Cognitive Consequences of Emotion

这项拟议中的研究调查了对情感如何调节思维的新理解。 拟议中的实验改变了人们的心态和情绪，以评估对几种不同的教科书现象的新解释，这些现象涉及情感和思想。该理论认为，人们经常经历的瞬间闪现的情感具有调整思维过程的效果，以帮助协商日常认知任务。这个过程发生在当感觉信号的价值一个人的当前心态为一个给定的任务。因此，情感就像一个精神交通警察;积极的情感给一个人当前活跃的心态亮起了绿色灯，消极的情感给一个人当前活跃的心态亮起了红灯。因此，教科书上说，快乐的情绪会增加全局思维和创造力，但也会增加刻板印象和错误记忆。 此外，他们还说，悲伤的情绪可以提高准确性、系统性处理和"抑郁现实主义"。“相反，对这些现象的新观点对人们的情绪反应如何调节思维和解决问题有着非常不同的影响。拟议中的研究通过指定能够复制和逆转标准观点所作预测的条件来测试这种新观点。 更广泛的影响包括研究生和本科生的研究培训，他们将参与项目的各个方面，从规划到进行研究，从分析数据到出版。这一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具有特定的情境性质。社会心理学家以前已经了解到，主要针对男性受访者的研究原则并不像最初假设的那样普遍。同样，主要来自西方样本的结论导致了关于人性的文化特定事实，而不是彻底的普遍事实。与此相关的是，上述观点暗示，过去关于情绪对认知影响的研究结果，既揭示了情绪实际上是如何影响思维的，也揭示了所研究的规范情境。所提出的原则承诺一个更普遍适用的答案，关于心灵和情感的问题。

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.