The role of affect in social thinking and interpersonal behaviour

Szczegóły

Utworzono: 11 maja 2007

Joseph P. Forgas

This work was supported by a Special Investigator award from the Australian Research Council, and the Research Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to Joseph P. Forgas. Please address all correspondence in connection with this paper to Joseph P. Forgas, at the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia; email Ten adres pocztowy jest chroniony przed spamowaniem. Aby go zobaczyć, konieczne jest włączenie obsługi JavaScript. . For further information on this research project, see also website at www.psy.unsw.edu.au/~joef/jforgas.htm.

Abstract

One of the greatest puzzles about human nature concerns the still poorly understood interplay between affect and cognition, the rational and emotional ways of dealing with the 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 paper reviews traditional and contemporary approaches to this issue, and recent theoretical and empirical work exploring the links between affect and cognition is considered. In particular, a series of experimental studies from our laboratory are presented, demonstrating that affective states exert a significant influence on many social judgments and interpersonal behaviours, including negotiation, verbal communication and social influence strategies. The major achievements and shortcomings of this now thriving research area are discussed, and the future prospects of psychological research on the cognitive and behavioural consequences of affective states are considered.

Introduction

Since the dawn of civilization, understanding the delicate relationship between affect and cognition, feeling and thinking has been a recurrent puzzle that occupied artists, writers and philosophers. Classic thinkers such as Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, St. Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Kant and many others devoted considerable attention to exploring the relationship between affect and thinking in human affairs. Attempts to promote positive affect and well-being, and reduce depression and sadness are becoming important policy objectives in many developed countries (Diener, 2000; Ciarrochi, Forgas & Mayer, 2006). In a sense, exploring the links between affect and cognition lies at the heart of the continuing quest to understand the fundamental relationship between the rational and the emotional aspects of human nature (Hilgard, 1980).

Within psychology, interest in affect saw a dramatic increase in the last couple of decades after long periods of neglect. Yet this progress has been fragile, and has been achieved against considerable odds. Even the definition of what is meant by ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ remains problematic, and the relationship between affect and cognition continues to be the subject of intense debate (Forgas, 2006). While some researchers focus on the cognitive antecedents of emotions, exploring the appraisal strategies underlying emotional responses (eg. Smith & Kirby, 2000), others ask a complementary question: what are the cognitive and behavioural consequences of affective states, such as everyday moods? This paper will present the results of several years of experimental research in our laboratory, investigating the multifaceted influence of affective states and moods on social thinking, judgments and behaviours. First, however, a brief review of the antecedents of this research will be presented.

Historical and theoretical background

Of the three faculties of the human mind, cognition, affect and conation, affect remains the last explored and least well understood (Hilgard, 1980). Why should this be so? It was the tripartite division of psychology’s subject matter by 18th century philosophers into three distinct faculties, cognition, affect, and conation, that paved the way for the behaviorist and later the cognitivist paradigms to dominate our field, with affect relatively neglected (Hilgard, 1980). Yet in early introspectionist experiments by Wundt, Titchener and others, affective, cognitive and conative responses were still considered jointly, as complementary windows into the nature of human experience. Unfortunately, with the emergence of the stultifying doctrines of behaviorism these three faculties came to be seen as sovereign, unrelated domains that can be studied without reference to each other, leading to a neglect of affective processes (Hilgard, 1980).

Affect: destructive or essential? Another reason for the neglect of affect in psychology may be a long-dominant view in Western thought that affect is a dangerous, invasive force that subverts rational thinking. Plato thought that emotions are a more primitive, subhuman response system, and so devised his ideal Republic to be run by rational philosophers impervious to emotional impulses. The idea that affect compromises rational thinking recurred in many theories throughout the ages, including Freud, Tarde and LeBon. Psychoanalysis in particular suggested that controlling affect requires countervailing psychological resources, and may often fail or lead to dysfunctional consequences. Indeed, some writers argued that human beings’ inability to understand and control affect reflects an evolutionary ‘fatal flaw’ in the brain that may ultimately threaten the very survival of our species (Koestler, 1978).

