Handbook of Affect and Social Cognition

Joseph P. Forgas

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135670054
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book offers a comprehensive review and integration of the most recent research and theories on the role of affect in social cognition and features original contributions from leading researchers in the field. The applications of this work to areas such as clinical, organizational, forensic, health, marketing, and advertising psychology receive special emphasis throughout. The book is suitable as a core text in advanced courses on the role of affect in social cognition and behavior or as a reference for those interested in the subject.

1

Introduction: Affect and
Social Cognition

Joseph P.Forgas

University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia

Philosophical and Speculative Theories Linking Affect and Cognition

Some Early Empirical Evidence for Affective Influences on Cognition and Judgments

Psychodynamic Approaches to Affect and Cognition

Conditioning Approaches to Affect and Cognition

The Emergence of a Cognitive Paradigm

Major Areas of Contemporary Research on Affect and Social Cognition

Affect and Cognition: Fundamental Issues and the Nature of the Relationship

Affective Influences on the Content of Cognition

Affect and Social Information Processing

Affective Influences on Social Motivation and Intentions

Affect, Cognition, and Interpersonal Behavior

Personality and Individual Differences in Affectivity

Conclusion

References

There can be little doubt that affect is one of the most important yet least understood influences on the way people think and behave in social situations. Although intuitively we all know that our feelings frequently have a profound influence on our thoughts, judgments, and interpersonal behaviors, in practice we do not yet fully understand how and why these influences occur. Somewhat disappointingly, empirical research by psychologists has, until quite recently, provided fact, most of what we know about the role of affect in social cognition has only been discovered since the beginning of the 1980s. This is thus a particularly fortuitous time to review and summarize what has been achieved in this exciting field to date. The main objective of this book is to provide a comprehensive and integrated overview of what we now know about the role of affect in social cognition.

Of course, interest in this issue goes back much further than just a few decades. In fact, ever since the dawn of human civilization, artists, writers, and philosophers as well as laypersons have been fascinated by the delicate relationships between feeling and thinking, affect and cognition. Classic philosophers such as Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, Descartes, Pascal, Kant, and others devoted considerable attention to the role of affect in human affairs. Plato was one of the earlier representatives of a long line of thinkers who believed that affect constitutes a more primitive, animalistic mode of responding that is incompatible with reason, and has an invasive, dangerous influence on rational thinking and behavior. The basic idea that affective reactions “tend to overwhelm or subvert rational mental processes” (Elster, 1985, p. 379) has been echoed in many philosophical, social, and psychological theories throughout the ages: Tarde, LeBon, and Freud are just a few classic theorists who saw emotion as a dangerous influence. Others, such as Arthur Koestler (1978), even suggested that the inability of human beings to fully understand and control their affective states is due to a “fatal flaw” in the way our central nervous system evolved that may ultimately threaten the very survival of our species.

Although the disruptive nature of affect has received much attention in traditional theorizing, in recent years a fundamentally different view began to emerge. Largely as a result of important advances in social cognition, neuroanatomy, and psychophysiology during the 1990s, it is now increasingly recognized that affect is not necessarily a disruptive influence on social thinking. In fact, the opposite may well be true: affect is often a useful and even essential component of rational behavior (see chapters by Adolphs & Damasio, Ito & Cacioppo, this volume). Indeed, recent research seems to bear out the philosopher Blaise Pascal's prescient prediction from more than 350 years ago, that “the heart has its reasons which reason does not understand” (Pascal, 1643/1966, p. 113). Research by DeSousa (1987), Damasio (1994), and others confirmed that the ability to experience and take into account affect in social decisions is an essential part of adaptive functioning. Individuals who suffer certain kinds of brain damage to the prefrontal cortex that impairs affective reactions but leaves cognitive capacities intact tend to make disastrous social decisions, and their social relationships suffer accordingly, even though their intellectual problemsolving ability may be completely normal.

Ultimately, most of the evidence from social cognition research since the early 1980s suggests that affect is neither a universally beneficial nor a universally disruptive influence on social cognitive processes. Rather, the effects of affective states on social thinking appear to be highly context specific (Fiedler, 1991; Martin, 2000; Sedikides, 1995). Sometimes, affective states facilitate effective decision making without any apparent impairment in the quality of the outcome (Isen & Means, 1983). At other times, affective states may contribute to cognitive and judgmental errors and lead to suboptimal and mistaken judgments and decisions (Forgas, 1998a). Whether the effects are adaptive or maladaptive, functional or dysfunctional depends on the nature of the task, the kind of information-processing strategy used, and the characteristics of the person and the situation (see also chapters by Rusting, and Mayer, this volume). Several of the contributions to this volume report important advances in our understanding of the delicate mechanisms that are responsible for mediating affective influences on social cognition, judgments, and interpersonal behaviors.

