Linda M. Isbell

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.

Correcting for Mood-Induced Bias in the Evaluation of Political Candidates: The Roles of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Participants were induced to feel either happy or sad while reading an article that described a politician’s stand on issues. When participants were unmotivated to evaluate the candidate at the time they read the article, they evaluated him more favorably when they were happy than when they were not. However, when participants were either intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to evaluate the candidate, they adjusted their evaluations to compensate for the biasing influence of the target-irrelevant affect they were experiencing. In fact, they overadjusted, reporting less favorable evaluations of him when they were happy than when they were not. These adjustments for bias occurred on-line, as the candidate’s issue stands were presented, rather than after all of the judgment-relevant information had been received.

Ambivalent Sexism and the Dumb Blonde: Men's and Women's Reactions to Sexist Jokes

This article examines the relationship between gender, hostile sexism, benevolent sexism and reactions to a seemingly innocuous genre of sexist humor, the dumb blonde joke. After hearing an audiotaped conversation in which two students swapped dumb blonde jokes, participants high in hostile sexism rated the jokes as more amusing and less offensive than those low in hostile sexism. Among individuals low in hostile sexism, however, benevolent sexism interacted with gender. Specifically, men high in benevolent sexism found the jokes significantly more amusing and less offensive than either women in the same group or men low in both hostile and benevolent sexism. This study replicates and extends previous research examining the relationship between hostile sexism and the enjoyment of sexist humor, and underscores the possibility that benevolent sexism may represent qualitatively distinct attitudes for men and women.

The Affective Control of Thought: Malleable, Not Fixed

Despite decades of research demonstrating a dedicated link between positive and negative affect and specific cognitive processes, not all research is consistent with this view. We present a new overarching theoretical account as an alternative-one that can simultaneously account for prior findings, generate new predictions, and encompass a wide range of phenomena. According to our proposed affect-as-cognitive-feedback account, affective reactions confer value on accessible information processing strategies (e.g., global vs. local processing) and other responses, goals, concepts, and thoughts that happen to be accessible at the time. This view underscores that the relationship between affect and cognition is not fixed but, instead, is highly malleable. That is, the relationship between affect and cognitive processing can be altered, and often reversed, by varying the mental context in which it is experienced. We present evidence that supports this account, along with implications for specific affective states and other subjective experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Affect and Politics: Effects on Judgment, Processing, and Information Seeking

Political figures and events often elicit strong emotional responses in citizens. These responses have the power to impact judgments and information processing, as well as the types of information that individuals seek out. Recent examples of political events that have elicited strong emotional reactions are easily accessible. The fiasco in Florida during the presidential election of 2000 led many voters to experience anger at the outcome of the election and disgust at the process whereby it was decided. The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, led citizens to experience a collective sense of fear and anxiety, along with sadness for the loss of life and anger at Osama bin Laden for masterminding the attacks. Along with these negative emotions was a sense of enthusiastic patriotism in the United States. Positive affective reactions, however, tend to be more general than negative reactions. That is, while positive reactions may be experienced as general positivity, negative feelings are typically more differentiated and may be experienced, for example, as fear, anger, sadness, disgust, or guilt (e.g., Averill 1980; Ellsworth and Smith 1988).

Sometimes Happy People Focus on the Trees and Sad People Focus on the Forest: Context-Dependent Effects of Mood in Impression Formation

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods should maintain and unhappy moods should inhibit situationally dominant thinking styles. Participants completed an impression formation task that included categorical and behavioral information. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, no fixed relation between mood and processing emerged. Whether happy moods led to judgments reflecting category-level or behavior-level information depended on whether participants were led to focus on the their immediate psychological state (i.e., current affective experience; Studies 1 and 2) or physical environment (i.e., an unexpected odor; Study 3). Consistent with research on socially situated cognition, these results demonstrate that the same affective state can trigger entirely different thinking styles depending on the context.