Fortunately, important advances in social cognition, neuroanatomy and psychophysiology during the last decades led to the recognition that affect is often a useful and even essential component of cognition and behavior (Adolphs & Damasio, 2001). Belatedly, Blaise Pascal’s prescient assertion from over 350 years ago that “the heart has its reasons which reason does not understand” (Pascal, 1643/1966, p. 113) is now receiving empirical support showing that affect is an essential adjunct to cognition (Damasio, 1994).

Affect in psychology: Traditional approaches

Early approaches to affect and cognition were shaped by theories such as psychoanalysis and behaviourism. Psychoanalytic accounts were among the first to focus on affect, locating affective impulses within the id, exerting ‘pressure’ against the countervailing forces of rational ego mechanisms. These ideas hugely influenced popular thinking, but had only limited influence on psychological research. In one exception, Feshbach and Singer (1957) found that attempts to suppress fear paradoxically increased the ‘pressure’ to "perceive another person as fearful and anxious" (p.286), suggesting that "suppression of fear facilitates the tendency to project fear onto another social object" (p. 286). However, psychoanalytic theories remained uninfluential, following the devastating epistemological criticisms of psychoanalysis by philosophers like Karl Popper and others.

Radical behaviorism suggested that affect influences thoughts and judgments through conditioned blind associations between affect and other stimuli. The full repertoire of human emotions can thus be explained in terms of cumulative conditioning experiences superimposed on just a few fundamental wired-in emotions (Watson & Rayner, 1920). The stultifying influence of behaviorist orthodoxy is now widely recognized, yet Watson’s idea that affect may influence thoughts and judgments through incidental associations survived in subsequent research. Clore and Byrne (1974) showed that aversive or pleasant environments (the unconditioned stimuli) can produce an affective reaction (the unconditioned response) to a person encountered in that environment. These studies explained affect congruence in thinking in terms of ‘blind’ conditioning principles based on temporal and spatial contiguity.

The cognitive revolution. The emerging cognitive paradigm in the 1960’s that supplanted behaviorism at first also ignored affectivity. Information processing theories focused on cold, affect-less thinking, and saw affect as a source of disruption and noise. Interestingly, even Heider’s (1958) influential phenomenological work ignored affect and focused on cold logical inferences.

It took several more decades before by the importance of affect was recognized in psychology. By the early 1980s research on naturalistic memory showed that affect plays a critical role in how people remember social information (Neisser, 1982). Within social psychology, Zajonc (1980) argued for the primacy of affective influences on social behavior. Ultimately, Gordon Bower’s associative network model gave a major impetus to experimental affect-cognition research, demonstrating a strong mood-congruent influence on social memory (Bower, 1981).

Affect and mental representations. Affect was also found to play a major role in the way mental representations about social episodes are constructed (Forgas, 1982). As Pervin (1976) noted, "what is striking is the extent to which situations are described in terms of affects … and organized in terms of similarity of affects aroused by them" (p.471). More recently, Niedenthal and Halberstadt (2000) found that “stimuli can cohere as a category even when they have nothing in common other than the emotional responses they elicit” (p. 381). Thus, affect plays a critical role in determining how mental representations about the social world are created and maintained in memory. Conversely, cognitive processes are also involved in the generation of affective responses, as we shall see below.

Exploring the cognitive consequences of affect

The idea that affect influences cognition has been around for a long time. How and why does such ‘affect infusion’ occur, and what are the psychological mechanisms that facilitate or inhibit its occurrence? Unlike earlier conditioning and psychoanalytic explanations, contemporary cognitive theories postulate precise mechanisms responsible for the infusion of affect into thinking and judgments. Affect can influence the content of cognition, through two complementary mechanisms: the inferential model, and the memory model. In addition, affect can also influence the process of how information is processed. We shall briefly consider these three theoretical approaches.

