COGNITIVE CONSEQUENCES OF EMOTION

University Of Virginia Charlottesville, Charlottesville VA

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Abstract

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.