PSC 152 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Rise Time, Arab Americans, Egocentrism
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Affect & Social Cognition
● Affect - some definitions
○ Affect - representations of personal value (i.e., the goodness or badness of
things
■ How we feel positively or negatively about something
○ Emotion - affective state with
■ Identifiable referent (i.e., what the emotion is “about”)
■ Sharp rise time & limited duration
● Start and end quickly
■ High intensity
○ Mood - affective state with
■ No clear referent - diffuse & objectless
● Not alwassy about someone or something
■ Gradual onset & extended duration
● Last longer
■ Low intensity
● How do researchers study affect ?
○ “Study 1” - induce temporary affective state:
■ Writing tasks (“thinking about a time when you felt happy, sad, anxious,
etc.”)
■ Music
● Listen to certain music that elicits a certain emotion
■ Video clips (ex: fear, disgust)
■ And many others
○ “Study 2” - outcome measure(s) of interest
● Affect - congruent judgments
○ Consumer product judgments
■ Ex: unexpected (vs. no) gift → more satisfaction w/ own car & TV
■ Receiving a gift unexpectedly tends to boost a person’s mood
■ Those w/ unexpected gift reported higher motor and TV satisfaction
○ Self - judgments
■ Ex: happy (vs. sad) movie → less (more) self- blame for relationship
conflicts
■ Those more positive gave themself less blame for relationship conflict
compared to those more negative
○ Judgments of other people
■ Ex: disgusting (vs. neutral) smell → more negative attitudes toward gay
men, but no other groups
● Those w/ disgusting smell had more neg attitudes toward gay
men, but not lesbians or African Americans
● Mechanism: affect as priming
○ Affective states lead to retrieval of affect - congruent concepts & memories
■ Happy → activation of info associated w/ happiness
● Feelign happy can lead us to think about info we associated w/
happiness
○ Ex: people, events, etc.
■ Sad → activation of info associated w/ sadness
● Feeling sad can lead us to think about info we associated w/
sadness
○ Accessible affective info influences judgment
● Mechanism: affect as information
○ Use affect as source of info
■ “How good is my life? How much do I like this product? Well, let’s see..
How do I feel right now?”
■ Potential source of error when current affect is irrelevant ot target of
judgment
■ Misattribute source of feelings to target
● Ex: may attribute frustration of failing test toward a person
● Schwarz & Clore (1983)
○ “How good do you feel about your life as a whole? “
Asked participants after writing about happy or sad experience
○ Study run in soundproof room: some participants told room makes people
“tense”; others told nothing about room
○ Allows for attribution of feelings to room
○ Priming model can’t explain this
○ Conclusion: people use feelings, unless cued not to do so
■ If feeling negative, attributed their neg feelings toward room, since they
were cued to, instead of attributing their neg feelings to their life as a
whole
○
● Affect as information
○ Information about our thought processes & strategies
■ Happiness: everything’s ok → heuristic processing
■ Sadness: current situation is problematic → systematic processing
■ Processing things systematically, people tend to be persuaded by strong
arguments
■ When processing heuristically, people tend to use simple cues
● Ex: consider how attractive the speaker is
● Don’t focus more on strong or weak arguments
■ Ex: persuasion