Cognitive Consequences of Emotion

情绪的认知后果

• 批准号: 1252079
• 负责人: Gerald Clore
• 金额: $ 34.99万
• 依托单位: University of Virginia Main Campus
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-05-15 至 2017-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1252079&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Cognitive; Consequences; Emotion

The proposed research investigates a new understanding of how feelings regulate thinking. The proposed experiments vary people's mindsets and their moods to assess a new explanation for several different textbook phenomena concerning emotion and thought. The theory is that the moment-to-moment flashes of affect that people regularly experience have the effect of tuning their thought processes to help negotiate everyday cognitive tasks. This process occurs when feelings signal the value of a person's current mindset for a given task. Affect thus acts like a mental traffic cop; positive affect giving a green light and negative affect a red light to one's currently active mindset.Thirty years of research has assumed that specific affective states automatically activate specific cognitive orientations. Thus, textbooks say that happy moods increase big picture thinking and creativity, but also increase stereotyping and false memories. In addition, they say that sad moods can increase accuracy, systematic processing, and "depressive realism." In contrast, a new view of these phenomena has very different implications for how people's emotional reactions regulate thinking and problem solving. The proposed research tests this new view by specifying conditions capable of both replicating and reversing the predictions made by the standard view. Broader impacts include the research training of graduate and undergraduate students, who will participate in all aspects of the project from planning to conducting the research and from analyzing the data to its publication. The importance of this new view is that a large body of findings previously assumed to reflect basic and general principles may actually be situationally specific in nature. Social psychologists have learned previously that principles from research on primarily male respondents are less general than first assumed. Similarly, conclusions from primarily Western samples have led to culturally specific, rather than thoroughly general, facts about human nature. In a related way, the proposed view implies that the results of past research on emotional influences on cognition reveal as much about the normative situations that were studied as they do about how emotion actually influences thought. The proposed principles promise a more generally applicable answer to questions about mind and emotion.

这项提议的研究对情感如何调节思维进行了新的理解。拟议中的实验改变了人们的心态和情绪，以评估几种不同的教科书上关于情感和思想的现象的新解释。该理论认为，人们经常经历的瞬间情感闪现会调节他们的思维过程，帮助他们完成日常的认知任务。当一个人对某项任务的当前心态表现出价值时，这个过程就会发生。因此，情感就像精神上的交通警察；积极的影响给一个人当前积极的心态亮绿灯，消极的影响给一个人当前积极的心态亮红灯。三十年的研究假设特定的情感状态会自动激活特定的认知取向。因此，教科书上说，快乐的情绪会增加大局思维和创造力，但也会增加刻板印象和错误记忆。此外，他们说，悲伤的情绪可以提高准确性、系统处理和“抑郁现实主义”。相比之下，对这些现象的一种新观点对人们的情绪反应如何调节思维和解决问题有着截然不同的含义。拟议的研究通过指定能够复制和逆转标准观点所做预测的条件来检验这一新观点。更广泛的影响包括研究生和本科生的研究训练，他们将参与项目的各个方面，从计划到进行研究，从分析数据到发表。这种新观点的重要性在于，以前被认为反映基本和一般原则的大量研究结果实际上可能在本质上是具体情况的。社会心理学家此前已经了解到，从主要针对男性受访者的研究中得出的原则并不像最初假设的那样普遍。类似地，主要来自西方样本的结论导致了文化特定的，而不是彻底的，关于人性的事实。以一种相关的方式，提出的观点意味着，过去关于情绪对认知影响的研究结果揭示了所研究的规范情境，就像它们揭示了情绪实际上如何影响思维一样。提出的原则有望为有关思想和情感的问题提供更普遍适用的答案。