Cognitive Consequences of Emotion

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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.