Framing-effects approach: A theoretical and methodological critique

The article deals with research on framing effects. First, I will start with classifying different approaches on framing. Subsequently, I will provide a definition of the concepts of frame, schema and framing, expand on framing research conducted so far - both theoretically and operationally. Having this equipment at hand, I will initiate a discussion on studies of framing-effects in terms of theory, methods and empirical results. This discussion leads to the conclusion that studies on framing effects are insufficiently concerned with the more recent psychological constructs and theories. In merely focusing on the activation of schemata, most studies ignore the more elaborate types of framing-effects. Therefore, several empirical questions remain unanswered and some methodical chances seem to be wasted

The influence of affect on attitude

Priests of the medieval Catholic Church understood something about the relationship between affect and attitude. To instill the proper attitude in parishioners, priests dramatized the power of liturgy to save them from Hell in a service in which the experience of darkness and fear gave way to light and familiar liturgy. These ceremonies “were written and performed so as to first arouse and then allay anxieties and fears ” (Scott, 2003, p. 227): The service usually began in the dark of night with the gothic cathedral’s nave filled with worship-pers cast into total darkness. Terrifying noises, wailing, shrieks, screams, and clanging of metal mimicked the chaos of hell, giving frightened witnesses a taste of what they could expect if they were tempted to stray. After a prolonged period of this imitation of hell, the cathedral’s interior gradually became filled with the blaze of a thousand lights. As the gloom diminished, cacophony was supplanted by the measured tones of Gregorian chants and polyphony. Light and divine order replaced darkness and chaos (R. Scott, personal correspondence, March 15, 2004). This ceremony was designed to buttress beliefs by experience and to transfigure abstractions into attitudes. In place of merely hearing about “the chaos and perdition of hell that regular performances of liturgy were designed to hold in check ” (Scott, 2003), parishioners shoul

THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN VISUALIZATION

The popular notion that emotion and reason are incompatible is no longer defensi- ble. Recent research in psychology and cognitive science has established emotion as a key element in numerous aspects of perception and cognition, including attention, memory, decision-making, risk perception, and creativity. This dissertation centers around the observation that emotion influences many aspects of perception and cog- nition that are crucial for effective visualization. First, I demonstrate that emotion influences accuracy in fundamental visualiza- tion tasks by combining a classic graphical perception experiment (from Cleveland and McGill) with emotion induction procedures from psychology (chapter 3). Next, I expand on the experiments in the first chapter to explore additional techniques for studying emotion and visualization, resulting in an experiment that shows that performance differences between primed individuals persist even as task difficulty in- creases (chapter 4). In a separate experiment, I show how certain emotional states (i.e. frustration and engagement) can be inferred from visualization interaction logs using machine learning (chapter 5). I then discuss a model for individual cognitive dif- ferences in visualization, which situates emotion into existing individual differences research in visualization (chapter 6). Finally, I propose an preliminary model for emotion in visualization (chapter 7)

Unseen Affective Faces Influence Person Perception Judgments in Schizophrenia.

To demonstrate the influence of unconscious affective processing on consciously processed information among people with and without schizophrenia, we used a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to examine whether early and rapid processing of affective information influences first impressions of structurally neutral faces. People with and without schizophrenia rated visible neutral faces as more or less trustworthy, warm, and competent when paired with unseen smiling or scowling faces compared to when paired with unseen neutral faces. Yet, people with schizophrenia also exhibited a deficit in explicit affect perception. These findings indicate that early processing of affective information is intact in schizophrenia but the integration of this information with semantic contexts is problematic. Furthermore, people with schizophrenia who were more influenced by smiling faces presented outside awareness reported experiencing more anticipatory pleasure, suggesting that the ability to rapidly process affective information is important for anticipation of future pleasurable events

