Emotion and Social Judgements

Joseph P. Forgas

• Publisher: Garland Science
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780080402352
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000142754
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The role of emotions in interpersonal judgements about health and illness and in social decisions receive particular attention in this book. The book is organised in three sections: conceptual approaches to the connection between emotion, mood and judgements; extension of the basic theory behind how feelings affect social judgements; and theoretical models and their application in research.

Part 1
Basic Conceptual Orientations

1
Affect and Social Judgments: An Introductory Review

JOSEPH P. FORGAS
University of New South Wales

Contents

Affect and social judgments: an historical overview

Early research on affect and social judgments

Recent theories of affect, cognition and social judgments

Information storage and retrieval theories of mood effects on social judgments

Empirical evidence for affect-priming models

Extensions of the affect-priming models

Affect as information: the misattribution model

Affective influences on information processing strategies

Affect and Persuasion

Summary and Overview of the Book

How do feelings influence our social perceptions and judgments? This question has been of intense interest to philosophers, artists and scientists, as well as lay people since time immemorial. Surprisingly, the scientific study of affective influences on social judgments is a fairly recent development. Yet a proper understanding of the mechanisms mediating between feeling states and the cognitive processes that are involved in social judgments is also of considerable practical relevance. The accuracy and efficiency of our social perceptions and judgments is of critical importance both in our private and in our working lives. The ability to form accurate and unbiased impressions of others is not only the foundation of effective interpersonal behaviour (Heider, 1958), but is also an important prerequisite for our personal and social adjustment and, ultimately, mental health. Further, the ability to form accurate social judgments is also an increasingly important part of the working lives of many people. In developed industrialized societies an ever increasing proportion of workers are employed in tertiary, service industries, where interpersonal “people skills” are perhaps the most important occupational skills required. During the past several years there has been an explosive growth in research on the role of affective states in social perception, judgments and decisions. This book aims to bring together and integrate the most recent theoretical, empirical and practical developments in this field, in order to present an up-to-date review and integration of how affect impinges on social judgments. Part 1 of the book contains chapters dealing with the basic theoretical framework of research on affect and social judgments; Part 2 includes chapters describing extensions and elaborations; and Part 3 presents contributions that link basic research on affect and social judgments to areas of application.

This introductory chapter in particular has the objective of outlining the historical and theoretical background of interest in affect and cognition, and surveying the future prospects for this exciting field of enquiry.

Affect and Social Judgments: An Historical Overview

The recent emergence of interest in how affective states may influence a variety of cognitive processes (cf. Bower, 1981; Fiedler and Forgas, 1988; Forgas and Bower, 1988; Isen, 1984; Schwarz and Clore, 1988) may only be properly appreciated from an historical perspective. Since its inception, the empirical discipline of psychology operated on the implicit assumption that mental faculties such as affect, cognition and conation can be adequately studied in separation from each other. As Hilgard (1980) argued, this fragmentation of psychology’s subject matter originated with German faculty psychology in the eighteenth century, and has been greatly accelerated during the explosive growth of empirical psychology in the twentieth century. The early dominant behaviorist models and the more recent cognitivist orientation that replaced them shared one common characteristic: neither of these two major paradigms attributed much importance to the study of affective processes and reactions. For the radical behaviorist, the study of affect, by definition involving internal processes, was inadmissible. If at all, affect and motivation were often studied in their most trivial manifestations, as aspects of environmentally manipulated drive states, such as hunger or thirst. For the cognitive psychologist, affect was long considered as irrelevant to its subject matter, traditionally defined as the study of essentially cold, rational ideation. At best, affective states were thought of as potentially “disruptive” influences on normal, that is affect-less, cognition.

It is in reaction to this long-assumed myth of affect-less behavior and cognition that during the past ten years or so, a number of influential theorists proposed a re-integration of affect into the mainstream of psychological inquiry. Zajonc (1980), in his influential paper, argued that affective reactions are often primary to, and temporarily precede elaborate cognitive processing, a view that has elicited considerable debate essentially centered on the question of how broadly one should define the domain of “cognition” (Lazarus, 1981, 1984). Others proposed broadly cognitivist conceptualizations of affect, where emotional states and reactions are subsumed as components of a single, integrated cognitive representational system (Bower, 1981; Bower and Cohen, 1982; Isen, 1984). Despite its shortcomings, this cognitive-reductionist view appears to have stimulated the overwhelming majority of recently published research dealing with the interface of affect and cognition, probably because of the existence of a rich experimental tradition in information processing psychology. However, within social psychology there is now growing evidence suggesting that in many everyday social contexts, affect and cognition may be regarded as at least partially independent response systems. Several theorists assume that affective states may fulfill direct informational functions, a position closely related to traditional social psychological formulations, and attribution theory in particular (Schwarz and Clore, 1988).

