PSY 3109 Lecture 12: Beyond Pleasure and Pain
15 May 2018
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Beyond Pleasure and Pain
Regulatory Focus: Some baseball players prefer to swing for the fences, accepting the
risk of an embarrassing strikeout for the potential of a home run. Other players prefer to
swing less hard, resulting in fewer home runs but also fewer strikeouts.
Consider that two students may strive for the same positive outcome of getting an A
in the class.
• The student in a promotion focus will be in a state of eager enthusiasm, meaning
that their approach to the class will be, for example, to speak up a lot in class
discussions and do extra-credit assignments.
• In contrast, the student with a prevention focus is in a state of vigilant caution,
meaning that their approach will be to do things like making sure to avoid the
temptation to watch television.
• Certain situations can put people into either focus
• Moreover, certain people generally tend to be more promotion focused while others
are more prevention focused.
• Most likely, the most effectively functioning people are able to toggle back and forth
between the two foci as the need arises.
Higgins:
• One of Higginss major insights was that being in either focus sets into motion the
processes of motivated cognition.
• For example, when you are in a promotion focus, you tend to have better memory
for the presence or absence of gains, and when you are in a prevention focus you
tend to have better memory for the presence of absence of losses
• In this respect, each focus sets up a cognitive framework through which the complex
array of stimuli bombarding our senses is filtered, much like a radar scanning the
environment that picks up blips of meaning
• You decide what is important and what isnt
Regulatory focus theory: is a goal pursuit theory regarding people's perceptions in
the decision making process. It examines the relationship between the motivation of a
person and the way in which they go about achieving their goal. This theory posits two
separate and independent self-regulatory orientations: prevention and promotion
• Another significant contribution of regulatory focus theory was to specify, for the
first time, how different types of basic goals yield different types of emotional
experiences.
• According to Higgins, when we experience promotion-related success, we feel joy;
when we experience promotion-related failure, we feel sadness
• This contrasts with the pattern under a prevention focus. Here, success leads to a
qualitatively different type of positive experience (relief) and failure leads to a
distinct type of negative experience (anxiety).
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