Right here, right now: situated interventions to change consumer habits

Consumer behavior-change interventions have traditionally encouraged consumers to form conscious intentions, but in the past decade it has been shown that while these interventions have a medium-to-large effect in changing intentions, they have a much smaller effect in changing behavior. Consumers often do not act in accordance with their conscious intentions because situational cues in the immediate environment automatically elicit learned, habitual behaviors. It has therefore been suggested that researchers refocus their efforts on developing interventions that target unconscious, unintentional influences on behavior, such as cue-behavior (“habit”) associations. To develop effective consumer behavior-change interventions, however, we argue that it is first important to understand how consumer experiences are represented in memory, in order to successfully target the situational cues that most strongly predict engagement in habitual behavior. In this article, we present a situated cognition perspective of habits and discuss how the situated cognition perspective extends our understanding of how consumer experiences are represented in memory, and the processes through which these situational representations can be retrieved in order to elicit habitual consumer behaviors. Based on the principles of situated cognition, we then discuss five ways that interventions could change consumer habits by targeting situational cues in the consumer environment and suggest how existing interventions utilizing these behavior-change strategies could be improved by integrating the principles of the situated cognition approach

The effect of prosody on decision making

MPA Regional Research AwardThis study sought to induce mood through affective prosody and then measure whether this had a significant effect on decision making. Prosody can be defined as tone, rate, or stress patterns that occur during speech. Prosody, when used to convey emotion, is termed affective prosody. Prior research suggests that mood is a viable predictor of performance on risky decision making tasks. More specifically, positive mood has been linked with heuristic processing, which relies on emotional reasoning. Initially, individuals feel more averse to losses and more pleased with wins, leading to more advantageous decision making. Negative emotion has been linked with substantive/systematic processing; individuals tend to exhibit more disadvantageous decision making initially in an effort to determine the most favorable outcome. This study investigated whether affective prosody alone could directly induce mood and thereby alter performance on an unrelated decision making task. This study utilized the Hungry Donkey Task, which is adapted for use with both children and adults to measure risk taking. It was hypothesized that adults induced with positive affective prosody would make more favorable decisions in early trials, while those induced with negative affective prosody would make riskier decisions initially. Mood was successfully induced with affective prosody such that participants in the positive condition reported more positive self-report mood than the negative condition. Results do not support the hypothesis; rather display negative affective prosody as eliciting better decision making in both the early and later trials. This may be a result of the positive condition relying on heuristic processing, which may have led to less advantageous decisions. This study helps build a greater understanding of the effects of mood on risky decision making and lends support to the claim that affective prosody can serve as an influencing factor in others’ behavior.No embargoAcademic Major: Psycholog

The Effects of Perceptual and Conceptual Priming on Attention and Evaluation in Commercial Breaks

While a vast number of studies have examined the effect of priming on positive evaluation towards an object, little research has been done on its effect on attention. Priming’s effect on positive evaluation has generally been attributed to an increase in associational availability that results in easier mental processing. This ease of mental processing is known as fluency. Furthermore, the theoretical review reveals that fluency, attention and emotional responses are highly interconnected. In this thesis, the priming paradigm is applied to a novel context; a sequence of video commercials. By manipulating the relatedness of two commercials, we examine whether a commercial can influence advertising effectiveness in the form of attention and increased positive evaluation towards product exposures in another commercial. This research involves collecting data from three groups, two of which are manipulated by different kinds of primes, and one which acts as control group. The commercial that the dependent variables are measured upon is known as the target commercial, and shown last in the sequence. The first group is exposed to a stimulus that is physically alike to the target commercial (perceptual prime). The second group is exposed to a stimulus that is only associatively alike (conceptual prime). Establishing the distinctions of these prime’s effect on attention was an important aspect of this paper. We predicted that the product in the target commercial should be more noticeable, and that attention would be paid to the product for a longer time. Furthermore, we predicted an increased positive evaluation of the target commercial and increased emotional arousal, both of which are connected. Data was collected both implicitly in the form of eye tracking measures, and explicitly through a questionnaire. The results suggest that the product attracts attention for a significantly longer time for the conceptual group. Furthermore, perceptual priming increases explicit positive evaluation. However, neither forms of priming makes the viewers notice the product exposures easier, nor elicit any substantial emotional arousal. The results are discussed in light of previous research on the topic of priming, fluency, attention and positive evaluation