The inferential account. According to this model, affect may influence the content of thinking due to an inferential error: individuals may ask themselves: 'How do I feel about it?’, and in so doing, they may mistake pre-existing feelings as a reaction to the target (Schwarz, 1990). This kind of misattribution is most likely when people fail to process the available information, and mistakenly use their affective state as a heuristic shortcut to infer a reaction. For example, such effects are most likely in situations where people have little interest or time to engage in elaborate processing, such as off-the-cuff responses to an unexpected telephone survey (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). It is not clear whether the ‘how do I feel about it’ process implies a conscious, inferential process, or an implicit, automatic mechanism. The model also does not explain how cues other than (by definition, irrelevant, misattributed) affect, such as the actual stimulus information, and internal knowledge structures can enter into producing a response. Thus, this is more a theory of misjudgment or aborted judgment rather than a complete theory of affective influences on cognition and judgments.

The memory mechanism: the affect priming principle. The alternative affect priming model (Bower, 1981) posits that affect is an integral part of cognitive representations about the world. Affective states should thus automatically prime related ideas and memories, facilitating their use in constructive cognitive tasks that use memory-based information. Numerous experiments confirmed these predictions, and found that affect priming is most likely when people face complex and demanding cognitive tasks that call for constructive thinking and facilitate the use of affectively primed information (Eich & Macauley, 2000). Integrative theories such as the Affect Infusion Model (AIM; Forgas, 1995a, 2002; see below) argue that the nature and extent of affective influences on social thinking should largely depend on the kind of information processing strategies people employ.

Affective influences on information processing. Affect may also directly influence the process of cognition, that is, how people think (Bless & Fiedler, 2006; Fiedler, 2001). It was originally thought that positive affect reduces and negative affect increases processing effort, as people in a good mood try to maintain, and those in a negative mood try to improve how they feel (Clark & Isen, 1982). However, based on more recent evidence, Bless and Fiedler (2006) showed that the processing consequences of affect can best be understood in terms of a fundamental dichotomy between accommodation and assimilation, a distinction also used by Piaget.

Accommodation involves focusing on the demands of the external world, paying careful attention to external stimulus information and using more inductive, bottom-up thinking. Assimilation is a complementary process where existing knowledge structures guide processing, producing more top-down, deductive thinking. Most cognitive tasks involve a combination of both these processing strategies, but in different proportions. This model is consistent with evolutionary theories that highlight the adaptive significance of positive and negative affect triggering different processing styles (Frijda, 1986). Current evidence supports the view that positive affect promotes a more assimilative, schema-based and top-down processing style, while negative affect calls for more accommodative, bottom-up and externally-focused thinking strategy (Bless & Fiedler, 2006; Fiedler, 2001; Forgas, 2006).

Integrative theories: The Affect Infusion Model (AIM). Affect may thus influence both the content, and the process of how people think. However, these effects are subject to important boundary conditions, and recent integrative theories such as the Affect Infusion Model (AIM; Forgas, 2002) seek to specify the conditions that facilitate or inhibit affect infusion. For example, affect priming is most reliably observed when cognitive tasks call for highly constructive processing that necessitates the use of memory-based information. Similarly, the inferential model is only likely to be used when people lack the motivation, ability or resources to deal with a task more exhaustively.

The Affect Infusion Model (AIM) predicts that affective influences on cognition depend on the processing styles recruited in different situations that can differ in terms of two features: the degree of effort, and the degree of openness of the information search strategy. By combining processing quantity (effort), and quality (openness, constructiveness) the model identifies four distinct processing styles: direct access processing (low effort, closed, not constructive), motivated processing (high effort, closed, not constructive), heuristic processing (low effort, open, constructive), and substantive processing (high effort, open, constructive). Affect infusion is most likely when constructive processing is used, such as substantive or heuristic processing. In contrast, affect should not infuse thinking when motivated or direct access processing is used. The AIM also specifies a range of contextual variables related to the task, the person, and the situation that influence processing choices and thus affective influences. The implications of this model have now been tested in a number of experiments, as we shall see below.