Jens Förster

Temporal construal effects on abstract and concrete thinking: consequences for insight and creative cognition.

Six studies investigate whether and how distant future time perspective facilitates abstract thinking and impedes concrete thinking by altering the level at which mental representations are construed. In Experiments 1-3, participants who envisioned their lives and imagined themselves engaging in a task 1 year later as opposed to the next day subsequently performed better on a series of insight tasks. In Experiments 4 and 5 a distal perspective was found to improve creative generation of abstract solutions. Moreover, Experiment 5 demonstrated a similar effect with temporal distance manipulated indirectly, by making participants imagine their lives in general a year from now versus tomorrow prior to performance. In Experiment 6, distant time perspective undermined rather than enhanced analytical problem solving.

How Global Versus Local Perception Fits Regulatory Focus

We propose a reciprocal relation between regulatory-focus systems and global versus local processing styles—specifically, that global processing fits a promotion focus on advancement, whereas local processing fits a prevention focus on security. In Study 1, participants were shown large letters made of small letters and decided if either of two specific letters appeared on the screen. Strength of promotion focus was positively correlated with speed of processing global letters and negatively correlated with speed of processing local letters, whereas the reverse was true for strength of prevention focus. In Study 2, participants first worked on a global or local task and later chose between two objects. Consistent with our fit proposal, participants who had performed the global task assigned a higher price to their chosen object if they had chosen it in apromotive, eager manner than if they had chosen it in a preventive, vigilant manner, whereas the reverse was true for participants who had performed the local task.

Seven Principles of Goal Activation: A Systematic Approach to Distinguishing Goal Priming From Priming of Non-Goal Constructs:

Countless studies have recently purported to demonstrate effects of goal priming; however, it is difficult to muster unambiguous support for the claims of these studies because of the lack of clear criteria for determining whether goals, as opposed to alternative varieties of mental representations, have indeed been activated. Therefore, the authors offer theoretical guidelines that may help distinguish between semantic, procedural, and goal priming. Seven principles that are hallmarks of self-regulatory processes are proposed: Goal-priming effects (a) involve value, (b) involve postattainment decrements in motivation, (c) involve gradients as a function of distance to the goal, (d) are proportional to the product of expectancy and value, (e) involve inhibition of conflicting goals, (f) involve self-control, and (g) are moderated by equifinality and multifinality. How these principles might help distinguish between automatic activation of goals and priming effects that do not involve goals is discussed.

Speed/accuracy decisions in task performance: Built-in trade-off or separate strategic concerns?

Abstract In four studies we show that participants’ regulatory focus influences speed/accuracy decisions in different tasks. According to regulatory focus theory ( Higgins, 1997 ), promotion focus concerns with accomplishments and aspirations produce strategic eagerness whereas prevention focus concerns with safety and responsibilities produce strategic vigilance. Studies 1–3 show faster performance and less accuracy in simple drawing tasks for participants with a chronic or situationally induced promotion focus compared to participants with a prevention focus. These studies also show that as participants move closer to the goal of completing the task, speed increases and accuracy decreases for participants with a promotion focus, whereas speed decreases and accuracy increases for participants with a prevention focus. Study 4 basically replicates these results for situationally induced regulatory focus with a more complex proofreading task. The study found that a promotion focus led to faster proofreading compared to a prevention focus, whereas a prevention focus led to higher accuracy in finding more difficult errors than a promotion focus. Through speed and searching for easy errors, promotion focus participants maximized their proofreading performance. In all four studies, the speed effects were independent of the accuracy effects and vice versa. These results show that speed/accuracy (or quantity/quality) decisions are influenced by the strategic inclinations of participants varying in regulatory focus rather than by a built-in trade-off.

Stereotype threat and performance: how self-stereotypes influence processing by inducing regulatory foci.

The authors hypothesized that activated self-stereotypes can influence the strategies of task solution by inducing regulatory foci. More specifically, positive self-stereotypes should induce a promotion focus state of eagerness, whereas negative stereotypes should induce a prevention focus state of vigilance. Study 1 showed that a negative ascribed stereotype with regard to task performance leads to better recall for avoidance-related statements whereas a positive stereotype leads to better recall for approach-related statements. In Studies 2 and 3, both an experimental manipulation of group performance expectation and the preexisting stereotype of better verbal skills in women than in men led to faster and less accurate performance in the positive as compared with the negative stereotype group. Studies 4 and 5 showed that positive in-group stereotypes led to more creative performance whereas negative stereotypes led to better analytical performance. These results point to a possible mechanism for stereotype-threat effects.

