Emotions and Social Cognition

Emotion vs. Mood

• Affect refers to immediate expressions of emotion.
• Mood refers to emotional experience over a more prolonged period of time.

What Are Emotions?

• Emotion is a brief, specific response, both psychological and physiological, that helps people meet goals, including social goals.
• Emotions are brief and specific, related to particular people and events.
• Emotions help us achieve our social goals by responding to specific challenges or opportunities in interactions with others.
• Emotions motivate and guide appropriate goal‐directed behavior that supports stronger and smoother social relationships.

The Components of Emotions

Appraisal Processes

• Appraisal processes consist of patterns of construal by which we evaluate events in our environments according to their relation to our current goals.
  • Is the event consistent or inconsistent with our goals?
  • Pleasant or unpleasant feelings.
  • What caused the event? Who is responsible for it?
  • Is it fair? What might be done about it?
• Appraisal can be fast and automatic, followed by more deliberate appraisals.

Physiological Responses

• Emotions involve distinct physiological responses.
  • Autonomic nervous system is responsible for the fight‐or‐flight response.

Expressive Behavior

• Emotions are expressed in “body language” or nonverbal behavior.
  • Gestures, tone of voice, bodily posture.
  • Smiles, frowns, furrowed brows, clenched fists, slumped shoulders.

Subjective Feelings

• Subjective feelings are qualities that define what the experience of a particular emotion is like.
  • Described with words, metaphors, and narratives.

Actions Tendencies

• Actions tendencies represents motivation to behave in certain ways.

Emotional Expressions: Evolutionary Perspective

• Emotions evolved because they have an adaptive purpose in helping species to survive and flourish.
  • Fear mobilizes to action.
  • Anger provokes aggression.
• Expression of emotion has a communication value.
• Ekman and Friesen linked facial expressions to particular emotions.
  • Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust are universally recognized.
  • Human facial muscles can create over 7000 different expressions.

Emotional Expressions: Culturally Specific

Emotion Accents

• Emotion accents are a specific way people from different cultures express a particular emotion.

Focal Emotions

• Focal emotions are experienced with greater frequency and intensity.
  • An emotion that is especially common within a particular culture.
  • Cultures seem to be defined by particular emotions.
• Emotions that promote important cultural ideals are valued and will tend to play a prominent role in the social lives of individuals.
  • Affect valuation theory explains why some emotions become focal in a particular culture.

Cultural Differences and Emotional Behaviors

• Cultural differences in which emotions are most valued translate into variations in emotional behaviors.
  • Americans are more likely to participate in exciting but risky recreational practices and advertise consumer products with intense smiles of excitement.
  • Americans are more likely to get addicted to excitement‐enhancing drugs and express preferences for upbeat, exciting music

Display Rules

• Display rules are cultural norms or guidelines that dictate what emotions are appropriate in particular situations.
  • Intensification, de‐intensification, neutralizing, masking.

From Cognition to Emotions

• Our thoughts can change or influence our emotions and moods.
  • Affective experiences are only possible following appraisals.
  • Physical arousal becomes emotion only when it is accompanied by a label or by an explanation for the arousal.
• Emotions, such as love, have two factors—an arousal factor and a cognitive factor.
  • Passionate (romantic) love comprises physiological arousal and the belief that another person is the cause of the arousal (appraisal).
• Any form of strong emotion, good or bad, can influence our feelings of romantic attraction.
  • Fear, rejection, frustration, hatred, excitement, sexual gratification.
• Misattribution of arousal occurs when people incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing.

From Emotions to Social Cognition

• Emotions involve distinct appraisals.
• The mind is attuned to threat and uncertainty, core appraisals of fear.
• Fear directs your attention to potential threats, preparing you to respond effectively.
• We perceive events in ways that are consistent with the emotions we’re currently feeling.
  • Participants listened to uplifting or depressing music, then completed a lexical decision task.
  • Feeling happy: quicker to identify happy words (delight) than sad words (weep) or positive words unrelated to happiness (calm).
  • Feeling sad: quicker to identify sad words (depression) than happy words (smile) or negative words unrelated to sadness (injury).
• Emotions influence broader judgments, such as our sense that our circumstances are fair or safe—or unfair and dangerous.
  • Two months after 9/11—participants asked to write about how attacks made them angry or made them fearful.
  • They judged future terrorist attacks more likely and reported to be more likely to be victimized by different threats (dying in a flu epidemic).
• Our experiences of anger may lower our threshold for seeing aggressive intentions in others.
• The influences emotions have on perceptions can be disastrous; anger primes us to perceive aggression.
  • Participants wrote about a memory that made them feel anger or disgust or sadness and briefly viewed a picture of a man holding a gun or neutral object.
  • Anger condition: more likely to misidentify neutral object as a gun (but not misidentify gun as a neutral object).

Mood States and Judgments

• Mood states are also powerful determinants of our current judgments about our well‐being.
  • Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore (1983) called participants on the telephone on sunny vs. cloudy days.
  • Participants reported their current mood and general well-being and reported better moods and greater well‐being on sunny days than rainy days.
• Even moods created subtly can have effects on our social judgments.
  • Fritz Strack and colleagues (1988): Participants rated how funny cartoons were while holding a writing pen in their mouth, which either activated muscle contractions used for smiling rather than frowning.
  • Stepper and Strack (1993): People interpreted events more positively when sitting in an upright position vs. slumped position.
  • Finding a coin in a pay phone or being offered some milk and cookies.

Affect Heuristic

• A tendency to rely on automatically occurring affective responses to stimuli to guide our judgments of them.
• Affect heuristic influence a wide range of social judgments and behaviors.
• Daniel Kahneman: “The idea of an affect heuristic…is probably the most important development in the study of…heuristics in the past few decades. There is compelling evidence for the proposition that every stimulus evokes an affective evaluation, which is not always conscious….”(Daniel Kahneman 2003, p. 710)
• Why is the affect heuristic so strong?
  • Attribute substitution: We deal with cognitively difficult social judgments by replacing them with easier ones—without being aware of this happening.

Mood and Cognitive Strategies

• Our moods can also affect the types of cognitive strategies that we use to make social judgments.
  • When in a positive mood we are more likely to stereotype.
• Why does a positive mood contribute to stereotyping?
  • Not motivated to engage in extensive cognitive effort (don’t want to ruin mood).
  • Happy people motivated to think carefully (e.g. made accountable for their judgments) can avoid stereotypic responses.
• Why does anger contribute to stereotyping?
  • Being angry overwhelms cognitively—leading us not to think too carefully about others.
• Not all negative moods facilitate stereotyping and prejudice.
  • Sad people don’t tend to think stereotypically.
  • Sad moods may influence judgments by setting strict subjective criteria for judgments.
• Study induced positive mood in participants, which produced changes in reasoning.
  • Given a word (carpet) and asked to generate related words.
  • Generate more novel associations (fresh or texture).
  • Neutral state generate more common responses (rug).
  • Positive mood prompts people to reason in ways that are flexible and creative.
  • People in a positive mood categorized objects in more inclusive ways.
  • Rate unconventional members of categories (like cane or purse as an example of clothing) as better members of that category.
• Mood-dependent memory: A tendency to better remember information when our current mood matches the mood we were in when we encoded that information.

Mood Congruence Effects

• When we are more able to retrieve memories that match our current mood.