Joseph P. Forgas

Mood and judgment: the affect infusion model (AIM).

Evidence for the role of affective states in social judgments is reviewed, and a new integrative theory, the affect infusion model (AIM), is proposed as a comprehensive explanation of these effects. The AIM, based on a multiprocess approach to social judgments, identifies 4 alternative judgmental strategies: (a) direct access, (b) motivated, (c) heuristic, and (d) substantive processing. The model predicts that the degree of affect infusion into judgments varies along a processing continuum, such that judgments requiring heuristic or substantive processing are more likely to be infused by affect than are direct access or motivated judgments. The role of target, judge, and situational variables in recruiting high- or low-infusion judgmental strategies is considered, and empirical support for the model is reviewed. The relationship between the AIM and other affect-cognition theories is discussed, and implications for future research are outlined.

On feeling good and getting your way: mood effects on negotiator cognition and bargaining strategies.

Are happy people more likely to be cooperative and successful negotiators? On the basis of the Affect Infusion Model (AIM; Forgas, 1995a). Experiment 1 predicted and found that both good and bad moods had a significant mood-congruent effect on peoples thoughts and plans, and on their negotiation strategies and outcomes in both interpersonal and intergroup bargaining. Experiment 2 replicated these results and also showed that mood effects were reduced for persons more likely to adopt motivated processing strategies (scoring high on machiavellianism and need for approval). Experiment 3 confirmed these effects and demonstrated that the mood of the opposition also produced more mood-congruent bargaining strategies and outcomes. The results are discussed in terms of affect priming influences on interpersonal behaviors, and the implications of these findings for real-life cognitive tasks and bargaining encounters are considered.

The social outcast: Ostracism, social exclusion, rejection, and bullying.

The Social Outcast: Introduction, Kipling D. Williams, Joseph P. Forgas, William von Hippel & Lisa Zadro. Part I. Theoretical Foundations. Ostracism: The Indiscriminate Early Detection System, Kipling D. Williams & Lisa Zadro. Varieties of Interpersonal Rejection. Mark R. Leary. The Inner Dimension of Social Exclusion: Intelligent Thought and Self-Regulation Among Rejected Persons, Roy F. Baumeister and C. Nathan DeWall. Part II. Deep Roots of Exclusion: Neuropsychological substrates of Isolation and Exclusion. Adding Insult to Injury: Social Pain Theory and Response to Social Exclusion, Geoff MacDonald, Rachell Kingsbury, and Stephanie Shaw. People Thinking about People: The Vicious Cycle of Being a Social Outcast in Ones Own Mind, John T. Cacioppo and Louise C. Hawkley. Why it Hurts to Be Left Out: The Neurocognitive Overlap between Physical and Social Pain, Naomi I. Eisenberger & Matthew D. Lieberman. Part III: Individual and Population Differences and the Impact of Social Exclusion and Bullying. Rejection Sensitivity as a Predictor of Affective and Behavioral Responses to Interpersonal Stress: A Defensive Motivational System, Rainer Romero-Canyas and Geraldine Downey. The Rejected and the Bullied: Lessons about Social Misfits from Developmental Psychology, Jaana Juvonen and Elisheva F. Gross. Role of Social Expectancies in Cognitive and Behavioral Responses to Social Rejection, Kristin L. Sommer and Yonata Rubin. Coping with Rejection: Core Social Motives, across Cultures, Susan T. Fiske and Mariko Yamamoto. Part IV: Influences of Rejection on Emotion, Perception, and Cognition. When Does Social Rejection Lead to Aggression? Jean M. Twenge. The Social Monitoring System: Enhanced Sensitivity to Social Cues and Information as an Adaptive Response to Social Exclusion and Belonging Need, Cynthia L. Pickett & Wendi L. Gardner. Social Snacking and Shielding: Using Social Symbols, Selves, and Surrogates in the Service of Belonging Needs, Wendi L. Gardner, Cynthia L. Pickett, and Megan Knowles. All Animals are Equal but some Animals are more Equal than Others: Social Identity and Marginal Membership, Michael A. Hogg. Bye Bye, Black Sheep: The Causes and Consequences of Rejection in Family Relationships, Julie Fitness. Part V: Effects of Social Exclusion on Pro- and Anti-Social Behavior. Exclusion and Nonconscious Behavioral Mimicry, Jessica L. Lakin and Tanya L. Chartrand. The Effect of Rejection on Anti-Social Behaviors: Social Exclusion Produces Aggressive Behaviors, Kathleen R. Catanese and Dianne M. Tice. Rejection and Entitativity: A Synergistic Model of Mass Violence, Lowell Gaertner and Jonathan Iuzzini. Avoiding the Social Death Penalty: Ostracism and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas, Jaap W. Ouwerkerk, Norbert L. Kerr, Marcello Gallucci, and Paul A. M. Van Lange.