The effects of approach and avoidance motor actions on the elements of creative insight.

The authors propose that the nonaffective bodily feedback produced by arm flexion and extension informs individuals about the processing requirements of the situation, leading to the adoption of differential processing styles and thereby influencing creativity. Specifically, the authors predicted that arm flexion would elicit a heuristic processing strategy and bolster insight processes, whereas arm extension would elicit a systematic processing strategy and impair insight processes. To test these predictions, the authors assessed the effects of these motor actions on 3 central elements of creative insight: contextual set-breaking, restructuring, and mental search. As predicted, in 6 experiments, arm flexion, relative to arm extension, facilitated insight-related processes. In a 7th experiment, arm extension, relative to arm flexion, facilitated analytical reasoning, supporting a cognitive tuning interpretation of the findings.

Effects of motivational cues on perceptual asymmetry: Implications for creativity and analytical problem solving

In 4 experiments, participants were led to focus on either the prospect of positive outcomes (approach anticipation) or the prospect of negative outcomes (avoidance anticipation) and were subsequently administered behavioral measures of relative hemispheric activation. It was found that approach, relative to avoidance-related anticipatory states, produced greater relative right (diminished relative left) hemispheric activation. Experiment 3 additionally demonstrated that this pattern of activation was reversed when approach and avoidance states were not merely anticipatory but were also emotionally arousing. Finally, Experiment 4 replicated earlier findings demonstrating an influence of approach and avoidance anticipatory states on creativity and analytical problem solving (R. S. Friedman & J. Forster, 2001, 2003) and provided evidence that such effects are mediated by differences in relative hemispheric activation.

GLOMOsys: a systems account of global versus local processing

Within GLOMOsys (the GLObal versus LOcal processing MOdel, a systems account) we examine the functionalities of two processing systems that process information either globally or locally (looking at the forest vs. the trees). GLOMOsys suggests that (a) global versus local perceptual processing carries over to other tasks; (b) perceptual processing is related to conceptual processing (e.g., creative/analytic tasks; face/verbal recognition; similarity/dissimilarity generation; abstract/concrete construals, distance estimates, inclusive/exclusive categorization; assimilation/contrast in social judgments); (c) perceptual and conceptual processing is elicited by real-world variables (e.g., mood, exteroceptive and interoceptive cues of approach/avoidance, promotion/prevention focus, high/low power, distance, obstacles, novelty/familiarity, love/sex, interdependent/independent selves); (d) regulatory focus, psychological distance, and novelty are driving effects; and (e) the global system (glo-sys) processes novelty and the local system (lo-sys) processes familiarity. We discuss whether glo-sys is responsible for understanding meaning, relate the systems to physiological research, and discuss new research questions.

Attentional Priming Effects on Creativity

The authors tested the hypothesis that a broad or narrow scope of perceptual attention engenders an analogously broad or narrow focus of conceptual attention, which in turn bolsters or undermines creative generation. In the first two experiments, participants completed visual tasks that forced them to focus perceptual attention on a comparatively broad or narrow visual area. As predicted, broad, compared to narrow initial focusing of perceptual attention subsequently led to generation of more original uses for a brick (Experiment 1) and generation of more unusual category exemplars (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, participants were merely asked to contract their frontalis versus corrugator muscles, producing rudimentary peripheral feedback associated with broad versus narrow perceptual focus. As predicted, frontalis contraction, relative to corrugator contraction, led to the production of more original uses for a pair of scissors. Together, these three experiments provided converging initial support for our attentional priming hypothesis, suggesting that situationally induced variations in the scope of perceptual attention (and simple cues associated with such variations) may correspondingly expand or constrict the focus of conceptual attention within the semantic network, thereby improving or diminishing creativity.

Influence of overt head movements on memory for valenced words : A case of conceptual-motor compatibility

The present article reports 3 studies that demonstrate the influence of overt behavior on recognition and elucidates the theoretical basis for such an influence. In 2 experiments it was found that participants who were induced to nod while incidentally encoding positive and negative adjectives were more likely to recognize positive adjectives, whereas participants who were induced to shake their heads were more likely to recognize negative words. In a third experiment, with a double-task procedure, it was shown that when encoding was accompanied by head movements that were compatible with words, participants were better at performing the secondary task than when words and head movements were incompatible. These findings suggest that performing incompatible motoric and conceptual tasks concurrently requires more cognitive capacity. Where this capacity is allocated and when it is withdrawn depends on the characteristics of the task. Implications of this mechanism for different phenomena in social psychology (e.g., facial feedback and masking of emotional displays) are discussed.