As in all areas of psychology dealing with affective phenomena, the accurate definition of exactly what is meant by emotion, affect and related terms such as evaluation remains a perennial problem (Frijda, 1986). However, there is a slowly developing consensus providing some clarification of the relationship betwen the most commonly used terms here, such as affect, emotion, evaluation and mood. The term “affect” is often used as a general and inclusive label to refer to both mood and emotion (cf. Petty, Gleicher and Baker, this volume). Some theorists consider that low-level affective reactions of a positive or negative valence arise directly in reaction to a stimulus event, and involve both physiological and phenomenological experiences (Leventhal, 1980) without abstract cognitive antecedents, but with possible informational functions (Clore and Parrott, this volume). A distinction between the terms “emotion” and “mood” is somewhat more problematic. Several theorists have suggested that moods are low-intensity and relatively enduring affective states with no immediately salient antecedent cause and therefore little cognitive content (e.g. feeling good or feeling bad). Emotions in turn are more intense, short lived and usually have a definite cause and clear cognitive content (e.g. annoyance, anger, or fear). Both moods and emotions have informational value. Whereas mood functions as a general, nonspecific positive or negative input that may be easily misattributed to an incorrect cause (Schwarz and Clore, 1988), emotions presumably evolved with specific signalling functions about particular environmental occurrences (Frijda, 1986). There is some evidence that moods have a relatively constant, nonspecific and additive effect on social judgments, while emotions, because of their high cognitive content, are dealt with in a manner similar to other cognitive inputs (Kaplan, this volume). Both of these terms are different from evaluation, an essential component of most attitudes, that may or may not involve affective reactions (see Innes and Ahrens, this volume).

Early Research on Affect and Social Judgments

The currently dominant cognitivist orientation in the domain of affective influences on social judgments represents a relatively recent development. As early as 1940, Razran showed that reactions to socio-political slogans were more favorable when these messages were received by subjects in a positive affective state (while enjoying a free lunch) than in a negative state (while being exposed to unpleasant smells). In the not so distant past, such affective influences on social judgments were typically accounted for in terms of either psychodynamic, or learning and conditioning principles. For example, Feshbach and Singer (1957) used the psychoanalytic concept of “projection” to account for the influence of affective states on social judgments. In this study, male subjects were made fearful through the administration of painful electric shocks, and were then instructed to either express or suppress their feelings, before making social judgments of another person. Results showed that fear resulted in a tendency to “perceive another person as fearful and anxious” and “suppression of fear facilitates the tendency to project fear onto another social object” (p. 286). This interpretation echoes Murray’s (1933) even earlier dynamic interpretation of the links between affect and cognition. Several other early studies also demonstrated mood-induced differences in social judgments. In a study by Wehmer and Izard (1962), positive or negative affect was induced in subjects through the manipulated behavior of the experimenter. Subjects in the positive mood condition made more positive judgments of the task and the experimenter and performed better on the task than did subjects in the negative mood condition. In a related study, Izard (1964) used an actress behaving in an enthusiastic, friendly, angry, or fearful manner to induce different affective states in subjects. Subjects in the positive affect conditions performed better on the task, and made more positive judgments of themselves as well as of the actress, than subjects in whom a negative mood had been induced. Wessman and Ricks (1966) found that self-perceptions as well as interest in social activities was positively associated with a person’s self-rated mood state over prolonged periods.

Accounts of these effects, consistent with the Zeitgeist in psychology at the time, shifted from psychoanalytic to conditioning principles. The Byrne and Clore (1970) model of classically conditioned evaluative responses predicts that reactions to social stimuli are determined by their association with other stimuli capable of eliciting unconditioned affective reactions. Griffitt (1970) found that subjects in whom negative affect has been induced by adverse environmental conditions, such as excessive heat and humidity, made more negative judgments of a target person. Within such a reinforcement-affective framework, “evaluative responses are seen as being determined by the positive or negative properties of the total stimulus situation” (p. 240), through the classical conditioning of evaluative responses. Gouaux (1971) reported mood-induced differences in social judgments following exposure to happy or depressing films, concluding that “interpersonal attraction is a positive function of the subject’s affective state” (p. 40). Gouaux and Summers (1973) gave their subjects spurious positive or negative interpersonal feedback to manipulate mood, with essentially similar results. These early experiments provided strong evidence that affective states do have a general and widespread influence on a variety of social judgments, across a number of different judgmental and mood manipulation conditions. However, the theoretical explanations offered for these effects, based on conditioning and associationist principles, were far from conclusive. The conditioning experiments (c.f. Griffitt, Gouaux) relied on the simultaneous presence of affect-eliciting stimuli and the judgmental target, yet it is known from other studies (e.g. Wessman and Ricks, 1966) that preexisting, free-floating mood states can have identical judgmental consequences. Kaplan and Anderson (1973) presented an early critique of the conditioning theory of interpersonal attraction, arguing for an information integration model of affective influences on social judgments instead. Although conditioning and associations can clearly determine evaluative reactions to simpler social stimuli such as words (Staats et al., 1962), as a general theory of mood effects on social judgments the model leaves much to be desired. Paradoxically, it is the psychoanalytic explanation put forward by Feshbach and Singer (1957) that comes closest to contemporary cognitive theorizing, by suggesting that cognition in a sense becomes “infused” with affect. Explaining how this process of “infusion” occurs is precisely what current cognitive models have attempted to do (cf. Bower, 1983, this volume).

Recent Theories of Affect, Cognition, and Social Judgments

It is in theorizing about the role of affect in social judgments that the most striking developments have occurred in recent years. As the accumulation of empirical information reached a “critical mass” in a variety of fields, a slow but inexorable convergence and integration of theories has become apparent in recent years. As is often the case in newly active fields, the similarities and overlaps between models first proposed in isolation from each other have become apparent, and theories first thought of as competing now appear complementary. This convergence of theoretical orientations is a strong feature of many of the contributions to this book. An excellent example of this trend is Bower’s chapter, which draws widely from information integration theory, models of judgmental heuristics and social psychological research on judgments in its most up-to-date reformulation of the associative network model. Other chapters, by Branscombe and Cohen, Clore and Parrott, Fiedler, Schwarz and Bless, and others, echo this theoretical eclecticism, suggesting that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Part 1. Basic Conceptual Orientations
• Part 2. Integrations and Extensions
• Part 3. Theories and Applications
• Name Index
• Subject Index