Affect in Social Judgments and Decisions: A Multiprocess Model

Publisher Summary This chapter proposes a new, comprehensive model of social judgmental processes, based on a review of the historical and theoretical background of the field, as well as the results of empirical research program. Specifically, the model attempts to deal with: (1) processing strategies available to people when performing a social judgment; (2) conditions most likely to be used; (3) role of affect in peoples processing preferences; (4) and how affects influence the outcome of social judgments under each of the processing alternatives. The model distinguishes between four alternative processing strategies available to judges: (1) direct access of crystallized judgments; (2) motivated processing in the service of a preexisting goal; (3) heuristic or simplified processing; (4) and the substantive or elaborate processing. The theory also specifies how eight specific features of the target, the judge, and the situation are likely to influence processing choices. The studies illustrated in this chapter emphasize on the complex and the constructive character of social judgments and the interactive role of affect and other variables in determining the processing choices. The chapter ends with a conclusion that there is enough information related to the processing consequences of affect, however less is known about the interaction of affect and stimulus characteristics.

Feeling and Doing: Affective Influences on Interpersonal Behavior

It is a nice sunny day, you are in a good mood, and you are on your way to ask your boss for a pay rise. What will you say? How will you formulate your request, and what sorts of negotiating strategies will you employ in pursuing your objective? More generally, how does temporary mood influence the kind of interpersonal strategies people adopt in such social encounters? This article is about the role of affect in the way people think and act in strategic social situations. Although most of us are intuitively aware that our feelings can have a profound influence on our thoughts, judgments, and interpersonal behaviors, we do not yet fully understand how and why these influences occur. Numerous recent studies found that affect plays an important role in social cognition and judgments (Baron, 1987; Forgas, 2000b; Martin & Clore, 2001; Sedikides, 1995; Sinclair & Mark, 1995; Zajonc, 2000). However, the influence of affective states on how people plan and execute real, strategic interpersonal behaviors has received comparatively little attention, except perhaps in the area of helping and altruism (Salovey & Rosenhan, 1989; Schaller & Cialdini,1990). This article redresses this imbalance by presenting an integrative review of past and present ideas about the role of affect in interpersonal behavior. The article also offers a theoretical explanation of these effects, emphasizing the moderating role of different information-processing strategies, and summarizes the results of a series of programmatic experiments dealing with this topic. The issues covered here should be of direct interest not only to social psychologists but also to cognitive, clinical, developmental and organizational psychologists—in fact, to scholars in any discipline where the relation between affect and social behavior is of importance. Understanding when, how, and why affect influences strategic social behavior requires a careful analysis of the information-processing strategies that produce these effects. Different information-processing strategies may promote, inhibit, or even reverse affective influences on cognition and behavior. Depending on the kind of processing strategies used, researchers may thus observe affect congruence or incongruence, or perhaps no affective influences at all on how people construe and respond to social situations (Forgas, 1995a). In addition, affective states themselves have an important but subtle influence on the kind of information-processing strategies people adopt in various social situations and ultimately on their interpersonal behaviors. The article begins with a brief discussion of historical ideas about the relations among affect, thinking, and behavior, and early psychological explanations based on psychodynamic and conditioning theories are considered. Next, contemporary affect–cognition theories are reviewed, and a multiprocess approach to explaining the existing evidence is outlined. In the second half of the article, I review my recent empirical research demonstrating the systematic influence of affective states on a variety of interactive behaviors. These experiments show that affect can significantly influence the way people interact with each other, the way they formulate and respond to interpersonal requests, the way they plan and execute bargaining and negotiating strategies, and the way they produce and use persuasive messages. Throughout, an integrative explanation of these findings is advocated, emphasizing the role of different information-processing strategies in moderating these effects.

