Gerald L. Clore

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 geometric figures. As predicted, individuals in sad moods were less likely than those in happier moods to classify figures on the basis of global features.

Mood as Information: 20 Years Later

Learning that Schwarz and Clore (1983) had been nominated as a “modern classic” was a great mood induction, one that brightened our day even though the cause was salient. However, responding to the editors’ request to tell the “inside story” of the studies we conducted 2 decades ago turned out to be a challenging exercise in collaborative reconstructive memory. In retrospect, the “story” of our studies seems utterly smooth and our failure to remember disappointing pretests, or bad results that sent us back to the drawing board, stands in stark contrast to our memories of other lines of research, making us wonder if we forgot all the complications or were indeed just plain lucky. We first summarize our recollections and subsequently address theoretical developments.

How emotions inform judgment and regulate thought

Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conveyed by affect is crucial. Tests of the hypothesis find that affective influences can be made to disappear by changing the source to which the affect is attributed. In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognitions, leading to relational processing and item-specific processing, respectively. Positive affect is found to promote, and negative affect to inhibit, many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology.

Episodic and Semantic Knowledge in Emotional Self-Report: Evidence for Two Judgment Processes

Three studies involving 3 participant samples (Ns = 39, 55, and 53) tested the hypothesis that people retrieve episodic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over short (e.g., last few hours) time frames, but that they retrieve semantic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over long (e.g., last few months) time frames. Support for 2 distinct judgment strategies was based on judgment latencies (Studies 1 and 2) and priming paradigms (Studies 2 and 3). The authors suggest that self-reports of emotion over short versus long time frames assess qualitatively different sources of self-knowledge.

With Sadness Comes Accuracy; With Happiness, False Memory: Mood and the False Memory Effect

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm lures people to produce false memories. Two experiments examined whether induced positive or negative moods would influence this false memory effect. The affect-as-information hypothesis predicts that, on the one hand, positive affective cues experienced as task-relevant feedback encourage relational processing during encoding, which should enhance false memory effects. On the other hand, negative affective cues are hypothesized to encourage item-specific processing at encoding, which should discourage such effects. The results of Experiment 1 are consistent with these predictions: Individuals in negative moods were significantly less likely to show false memory effects than those in positive moods or those whose mood was not manipulated. Experiment 2 introduced inclusion instructions to investigate whether moods had their effects at encoding or retrieval. The results replicated the false memory finding of Experiment 1 and provide evidence that moods influence the accessibility of lures at encoding, rather than influencing monitoring at retrieval of whether lures were actually presented.

The Psychological Foundations of the Affective Lexicon

Subjects rated their confidence that each word from a set of 585 words referred to an emotion. As a strategy for discriminating words that refer to genuine emotions from words that refer to other kinds of conditions, ratings were collected in two different linguistic contexts: first, in the context of feeling something and second, in the context of being something. We hypothesized that words that referred to genuine emotions would be judged as such when presented in the context of feeling or being (e.g., feeling angry and being angry should both be rated as emotions). Words not referring to genuine emotions, however, were expected to show one of several other patterns. For example, words such as abandoned, which refer to objective states of the world, were expected to be rated as emotions in the feeling context but not in the being context. A discriminant analysis showed that such patterns could be used to distinguish the categories of a taxonomy of psychological conditions that Ortony, Clore, and Foss (1987) have proposed. The most discriminable categories were the four classes of affective, cognitive, external, and bodily conditions.

Individual Differences in Emotional Experience: Mapping Available Scales to Processes

Increasing interest in individual differences related to emotion is evident in the recent appearance of a large number of self-report instruments designed to assess aspects of the feeling experience. In this article, the authors review a sample of 18 of these scales and report technical information on each (e.g., length, format, reliability, construct validity, and correlates). They propose that this domain of individual differences can be usefully structured into five conceptual categories, including measures of absorption, attention, clarity, intensity, and expression. The measures were administered to a sample of individuals, and the coherence of the proposed categories was examined through hierarchical cluster analyses. The results confirmed the proposed structure of this domain of individual difference measures. The authors argue for the usefulness of an individual differences approach to theory testing and specify some of the information-processing roles that might be played by the categories of individual differences found in the data.

Four latent traits of emotional experience and their involvement in well-being, coping, and attributional style

In two samples of college students (Ns = 116 and 141), this research investigated the ways in which individuals differ in their experience of emotion. Four latent traits emerged from scales assessing such differences—Intensity, Attention, Expression, and Clarity. In both samples, these latent traits were found to be involved in reports of personality, well-being, coping, and explanatory style. Clarity was positively associated with measures of positive well-being and negatively associated with measures of negative well-being. Individuals who experience intense emotions (Intensity), who attend to them often (Attention), or who notably express them (Expression), reported coping by focusing on and venting their emotions and by seeking social support. Individuals who are adept at identifying their emotions (Clarity) reported engaging in active, planful coping and in positive reinterpretations of events. Individuals high on Clarity made self-affirming attributions for good events.

Simulation, Scenarios, and Emotional Appraisal: Testing the Convergence of Real and Imagined Reactions to Emotional Stimuli

Appraisal research has relied heavily on vignette- and recall-based methodologies in theory construction; however, the validity of these methodologies in capturing the concomitants of online experience is unknown. To assess the convergence of online and simulated accounts of emotion, the authors assigned undergraduate research participants to either online or simulated conditions. Those in the online condition reported on their appraisals and emotions after viewing a series of 10 emotional slides, whereas those in the simulated condition estimated their likely reactions on the basis of short descriptions of the same slides. Despite the different information available in the two conditions, there was a surprising degree of correspondence in the reports. This convergence was seen in mean levels of appraisal and emotion but even more dramatically in the pattern of appraisal-emotion relations across slides. It is concluded that vignette methodologies can play a useful role in theory construction. In addition, the findings raise interesting questions about the role(s) of implicit theory in emotion.

Affect and Information Processing

Publisher Summary It is noted that the most active area of research and theory of social information processing that emerged in the past two decades concerns the cognitive determinants and consequences of affect and emotion. This chapter illustrates development of conceptualization that incorporates the implications of diverse phenomenas such as creativity, persuasive messages, impression formation, stereotyping, self-evaluations, and political judgment along with cognitive processes that underlie them. The chapter specifies the possible determinants and consequences of the affect that individuals experience in both laboratory and daily life situations. The chapter considers one basic assumption of conceptualization that essentially distinguishes it from other formulations of affect and cognition. Specifically, it states that although affective reactions can be responses to previously acquired concepts and knowledge that are activated in memory and although one can have concepts about their own and others reactions, but affect per se is not itself part of the cognitive system. This assumption places restrictions on the ways that affect can influence information processing.