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.

The empirical evidence

There are thus good theoretical reasons to expect that affect plays a significant and multifaceted role in how people represent the social world, and the way they form impressions and judgments and behave in social situations.

More extensive processing magnifies affect infusion. One key counterintuitive prediction derived from the Affect Infusion Model is that affect congruence should be greater when longer and constructive processing is required to deal with more complex cognitive tasks. This prediction has been tested in a number of experiments where the complexity of the social situation was manipulated to create more or less demand for an open and substantive processing style. For example, if one observes usual, or unusual people in a public setting such as a restaurant or a cafe, a well-matched couple is much more ‘typical’ and should require less elaborate and constructive processing than do couples where the partners are obviously mismatched in terms of features such as age or physical attractiveness. Several experiments tested this prediction (Forgas, 1993; 1995b). In a controlled replication of the above restaurant scenario, participants feeling happy or sad after viewing standard mood induction films were presented with images of well-matched or badly matched couples. Their judgments showed significant mood congruence as happy participants formed more positive impressions of the couples than did sad participants. However, when the couples were atypical and badly matched, mood had a much greater effect on judgments than for couples who were typical and well matched (Forgas, 1993, 1995b). In fact, the size of mood effects on judgments was strongest when the couples were most mismatched, intermediate when they were partly matched, and smallest when they were well matched (Forgas, 1995b).

Similar results were also obtained when we asked participants to respond to people who varied in terms of their prototypicality (Forgas, 1992). An analysis of processing latency and recall memory data confirmed that forming impressions about more unusual and atypical persons took longer, and there was correspondingly greater affect infusion into these more constructive responses. Surprisingly, the same kinds of effects can also be obtained when people respond to highly realistic social information, such as making judgments about their own intimate relationships (Forgas, 1994). In a counter-intuitive pattern, mood effects were consistently greater when more extensive, constructive processing was required to deal with more complex and serious rather than simple, everyday interpersonal issues. Jointly, these series of experiments provide strong evidence for the process sensitivity of affect infusion into cognition and interpersonal behaviors. Similar effects may also influence the way people interpret real-life social behaviors, as the next section will suggest.

Affect and front-end cognition: The interpretation of observed behaviours. Affect may also influence the way observed behaviors are perceived and encoded. This hypothesis was tested (Forgas, Bower & Krantz, 1984) by asking happy or sad participants to rate their own and their partner’s observed interactive behaviors on a videotape. As predicted, happy people ‘saw’ significantly more positive, skilled and fewer negative, unskilled behaviors both in themselves and in their partners than did sad subjects. These effects confirm that affect priming will subtly influence the kinds of associations and interpretations people use when encoding complex observed behaviors. Thus, a smile or gesture that may seem ‘friendly’ in a good mood may be perceived as ‘awkward’ in a negative mood.

Later experiments found that these effects also extend to the way people evaluate themselves. People in a negative mood made more critical, self-deprecatory interpretations of their own behaviors, but those in a positive mood selectively looked for and found lenient and optimistic explanations for identical outcomes (Forgas, Bower & Moylan, 1990; see Figure 1). Rather surprisingly, such mood-induced distortions can also influence reactions to highly familiar, intimate events involving close partners (Forgas, 1994). When partners in long-term intimate relationships were asked to evaluate their own, and their partner’s behaviors in more or less serious interpersonal conflicts, positive mood produced lenient, self-serving explanations. These mood effects were even stronger when the events judged were more complex and serious and thus required more constructive processing. Similar affective biases also influence the way people think about themselves, and these effects are particularly strong when people deal with peripheral, poorly rehearsed aspects of themselves (Sedikides, 1995).

Figure 1. The mood congruent effects of positive and negative mood on attributions for success and failure in an exam. Happy persons claim credit for success (make more internal and stable attributions) but reject blame for failure (make more external and unstable attributions). Persons in negative mood in turn take less credit for success, and blame themselves more for failing. (Data based on Forgas, Bower & Moylan, 1990).