Effects of the time course of negative affective priming on moral judgment: the shortest the soa, the lesser the severity

Although a number of studies report that disgust exerts a special influence on moral judgments by making them more severe, these studies have not properly explained whether (a) the influence of disgust is moral-specific and (b) whether such influence results from specific disgust appraisals or if it is caused by a more basic affective computation. In this context, in the present investigation we test how affective priming by disgust and horror influences participant’s moral and nonmoral judgments. Additionally, by varying the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) duration, the present study tests the way such an influence varies through the time course of affective priming. This is, to our knowledge, the first research testing the effects of the time course of affective priming on moral judgments.Tot i que diferents investigacions suggereixen que l’emoció de repugnància incrementa la severitat dels judicis morals, aquests estudis no han acabat d’explicar prou si: (a) l’esmentada influència de la repugnància resulta específica dels judicis morals o afecta també als judicis no morals; (b) si l’efecte susdit resulta d’un procés de valoració (appraisal) específica o es tracta més aviat d’una influència de l’afecte. En el context descrit, aquesta investigació contrasta si el priming afectiu (a partir d’estímuls prime de repugnància i horror) influeix sobre els judicis morals i no morals, analitzant, alhora, si aquest efecte canvia segons els paràmetres temporals del priming, tot investigant com influeix la durada de l’interval entre l’aparició del prime i la del target (Stimulus-Onset Asynchrony, SOA). Aquest treball constitueix el primer estudi en torn dels efectes del priming afectiu de repugnància i horror (i del seu curs temporal) sobre els judicis morals i no moralsAunque diversas investigaciones sugieren que la repugnancia incrementa la severidad de los juicios morales, estos estudios explican suficientemente: (a) si dicha influencia es específica de los juicios morales o afecta también a los no morales; (b) si el efecto descrito resulta de un proceso de valoración (appraisal) o se trata de una mera influencia del afecto. En el contexto descrito, esta investigación contrasta si el priming afectivo, utilizando primes de repugnancia y de horror, influye sobre los juicios morales y sobre los no morales, estudiando asimismo si dicho efecto cambia según los parámetros temporales del priming a partir del análisis de la influencia del intervalo entre la aparición del prime y la del target (stimulus-onset asynchrony, SOA). Este trabajo constituye el primer estudio en torno a los efectos del priming afectivo de repugnancia y horror, así como de su curso temporal, sobre los juicios morales vs. no morales

Can I Trust You? Negative Affective Priming Influences Social Judgments in Schizophrenia

Successful social interactions rely on the ability to make accurate judgments based on social cues as well as the ability to control the influence of internal or external affective information on those judgments. Prior research suggests that individuals with schizophrenia misinterpret social stimuli and this misinterpretation contributes to impaired social functioning. We tested the hypothesis that for people with schizophrenia, social judgments are abnormally influenced by affective information. Twenty-three patients with schizophrenia and 35 healthy control participants rated the trustworthiness of faces following the presentation of neutral, negative (threat-related), or positive affective primes. Results showed that all participants rated faces following negative affective primes as less trustworthy than faces following neutral or positive primes. Importantly, this effect was significantly more pronounced for participants with schizophrenia, suggesting that schizophrenia may be characterized by an exaggerated influence of negative affective information on social judgment. Furthermore, the extent that the negative affective prime influenced trustworthiness judgments was significantly associated with patients' severity of positive symptoms, particularly feelings of persecution. These findings suggest that for people with schizophrenia, negative affective information contributes to an interpretive bias, consistent with paranoid ideation, when judging the trustworthiness of others. This bias may contribute to social impairments in schizophrenia.Psycholog