How I Vote Depends on How I Feel The Differential Impact of Anger and Fear on Political Information Processing

Long-popular rational-choice models of voting (e.g., Riker & Ordeshook, 1968) suggest that affect plays a nonexistent or detrimental role in voting decisions. However, more recent work demonstrates affect’s powerful and sometimes beneficial function (see Isbell, Ottati, & Burns, 2006). Some researchers have assumed that negative affective reactions, particularly fear, lead voters to disengage and go astray from the democratic ideal—that is, a nation of well-informed voters who choose the candidate who best represents their concerns (for a review, see Valentino, Hutchings, Banks, & Davis, 2008). Recent research examining the effects of discrete negative emotions paints a more complex picture and suggests that this assumption may be inaccurate (Lerner & Tiedens, 2006). In fact, fear may contribute to the ideal of informed voting by enhancing detailed processing (Tiedens & Linton, 2001), whereas anger may detract from this ideal by promoting less careful processing and reliance on heuristics (Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994). Consistent with this possibility, work in political science (e.g., Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000; Valentino et al., 2008) suggests that anxiety (fear) motivates citizens to learn, which may lead them to become better informed voters. The current work examined how this process might unfold and extended earlier work by examining the effects of anger and fear on voters’ decision making. Although some political scientists acknowledge the importance of examining how voters research candidates and reach a decision (Lau & Redlawsk, 2006), psychologists (Jacoby, Jaccard, Kuss, Troutman, & Mazursky, 1987) and political scientists alike rarely use behavior-process research methods (but see Lau & Redlawsk, 2006). Yet such a paradigm captures the real-world information processing of voters who actively and selectively seek out information. We relied on this methodology to test the prediction that fear would lead participants to use specific issue-based information when choosing a candidate, whereas anger would lead participants to rely on general criteria (e.g., party loyalty). Method

The Emotional Voter

It seems self-evident that political figures arouse passion and emotion in the electorate. Vivid examples can be found throughout all of political history. In 1864, Harper’s Weekly described Abraham Lincoln as a “monster”, a characterization that is clearly emotionally evocative (Jamieson, 1992). John F. Kennedy, the “Camelot” president, evoked feelings of tremendous pride and patriotism in his eloquent speeches (e.g., “Ask not what your country can do for you…”). Bill Clinton’s recent sexual escapades elicited disgust among many citizens, and his subsequent lies about the affair aroused considerable anger. Moreover, political candidates notoriously surround themselves with contextual stimuli (e.g., the American flag, balloons, music) that are designed to elicit positive emotional reactions in the electorate ([Jamieson, 1992]).

Who am I?: The influence of affect on the working self-concept

Two experiments investigated the impact of affect on the working self-concept. Following an affect induction, participants completed the Twenty Statements Test (TST) to assess their working self-concepts. Participants in predominantly happy and angry states used more abstract statements to describe themselves than did participants in predominantly sad and fearful states. Evaluations of the statements that participants generated (Experiment 2) demonstrate that these effects are not the result of (1) participants describing positively and negatively valenced information at different levels of abstraction, or (2) valence-based affective priming. Further, half of the participants in Experiment 2 were led to attribute their affect to the manipulation prior to completing the TST. This manipulation eliminated the influence of affect on the working self-concept. Taken together, these results are consistent with theory and research on the informative functions of affect.

The impact of negative emotions on self-concept abstraction depends on accessible information processing styles.

Research suggests that anger promotes global, abstract processing whereas sadness and fear promote local, concrete processing (see Schwarz & Clore, 2007 for a review). Contrary to a large and influential body of work suggesting that specific affective experiences are tethered to specific cognitive outcomes, the affect-as-cognitive-feedback account maintains that affective experiences confer positive or negative value on currently dominant processing styles, and thus can lead to either global or local processing (Huntsinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2014). The current work extends this theoretical perspective by investigating the impact of discrete negative emotions on the self-concept. By experimentally manipulating information processing styles and discrete negative emotions that vary in appraisals of certainty, we demonstrate that the impact of discrete negative emotions on the spontaneous self-concept depends on accessible processing styles. When global processing was accessible, individuals in angry (negative, high certainty) states generated more abstract statements about themselves than individuals in either sad (Experiment 1) or fearful (Experiment 2; negative, low certainty) states. When local processing was made accessible, however, the opposite pattern emerged, whereby individuals in angry states generated fewer abstract statements than individuals in sad or fearful states. Together these studies provide new insights into the mechanisms through which discrete emotions influence cognition. In contrast to theories assuming a dedicated link between emotions and processing styles, these results suggest that discrete emotions provide feedback about accessible ways of thinking, and are consistent with recent evidence suggesting that the impact of affect on cognition is highly context-dependent. (PsycINFO Database Record