The cognitive benefits of negative affect: When sad is better than happy? Affect can also influence the kind of information processing strategies people adopt. We recently found for example that the kind of vigilant, systematic attention to external stimulus details recruited by negative moods tends to reduce or even eliminate such common judgmental mistakes as the fundamental attribution error (FAE; Forgas, 1998c). As positive affect often produces a more schematic, top-down and heuristic processing style (Bless & Fiedler, 2006), the schematic perception of a ‘unit relation’ between the actor and the act leading to the FAE appears to be promoted by positive affect, and reduced by negative affect. This pattern was also confirmed in unobtrusive field studies. People who had just seen happy or sad films made judgments about the writers of popular and unpopular essays in an ostensible ‘street survey’. Positive affect again increased and negative affect decreased the FAE. Happy judges mistakenly assumed that that the views advocated in a coerced essay were in fact the writer’s own, but sad judges realized that the essays were coerced and discounted their relevance. Subsequent mediational analyses (Forgas, 1998c, Exp. 3) confirmed that these attributional biases were due to affect-induced differences in processing strategies: sad judges also thought longer about their responses than did happy judges.

Affective influences on processing strategies also influence eyewitness accounts of observed social events. In a recent series of investigation (Forgas, Vargas & Laham, 2005) participants witnessed complex social events such as a wedding or a robbery on a videotape. Some time later, they were exposed to a mood induction, and then received questions about the incident that either included, or did not include ‘planted’ misleading details. After a further interval, participants’ recognition memory for the incidents was tested. Temporary positive mood at the time when the misleading information was presented significantly increased, and negative mood decreased the mistaken incorporation of planted information into eyewitness memories (Figure 2). These effects were replicated in a field study, where students observed a staged incident during a lecture (Forgas et al., 2005). About a week later, they were induced to feel good or bad through watching videotapes, and were then exposed to questions about the incident that included or did not include planted incorrect information. Once again, those feeling good while hearing the planted information were more likely later to incorporate ‘planted’ details heard during the questioning with actually witnessed details. In contrast, negative affect reduced the incidence of such mistakes. These results – together with the evidence for mood effects on inferential mistakes such as the FAE - confirm that mild, transient affective states can have a marked influence on the way people process, interpret and remember observed social behaviors. Does affect also impact on actual interactive behaviors? This possibility was explored in several recent studies.

Figure 2. The interaction between mood and the presence or absence of misleading information on eyewitness memory: positive mood increased, and negative mood decreased the influence of misleading information on the accuracy of subsequent eye-witness reports (after Forgas, Vargas & Laham, 2005).

The possibility that negative affect may also benefit certain interpersonal behaviors was explored in several recent studies looking at affective influences on the quality of persuasive messages. If negative affect produces more accommodative thinking (Bless & Fiedler, 2006), it may also improve the quality of persuasive messages. This was confirmed in a series of experiments (Forgas, in press), where participants in a negative mood produced significantly more concrete, and ultimately, more effective persuasive arguments in support of topical issues (eg. student fees, etc.). This result is consistent with negative mood promoting a processing style that is more attuned to the requirements of a particular situation, and so improves the quality and effectiveness of cognitive performance. A second experiment confirmed these findings. This time, happy and sad participants were asked to argue either for or against Australia becoming a republic, and for or against the right-wing One Nation party. Results showed that sad mood resulted in arguments that were of higher quality and more persuasive than those by happy persons, with an intermediate performance by the neutral group (Figure 3). This result is consistent with negative mood promoting a processing style that is more attuned to the requirements of a particular situation.

Figure 3. Mood effects on the quality and valence of persuasive messages: negative affect increases the quality and persuasiveness of arguments. There is also a mood-congruent influence on the valence of persuasive arguments (after Forgas, in press).

In another study persuasive arguments were produced while interacting with a ‘partner’ through a computer keyboard as if exchanging emails. In fact, the computer was pre-programmed to ‘respond’ indicating increasing agreement or disagreement. Responses by the ‘partner’ communicated increasingly positive, accepting or increasingly negative and rejecting reactions to the persuasive messages. The negative mood group again generated significantly higher quality arguments. However, consistent with the Affect Infusion Model, the provision of a reward reduced the size of mood effects on argument quality by imposing a strong motivational influence on how the task was approached. These experiments provide convergent evidence that even slight changes in mood can produce profound differences in the quality and effectiveness of persuasive arguments. These results make sense in terms of our theoretical predictions, and suggest that negative affect promotes a more externally focused and bottom-up information processing style that was previously also found to lead to the reduction of some attribution errors and the reduction of eye-witness memory distortions (Forgas, 1998c).

