brief evaluation of the relationship between psychological skills training and metacognition and comment on the measurement of metacognitive processes. Finally, we summarize our conclusions and outline some potentially new directions for research on metacognition in action.

The Conversational Basis for the Dilution Effect

The impact of diagnostic information on judgments and in decision making is often reduced when additional, nondiagnostic information is presented. This article argues that the diluting impact of nondiagnostic information results in part from rules of everyday communication,which usually grant relevance to presented information.In an experimental test, participants were presented with positive or negative information about a product.Positive diagnostic information resulted in more favorable judgments than negative diagnostic information. This impact of diagnostic information was diluted when nondiagnostic information was added. Most important, the dilution effect was not observed when the applicability of the conversation was experimentally called into question.