Leonard L. Martin

Inhibiting and Facilitating Conditions of the Human Smile: A Nonobtrusive Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis

We investigated the hypothesis that peoples facial activity influences their affective responses. Two studies were designed to both eliminate methodological problems of earlier experiments and clarify theoretical ambiguities. This was achieved by having subjects hold a pen in their mouth in ways that either inhibited or facilitated the muscles typically associated with smiling without requiring subjects to pose in a smiling face. Study 1s results demonstrated the effectiveness of the procedure. Subjects reported more intense humor responses when cartoons were presented under facilitating conditions than under inhibiting conditions that precluded labeling of the facial expression in emotion categories. Study 2 served to further validate the methodology and to answer additional theoretical questions. The results replicated Study 1s findings and also showed that facial feedback operates on the affective but not on the cognitive component of the humor response. Finally, the results suggested that both inhibitory and facilitatory mechanisms may have contributed to the observed affective responses.

Mood as Input: People Have to Interpret the Motivational Implications of Their Moods

It was hypothesized that moods have few, if any, motivational or processing implications, but are input to other processes that determine their motivational implications. In Experiment 1, Ss read a series of behaviors in forming an impression. When told to read the behaviors until they felt they had enough information, those in positive moods (PMs) stopped sooner than did those in negative moods (NMs). When told to stop when they no longer enjoyed reading the behaviors, NMs stopped sooner than PMs

Set/reset: use and disuse of concepts in impression formation.

In three experiments, impressions of an ambiguously described stimulus person were assimilated toward the implications of primed concepts when performance of the priming task was interrupted, but were contrasted with these implications when performance of the priming task was allowed to continue to completion. In addition, when the primed concepts were evaluatively consistent (Experiment 1), assimilation and contrast were observed on both prime-related and prime-unrelated dimensions. When the primed concepts were evaluatively inconsistent (Experiment 2), however, these shifts in impression were observed only on dimensions directly related to the primed concepts. When no concepts descriptively relevant to the stimulus information were primed (Experiment 3), the assimilation and contrast were relative to the favorableness of a primed general evaluative person concept. Taken together, these results suggest that a concept may be accessible to an individual and may be relevant to target information, yet not be used to encode that information; that assimilation and contrast may occur for reasons other than the discrepancy between the target and the contextual stimuli on the dimension of judgment; and that individuals may use the evaluative implications of their person representation as a cue in deciding which of several equally applicable, equally accessible descriptive concepts to use in interpreting information about a person.

Assimilation and contrast as a function of people's willingness and ability to expend effort in forming an impression

Set/reset (Martin, 1986) hypothesis that contrast demands more cognitive effort than does assimilation was examined. In Exp. 1, the impressions of distracted Ss showed assimilation toward blatantly primed concepts, whereas the impressions of nondistracted Ss showed contrast. In Exp. 2, Ss told that their ratings would be lumped into a group average showed assimilation, whereas Ss told that their ratings would be examined individually showed contrast. In Exp. 3, the impressions of Ss low in need for cognition showed assimilation, whereas the impressions of Ss high in need for cognition showed contrast. Exp. 1 also showed that the results were not due to differences in recall of the target information, and Exp. 3 showed that the results were not due to differences in recall of the priming stimuli. Together, the results suggest that the processes involved in contrast demand more cognitive effort than do the processes involved in assimilation.

Person memory: the role of traits, group stereotypes, and specific behaviors in the cognitive representation of persons.

Subjects read a list of statements describing behaviors manifested by a target person who had previously been described by a set of personality trait adjectives. Some statements referred to the person by name, whereas others referred to him as a member of a stereotyped social group. The consistency of the behaviors with expectancies based on these general target characterizations was varied. Results of Experiment 1 showed that when the trait-adjective characterization of the target and the targets group membership had similar implications, the relative ease of recalling behaviors that were consistent and inconsistent with these implications depended on whether subjects had the opportunity to think more extensively about the information they received after all of it had been presented. Results of Experiment 2 showed that when a targets trait-adjective description and his group membership had dissimilar implications, subjects organized the persons behaviors around separate concepts, depending on whether the behavior statements referred to him by name or by group membership. Moreover, when subjects were told after they read the behaviors that the person described by trait adjectives was the same as the one referred to by group membership, they did not alter the cognitive representations they formed initially. These and other results suggested the existence of a priority system for engaging in goal-directed cognitive activity en route to forming a person impression, with lower priority activities giving way to higher priority ones when processing demands are high.