Affective influences on skilled interpersonal behaviours.Humans are a gregarious species, and coordinating our interpersonal behaviors can be a demanding cognitive task (Heider, 1958). As social interaction often demands open, constructive thinking, affective states may infuse our thoughts, plans and ultimately, behaviors. Positive affect may prime positive interpretations and produce more confident, friendly, and cooperative ‘approach’ behaviors, whereas negative affect may facilitate access to negative memories and produce more avoidant, defensive or unfriendly attitudes and behaviours. We found, for example (Forgas & Gunawardena, 2001), that female undergraduates who were feeling good after watching a film behaved in a much more positive manner in a subsequent, unrelated interaction. They smiled more, communicated more effectively, disclosed more personal information and generally behaved in a more poised, skilled and rewarding manner according to raters blind to the affect condition. Sad participants were rated as being less friendly, confident, relaxed, comfortable, active, interested and competent than were happy participants. In other words, prior affect manipulation had a significant subsequent influence on interpersonal behaviors that was readily detectable by observers.

Affective influences on requesting. Making a request is a difficult and complex interpersonal task. Requesting involves uncertainty, and requesters must try to maximise the likelihood of compliance (by being direct), yet avoid the danger of giving offence (by not being too direct). In terms of the AIM, happy people should adopt a more confident, direct requesting style, as a result of the greater availability and use of positively valenced thoughts and associations in their minds (Forgas, 1999a,b). Further, in terms of the AIM these mood effects should be greater when the request situation is more complex and difficult, and requires more substantive processing. This prediction was tested in several experiments. In one study, mood was induced by asking participants to recall and think about happy or sad autobiographical episodes (Forgas, 1999a, Exp. 1). Next, participants were asked to identify more or less polite request forms they would prefer to use in an easy, routine and in a difficult, embarrassing request situation. Happy participants generally preferred more direct, impolite requests, while sad persons preferred more cautious, indirect and polite requests. Further, mood effects on requesting were much stronger when the request situation was demanding and difficult, and required more extensive, substantive processing.

These mood effects also occur in real-life interactions. In an unobtrusive experiment (Forgas, 1999b, Exp. 2), affect was induced by asking participants to view happy or sad films. Next, in an apparently impromptu development, the experimenter casually asked participants to get a file from a neighboring office. Their words in requesting the file were recorded by a concealed tape recorder. Negative mood resulted in significantly more polite, elaborate and more hedging requests than did positive mood (Figure 4). Those in a negative mood were also more hesitant, and delayed making their requests significantly longer. An analysis of recall memory for the exact words they used – an index of elaborate processing – showed that recall accuracy was positively related to the degree of affect infusion, as predicted by the AIM.

Figure 4. The effects of happy, control and sad mood on the politeness, and elaboration of requests used in easy or difficult interpersonal situations. Positive mood produces more direct, less polite and less elaborate requests, and these mood effects are significantly greater when the situation is difficult and requires more extensive processing (Data based on Forgas, 1999a).

Affective influences on bargaining and negotiation. Affective states should play a particularly important role in elaborately planned interpersonal encounters such as bargaining and negotiating encounters (Forgas, 1998a). In these studies, mood was induced by giving participants positive, negative or neutral feedback about their performance on a verbal test. Next, they engaged in highly realistic interpersonal and inter-group negotiation in what they believed was a separate experiment. The question we were interested in was how temporary moods might influence people’s goals, plans and ultimately, their behaviors in this interaction. Happy participants were more confident about the encounter, formed higher expectations about their success, and also planned and used more optimistic, cooperative and integrative strategies than did control, or negative mood participants (Figure 5). Surprisingly, these mood effects on bargaining behavior actually produced significantly better outcomes for happy participants than for those who were feeling bad. These findings clearly suggest that even slight changes in affective state due to an unrelated prior event influenced the goals that people set for themselves, the action plans they formulated, and the way they ultimately behaved and succeeded in strategic interpersonal encounters.

Figure 5. Mood congruent influences on planned and actual negotiating strategies: happy persons plan, and use more cooperative and less competitive bargaining strategies, and are more likely to make and honor deals than do negotiators experiencing negative affect. (Data based on Forgas, 1998a).