The book is organized into six main sections to correspond to six major areas of contemporary affect cognition research, and each section contains three contributions. After this introductory chapter, the first section considers some basic conceptual issues about the relationship between affect and cognition. The three chapters here take different and complementary approaches. Adolphs and Damasio emphasize the fundamental interaction between affect and cognition and the adaptive importance of this relationship based on recent neurobiological evidence, and discuss how affective states may modulate cognitive processes involved in attention, memory, judgment, and decision making. Ito and Cacioppo take a complementary social neuroscience perspective and analyze the role of affect in social attitudes. The third chapter in this section, by Smith and Kirby, focuses on yet another crucial aspect of the interaction between cognition and affect. Their chapter offers a comprehensive review and an integrative theory of the role of cognitive appraisal processes in the way affective states are experienced and defined.

The second section of the book reviews evidence for the role of affective states in influencing the content of social cognition. Gordon Bower and Joseph Forgas survey almost two decades of research on the role of affect in social memory, and suggest that a revised associative network theory is capable of accounting for most of the evidence for mood-congruent memory effects. A major alternative to memory-based network models is outlined by Gerald Clore, Karen Gasper, and Erika Garvin, who suggest that in many situations the direct use of affect as information can account for affective influences on social thinking, judgments, and information-processing style. Constantine Sedikides and Jeffrey Green discuss and integrate extensive evidence for affective influences on the content of ideas about the self and the self-concept, and offer a new theoretical perspective explaining how variables such as individual differences, judgmental and task features, and different types of self-conceptions can mediate these effects.

The chapters in the third section address one of the key issues in affectcognition research: how affect is implicated in the processing of social information. Klaus Fiedler reviews recent evidence linking affective states to different information-processing strategies and outlines an integrative dual-process theory describing how positive and negative affective states selectively facilitate a processing style that promotes either the assimilation of, or accommodation to social information. Tory Higgins describes a fundamental dichotomy between promotion-and prevention-oriented experiences and processing style, and reviews the intricate role that affective states play in these two basic modes of relating to the social world. The third chapter in this section, by Richard Petty, David DeSteno, and Derek Rucker, discusses the role of affective states in attitude change and how people process persuasive messages in particular as a function of high or low elaboration processing styles.

Part IV contains contributions that analyze the relationship between affect and social motivation and intentions. Eddie Harmon-Jones reviews decades of research on the role of affective states in cognitive dissonance processes, one of the most productive motivational theories in our discipline, and provides an integrative theoretical treatment of these findings. Positive and negative mood can also play a crucial motivational role in how people process potentially threatening self-relevant information, according to the work reviewed by Yaacov Trope, Melissa Ferguson, and Raj Raghunathan. These authors suggest that mood can serve as a motivational resource in social cognition when people deal with self-relevant feedback or persuasive messages. The third chapter in this section, by Maureen Wang Erber and Ralph Erber, argues that motivated social cognition plays an important role in the regulation of affective states. These authors describe studies showing that people will use motivated strategies to selectively search for and use social information that helps them to calibrate their affect to fit in with contextual requirements.

Part V discusses the role of affective states in explanations of cognitively mediated social behaviors. The chapter by Joseph Forgas argues that different information-processing strategies play a key role in determining whether and how affect influences interpersonal behaviors. The chapter also describes a number of recent experiments demonstrating affective influences on how people interact with each other in various social situations. Stereotyping, prejudice, and intergroup behavior are among the most important real-life issues investigated by social psychologists, and the next chapter, by Galen Bodenhausen, Thomas Mussweiler, Shira Gabriel, and Kristen Moreno, reviews the role of affect in these processes. Affective states play a particularly important role in health-related cognition and behaviors, a topic that is also of considerable applied importance according to the chapter by Peter Salovey, Jerusha Detweiler, Wayne Steward, and Brian Bedell.

The final section of the book discusses the critical role of individual differences and personality characteristics in affectivity. Cheryl Rusting reviews and integrates recent evidence suggesting that personality characteristics such as extraversion, neuroticism, self-esteem, and other traits are critically involved in mediating affective influences on social cognition. In the next chapter, Jerry Suls analyzes the intricate relationship between affect, stress, personality, and social cognition. In the final chapter of this book, Jack Mayer, one of the researchers who first coined the term emotional intelligence to describe the complex set of individual characteristics that makes people able to manage affective states effectively, reviews recent work in this area and describes the development of a new empirical measure of the emotional intelligence construct.

The aim of this introductory chapter is to provide some background to much of what follows. The history of early philosophical and speculative ideas about the relationship between affect and cognition is reviewed briefly. Next, psychological explanations of affective influences on cognition based on psychodynamic or conditioning theories and processes is considered. The final section of the chapter discusses the emergence of a social cognitive approach to studying affective processes since the 1980s and offers a brief overview of the main threads of contemporary affect-cognition research as represented in this volume.

