COGNITIVE CONSEQUENCES OF EMOTION

本研究的目的是研究情绪感受影响记忆、判断和信息处理的认知过程。通常情况下，情感会对大部分无意识的情绪过程提供有意识的反馈。本研究旨在检验这些反馈的资讯价值。这些实验包括诱导温和的情绪状态（例如，音乐段落），以提供情感感受的来源，以便研究它们对认知过程的控制。实验提出了三个问题。(1)情绪对记忆的影响是由情感体验还是情感概念决定的？这项研究将通过用不同的技术分别激活感觉和想法来比较它们各自的影响。(2)共同过程是否对情绪和无意识思想的认知加工都有影响？实验包括展示微笑或皱眉的表情示意图，但曝光时间太短，无法被有意识地感知，以确定这种明显由内部产生的情感信息是否与情绪感受在处理过程中具有相同的影响。(3)积极情绪与消极情绪、对整体刺激与局部刺激的注意之间的关系是共同神经回路的副产品，还是依赖于情感感受的信息反馈特性？这些过程对学习、日常判断、决策和解决问题都有潜在的重要影响，对它们的研究可能为理解情感困难提供社会认知基础。

The aim of the proposed research is to examine the cognitive processes by which emotional feelings influence memory, judgment, and information processing. Normally affective feelings provide conscious feedback about largely nonconscious emotional processes. The proposed research examines the information value of such feedback. The experiments involve the induction of mild mood states (e.g., with musical passages) to provide a source of affective feelings, so that their control of cognitive processes can be studied. The experiments ask three questions. (l) Are mood effects on memory governed by affective experience or by affective concepts? The research will compare the effects of feelings and ideas independently by activating each with a separate technique. (2) Do common processes underlie the effects on cognitive processing of both mood and unconscious ideas? Experiments involve presenting schematic smiling or frowning faces at exposures too brief to be consciously perceived to determine whether such apparently internally generated affective information has the same effects on processing as feelings of mood. (3) Is the relationship between positive vs. negative affect and attention to global vs. local stimuli a byproduct of their common neural circuitry or are dependent on the informational feedback properties of affective feelings? These processes each have potentially important implications for learning and for daily judgment, decision making, and problem solving, and research on them may provide a social cognitive basis for understanding emotional difficulty.