Affective influences on responding to unexpected social situations. Frequently we must respond almost instantaneously to a new social situation. When such events involve uncertainty and require constructive processing, responses should also be subject to affect infusion effects. This prediction was evaluated in a series of field experiments (Forgas, 1998b), where we assessed how people respond to being unexpectedly approached by another person in a public place such as a university library. Affect was induced by leaving folders containing pictures or text designed to induce positive or negative mood on unoccupied library desks. Students entering the library were surreptitiously observed as they exposed themselves to the mood induction. A few minutes later, they were approached by another student (in fact, a confederate) who made an unexpected polite or impolite request for several sheets of paper needed to complete an essay. Their responses were noted. A short time after this incident a second confederate approached the participants and explained that the situation was in fact staged, and asked them to complete a brief questionnaire assessing their perception and evaluation of the request and the requester, and their recall of the request.

Students who received the negative mood induction were significantly more likely to respond with a critical, negative evaluation of the request and the requester and were less likely to comply than were positive mood participants. Mood effects were markedly greater when responding to an impolite, unconventional rather than a polite request. An analysis of later recall memory for the incident confirmed the more substantive processing (and better recall) of impolite requests. Conventional, polite requests on the other hand were processed more superficially, were recalled less well, and responses were less influenced by mood. These results confirm that affect infusion was again significantly mediated by the processing strategy people employed.

Self disclosure. Self-disclosure is also a critical aspect of skilled interpersonal behavior, and essential for the development of rewarding intimate relationships (Forgas, 1985). Affective influences on self-disclosure were demonstrated in several experiments (Forgas, 2006), when happy or sad participants indicated the order in which they would feel comfortable disclosing increasingly intimate information about themselves to a person they have just met. Happy people preferred more intimate disclosure topics, suggesting a generally more confident and optimistic interpersonal style (Figure 6). In subsequent experiments, participants interacted with another person in a neighbouring room through a computer keyboard, as if exchanging emails. Using this ‘bogus partner’ method, the computer was pre-programmed to respond in ways that indicated either consistently high or low levels of self disclosure. Individuals in a positive mood produced more intimate disclosure, revealed more positive information about themselves, and formed more positive impressions about the ‘partner’, but only when the ‘partner’ was also disclosing. Positive mood did not increase the intimacy of self-disclosure when the partner was not disclosing.

Figure 6. The mood congruent effects of positive and negative mood on self disclosure: positive mood increases, and negative mood decreases the intimacy of self-disclosure, and these effects are significantly greater when the partner is high disclosing rather than low disclosing (unpublished data).

Why do these effects occur? In uncertain and unpredictable social encounters, we need to rely on open, constructive thinking in order to formulate our plans to guide our interpersonal behaviors. Affect can prime access to more affect-congruent thoughts, and these ideas should ultimately influence plans and behaviors. Thus, affective influences on social behaviors depend on whether open, constructive processing is required to deal with a more or less demanding interpersonal task. Whenever motivated, closed information processing is used, mood effects are reduced. The same mechanisms of affect infusion seem to influence the way people formulate personal requests, the way they respond to approaches by others, the way they plan and execute negotiations, and the way they produce persuasive messages and self-disclose (Forgas, 1998b,c; 1999a,b; 2006, in press).

Summary and Conclusions

This paper argued that mild everyday affective states do have a significant influence on the way people perceive and interpret social behaviors, and the way they plan and execute strategic interactions. Different information processing strategies seem to play a key role in explaining these effects. Multi-process theories such as the Affect Infusion Model (Forgas, 1995a) offer a simple and parsimonious explanation of when, and how affect infusion into social behaviors occurs. Several experiments found that more extensive, substantive processing enhances mood congruity effects, consistent with the predictions of the AIM (Forgas, 1994; 1995b).

The paper also reviewed a number of empirical studies demonstrating how such principles can be translated into behavioral research, and how affective states impact on both simple, and complex interpersonal behaviors. These experiments show that affect can influence behavior monitoring and interpretation, as well as the actual performance of interpersonal behaviors, such as the formulation of, and responses to requests; the planning and execution of strategic negotiations; and the production of persuasive arguments. In contrast, affect infusion is reduced or absent whenever a social cognitive task could be performed using a simple, well-rehearsed direct access strategy, or a highly motivated strategy. In these conditions, there is little need, and little opportunity for incidentally primed mood-congruent information to infuse information processing (Fiedler, 2001; Forgas, 1995a).