The Smell of Bias: What Instigates Correction Processes in Social Judgments?

Participants were either informed that contextual influences bias their judgment and asked to correct for the unspecified influence (blatant warning) or they were instructed that they should correct for the unspecified influence if they felt that there may be biasing influences (conditional warning). Whereas blatantly warned participants corrected under all conditions (Study 2), conditionally warned participants corrected their judgments when the source of bias was salient but not when the source was subtle (Studies 1 to 3). Implications for models of theory-driven correction are discussed.

The Role of Bodily Sensations in the Evaluation of Social Events

Three hypotheses were tested: that feedback from facial expressions can provide the valence of an emotional reaction, that ones level of arousal can provide the felt intensity of that reaction, and that people use these sensations as information when appraising a stimulus that provides no clear valence of its own. Subjects read a story to which either understanding or anger was a possible reaction. While reading the story, all subjects were induced to hold their faces in expressions of either happiness or anger. In addition, one group of subjects engaged in 2 min of vigorous exercise immediately before reading the story. Another group engaged in the exercise 90 s before reading the story. The control group read the story without having exercised. Nonaroused subjects tended to report more favorable reactions when smiling than when holding an angry expression. This difference was signify cant when there was a delay between the exercise and the rating task and was reduced to nonsignificance when there was no delay. These results are discussed in the context of a theory of private self-perception in which people use their bodily sensations as information when making judgments.

Stereotyping, Self-Affirmation, and the Cerebral Hemispheres

The authors used the processing characteristics of the left and right cerebral hemispheres to gain some insight into the relation between self-affirmation and stereotyping. In Study 1, self-affirmation led to greater stereotyping (of a librarian) and to greater left hemisphere activation, which in turn mediated the self-affirmation/stereotyping relationship. Study 2 replicated these results but also found that self-affirmation decreased stereotyping for a stigmatized target. However, relative hemisphere activation did not mediate this self-affirmation/stereotyping relationship. These studies showed that self-affirmation can either increase or decrease stereotyping depending on the status of the target and that relative hemisphere activation may provide clues as to underlying processes of stereotyping. In both studies, relative hemisphere activation was assessed using a line bisection task. Discussion focuses on possible mechanisms of different kinds of stereotyping and on the ways in which a consideration of relative hemisphere activation could help researchers gain insights into those mechanisms.

One Person’s Enjoyment is Another Person’s Boredom: Mood Effects on Responsiveness to Framing

This study examined the effects of induced mood on susceptibility to question-framing effects. Participants were placed in either a happy, sad, or neutral mood and performed an impression-formation task under different phrasings of Martin, Ward, Achee, and Wyer’s (1993) stop rule instructions. For the enjoy rule, participants were told to stop reading behaviors either when they no longer enjoyed the task or when they became bored with the task. For the performance-based rule, participants were told to stop either when they had enough information to form an impression of the target or when they did not need to collect additional information. Results indicated that neutral mood participants were strongly influenced by the framing of the stop rule. Participants in valenced moods, however, were unaffected by framing, suggesting that they based their decisions about when to stop solely on the informational value of their moods. The implications of these results are discussed.

Basking and Brooding: The Motivating Effects of Filter Questions in Surveys

Answer the following questions: Q1. Do you happen to remember anything special that your U.S. representative has done for your district or for the people in your district while he has been in Congress? (IF YES): What was that? Q2. Is there any legislative bill that has come up in the House of Representatives on which you remember how your congressman has voted in the last couple of years? (IF YES): What bill was that?