Affect and Cognition

One of the greatest puzzles of human nature concerns the poorly understood interplay between affect and cognition—the rational and emotional ways of dealing with the social world around us. Affect is a ubiquitous and powerful phenomenon in our lives, yet research on human affectivity has been neglected until quite recently. This article reviews traditional and contemporary approaches to this issue, and recent theoretical and empirical work exploring the links between affect and cognition is considered. The major achievements and shortcomings of this now-thriving research area are discussed, and the future prospects of psychological research on human affectivity are considered.

After the Movies Transient Mood and Social Judgments

The effects of transient moods on a variety of social judgments were studied in an unobtrusive field study. Subjects were interviewed immediately after leaving film performances classified as predominantly happy, sad, or aggressive in affective tone. Questions covered four topic areas: political judgments, expectations about the future, judgments of responsibility and guilt, and quality-of-life judgments. Judgments on all four question categories were significantly influenced by the affective quality of the films. Judgments were more positive, lenient or optimistic after viewing a happy film than after a sad or an aggressive film. These mood biases were universal irrespective of the demographic background of subjects, suggesting the robustness of the phenomenon. The results were interpreted in terms of recent models of emotional influences on social cognition, and the practical implications of the findings were considered.

On mood and peculiar people: Affect and person typicality in impression formation.

Are memories and impressions about unusual, atypical people more likely to be influenced by mood? Atypical targets were expected to elicit more extensive processing, and mood-primed associations were expected to play a greater role in such judgments. In Experiment 1 (N= 72) mood effects were stronger on judgments of atypical than of prototypical persons. In Experiment 2 (N = 42) mood effects on memory were greater for atypical targets, and recall was also better for typical people in positive mood and for atypical targets in negative mood. Experiment 3(N= 60) replicated these findings and also found greater mood effects on processing and judgmental latencies for atypical than for typical targets. The results suggest that mood effects depend on the kind of processing strategies triggered by prototypical and atypical targets, consistent with recent multiprocess theories of affect and cognition (Forgas, 1992a). The implications of the results for current affect-cognition models, as well as everyday instances of affective biases in social judgments and stereotyping, are considered.

Linking Person Perception to Behavior Intention Across Cultures The Role of Cultural Collectivism

This research addressed two questions: (1) What are the potentially universal links between the dimensions of person perception and those of behavior intention, and (2) what dimensions of person perception are most salient in collectivist as opposed to individualistic cultures? Male subjects from Hong Kong and Australia read a description of a target person (TP) varying across the universal dimensions of extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. They then indicated their behavior intentions toward that TP. Across both cultures, TP conscientiousness was linked to intentions of trust and TP extroversion and agreeableness to intentions of association. As predicted from the dynamics of cultural collectivism, the Chinese were more responsive than the Australians to TP conscientiousness in forming trust intentions and to TP agreeableness in forming associative intentions.This research addressed two questions: (1) What are the potentially universal links between the dimensions of person perception and those of behavior intention, and (2) what dimensions of person perception are most salient in collectivist as opposed to individualistic cultures? Male subjects from Hong Kong and Australia read a description of a target person (TP) varying across the universal dimensions of extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. They then indicated their behavior intentions toward that TP. Across both cultures, TP conscientiousness was linked to intentions of trust and TP extroversion and agreeableness to intentions of association. As predicted from the dynamics of cultural collectivism, the Chinese were more responsive than the Australians to TP conscientiousness in forming trust intentions and to TP agreeableness in forming associative intentions.

Episode Cognition: Internal Representations of Interaction Routines1

Publisher Summary This chapter provides a summary and a synthesis of the most recent research on episode cognition to describe some it studies and to outline the most promising prospects and practical implications of this work. It surveys the historical roots of interest in social episodes in psychology and sociology and reviews recent research on situations and episodes in personality, social, cognitive, and clinical psychology. The chapter focuses on the two currently dominant approaches to episode cognition: the sociocultural strategy based on modeling consensual episode spaces and the information processing strategy to study the cognitive and affective factors in episode cognition. In the social consensus approach, research on situation perception; studies of episode domains—subcultural, group, and individual differences in episode cognition; and elements in episode cognition are discussed in the chapter. The practical implications of this work and the prospects of episode research in social psychology are discussed in the chapter.