Several of the field experiments also showed that affect infusion occurs not only in the laboratory, but also in many real-life situations. These findings have many applied implications. Affect is likely to have a significant influence on relationship behaviors, group behaviors, organizational decisions, consumer preferences, welfare policies and health psychology (Diener, 2000; Forgas & George, 2001; Salovey et al., 2001). Affect is also heavily implicated in many moral judgments and decisions (Haidt, 2002), another rapidly developing area of inquiry on the interface of affect and cognition. The tendency to alternate between substantive and motivated processing strategies, producing affect infusion and affect control respectively, could also be considered as part of an ongoing homeostatic strategy of self-regulatory mood management (Forgas, 2002).

A special case of affective influences occurs when people make judgments about their expected future affective reactions to anticipated outcomes. Such ‘future forecasting’ motivates many human endeavours in everyday life, yet there is now good evidence that people make many systematic mistakes when they forecast their future affective reactions (Gilbert & Wilson, 2000). Exploration of the cognitive processes that underlie such affective forecasting errors is an exciting new research domain that is not yet adequately linked to research on contemporaneous emotion appraisals.

There can thus be little doubt that empirical research and theory building linking affect and cognition will continue apace in the future. In particular, evolutionary ideas are likely to become an important source of theoretical progress, focusing on the adaptive significance of affective phenomena, and highlighting the manifold links between cognitive research and the neurosciences (Buss, 2005). It is not too far-fetched to suggest that in early evolutionary history, wired-in emotional reactions provided distinct survival advantages (Frijda, 1986), just as our existing emotion appraisal strategies clearly serve adaptive ends (Lazarus, 1991; Smith & Kirby, 2000). For example, positive affect also functions as a motivational resource, allowing people to cope with necessary but aversive situations (Trope et al., 2001). Acceptance or rejection by others appears to be a particularly potent cause of affective reactions (Leary, 2000), consistent with the probable evolutionary origins of many affective reactions. Evolutionary thinking might also help us answer the question: What are the cognitive functions of affective states? Is there an identifiable adaptive advantage we derive from experiencing affect? Much recent research suggests the beneficial consequences of positive affect in promoting creativity, flexibility, cooperation, integrative thinking, successful negotiation and a host of other desirable outcomes. However, we have also seen that in the right circumstances, negative affective states such as sadness may also confer significant adaptive advantages by promoting a more attentive, accommodating thinking style that produces superior outcomes.

It seems intriguing that despite our apparently never-ending quest for happiness, the human emotional repertoire remains heavily skewed towards negative emotions. Four of the six deeply ingrained basic emotions with distinct physiological substrates are negative ones – fear, anger, disgust and sadness - suggesting that these emotions were adaptive in the precarious ancestral environment, preparing the organism for flight, fight or avoidance in the face of challenges. It is interesting that even though sadness is clearly unpleasant and provides no hedonic benefit, it remains one of the most enduring and ubiquitous affective states (Ciarrochi, Forgas & Mayer, 2006). The possible adaptive functions and cognitive benefits of sadness are suggested in several recent experiments reviewed above, indicating that negative mood can reduce judgmental errors, improve eyewitness memory and produce more effective persuasive arguments. Such findings are broadly consistent with the notion that over evolutionary time, affective states functioned as automatic triggers to elicit cognitive and behavioural responses that are appropriate in a given situation.

It is noteworthy that most investigations of the cognitive and behavioral consequences of affect looked at mild, undifferentiated mood states, whereas research on the antecedents of emotion covers a wide variety of specific emotional states beyond positivity and negativity. We believe that an important direction for future research is to better integrate research on the elicitation of emotion with the study of the cognitive and behavioural consequences of affect. For example, several intriguing experiments now suggest that emotions also have reliable cognitive consequences for social judgments and decisions (Keltner, Ellsworth & Edwards, 1993).

In summary, this paper argued that different information processing strategies play a key role in explaining how affect influences social cognition and interpersonal behavior. The Affect Infusion Model in particular offers a parsimonious integrative account of the conditions likely to facilitate or inhibit affect infusion processes. Much of the evidence reviewed here suggests that affect infusion is most likely in conditions requiring constructive, substantive processing. Other processing strategies such as direct access or motivated processing result in the absence, or even reversal of affect infusion. Obviously a great deal more research is needed before we can fully understand the multiple influences that affect has on interpersonal behavior. Hopefully, this summary will help to stimulate further interest in this fascinating and important area of inquiry.

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