PHILOSOPHICAL AND SPECULATIVE THEORIES LINKING AFFECT AND COGNITION

Long before the advent of empirical psychology, there was much speculative and philosophical theorizing about the relationship between affect and cognition in human affairs. By and large, theories that emphasized the dangerous and threatening aspects of affectivity have predominated until quite recently. This concern with the invasive and uncontrollable aspects of emotion can be traced throughout most of the Western philosophical tradition, from the work of Plato through St. Augustine and Descartes to Kant. Freud's psychodynamic theories were among the first to define a range of specific “defense mechanisms” that are involved in keeping threatening emotional impulses under control. The psychodynamic view of affect as a powerful force that must be under continuous pychological control by various ego mechanisms has had and continues to have a widespread influence on popular views of affect and cognition. The hydraulic principle suggests that managing and controlling affective states requires considerable countervailing psychological resources, and that cognitive attempts at affect control are often ineffective and frequently result in unintended and dysfunctional consequences.

Although Freud has done much to place affect and emotions back on the cultural agenda, his influence on empirical psychology has been more limited, and research on affect remained a relatively neglected field until recently. One reason for this neglect is probably empirical psychology's fundamental assumption that different components of the human mind, affect, cognition, and conation, can be adequately studied in separation from each other rather than in their interactions (Hilgard, 1980). The idea that human mental life can be readily separated into three distinct and fundamental faculties, affect, cognition, and conation (feeling, knowing, and willing), first emerged in a concrete form in the philosophy of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. As Hilgard (1980) suggests, it was probably Christian Wolff (1714–1762) who first proposed a distinction between a facultas cognoscivita and a facultas appetiva—knowing and desire. Soon afterward, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1789) introduced a more elaborate, threefold classification of the fundamental faculties of soul—understanding, feeling, and will.

Perhaps the most influential philosopher of this period, Immanuel Kant, readily accepted this tripartite division of the human mental faculties and incorporated it into his philosophical system. For Kant, “pure reason corresponds to intellect or cognition, practical reason to will, action or conation, and judgment to feeling pleasure or pain, hence affection” (Hilgard, 1980, p. 109). In fact, Kant's main philosophical works clearly reflect his acceptance of the tripartite categorization of human mental life into cognition, conation, and affect (Critique of Pure Reason, 1789; Critique of Practical Reason, 1788; Critique of Judgment, 1790). This philosophical classification of psychology's subject matter into affect, cognition, and conation has had a major influence on the eventual development of empirical psychology.

In early laboratory research by Wilhelm Wundt, Titchener, and others, the tripartite division was used as a guide to the introspective assessments of various experimentally manipulated psychological experiences. For these researchers, a subject's self-reported affective, cognitive, and conative responses to a given stimulus had to be analyzed jointly, and were considered to be providing equally valid and complementary windows into the nature of an underlying and unitary psychological experience. However, this “unitary” approach to the psychological study of human experience did not survive early introspectionist experimentation. For most of the 20th century, affect, cognition, and conation were studied without reference to each other, as independent and isolated entities, and affect was arguably the most “neglected” member of the trilogy of mind, at least until recently (Hilgard, 1980). This does not mean, however, that there were no empirical investigations touching on the relationship between affect and cognition, as discussed in the next section.

SOME EARLY EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR AFFECTIVE INFLUENCES ON COGNITION AND JUDGMENTS

There are several early empirical experiments that suggested the close interdependence between affect and cognition. Most of these studies looked at affective influences on judgments and were typically concerned with demonstrating and explaining affect-congruent phenomena. One early demonstration of this effect was reported by Razran (1940) in a study that foreshadowed much later research on affect congruence. In this experiment, positive or negative affective states were induced unobtrusively, by exposing participants to highly aversive smells or providing them with a free lunch (!). Results showed that these manipulations produced a significant mood-congruent influence on subsequent social judgments. In another early demonstration of affect congruence, Wehmer and Izard (1962) used the manipulated behavior of the experimenter to induce a positive or negative affective state. This study also found that people who were made to feel good subsequently made more positive judgments than did individuals who experienced induced negative mood.

In later studies, Izard (1964) relied on the behavior of a confederate (a trained actress) to produce good or bad mood. This research also confirmed that both social judgments and performance were more positive after positive mood induction and more negative after negative mood induction. These affective influences were not limited to experimentally induced mood states. Researchers such as Wessman and Ricks (1966) demonstrated that people's judgments about various social activities were also positively correlated with self-rated mood over time, suggesting that affect congruence in thinking and judgments is a reliable everyday phenomenon. Similar conclusions were reached in more recent experimental studies based on naturally occurring moods by Jack Mayer (see also chapter by Mayer, this volume). Although this review of early empirical research on affect and judgments is by no means complete, it is clear that there was considerable if scattered evidence for aff...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Affect and Social Cognition
• I The Relationship Between Affect and Cognition: Fundamental Issues
• II Affective Influences on the Content of Cognition
• III Affective Influences on Social Information Processing
• IV Affective Influences on Motivation and Intentions
• V Affective Influences on Cognitively Mediated Social Behaviors
• VI The Role of Individual Differences in Affectivity
• Author Index
• Subject Index