The Role of Affect in Information Processing

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates the role of affect in information processing. Affect plays an important role in everyday life, and it has a significant influence on human cognitive functioning and social interactions. Although a large and growing body of research demonstrates that affect influences the extent to which individuals rely upon general, categorical information (e.g., stereotypes) as a basis for forming impressions of others, researchers disagree about what accounts for these findings. This project is concerned with how affect influences global/local processing during impression formation and evaluates a new conceptualization of the role of affect in processing. According to this conceptualization, affective feelings serve as conscious feedback about largely nonconscious emotional processes. This feedback is used by individuals to direct their information processing. In evaluating this conceptualization, the research acknowledges that many real-world impression formation contexts require individuals to actively seek out information about others. Despite this, many researchers have treated the perceiver as a relatively passive recipient of target information. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of how affective feelings function in more naturalistic contexts, it is essential to study active information seeking behavior. This will be done by initiating a new direction for research that examines how feelings guide information search and impression formation. Given that impression formation is one of the most common goals that individuals have in human interaction, a greater understanding of the role that feelings play in this process will serve to illuminate further our understanding of human behavior.