COGNITIVE MALLEABILITY: DOES DISGUST ACT AS A STOP SIGNAL ON CURRENTLY ACCESSIBLE COGNITIVE PROCESSING STYLES IN PERCEPTUAL AND CONCEPTUAL TASKS?

Much of the research on feeling and thought supports the notion of a fixed relationship between affect and cognition, specifically that particular affective experiences promote particular ways of thinking (i.e., information processing styles). Surprisingly, little is known about the relationship between disgust and cognition, and this dissertation sought to rectify this omission. The recently proposed Cognitive Malleability approach (Clore, et al., 2001; Huntsinger & Clore, 2007; Isbell, 2010; Isbell, Lair, & Rovenpor, 2013) calls the fixed nature of the affect-cognition relationship into question, and instead argues that affect confers value on whatever information processing style is currently dominant. This new approach suggests that contrary to the current view of a fixed relationship between affect and cognition, this relationship is instead highly malleable. This dissertation had three primary research goals: (1) to determine whether disgust interacts with initial cognitive processing styles, (2) to investigate if a malleable relationship between disgust and cognition exists for both basic cognition (perceptual tasks) and upper-level cognition (conceptual tasks), and (3) to determine if disgust and cognition interact in low-disgust relevant contexts (neutral stimuli, social judgments) and high-disgust relevant contexts (disgusting stimuli, moral judgments). Results reveal that disgust acts as a stop signal on currently dominant information processing styles to influence visual attention to emotional stimuli (Study 2), impression formation in a social context (Study 3), and impression formation in a moral context (Study 4). Results from Study 1, which investigated how disgust and initial processing styles interact to influence visual attention to neutral stimuli, were inconclusive

Gender influences the feedback anger and disgust provide about construal use in likelihood judgments

According to the affect-as-cognitive-feedback approach, affect validates or invalidates one’s active cognition. The current work investigated whether men and women receive different cognitive validation cues from gender-normative emotions when making likelihood judgments. Study 1 establishes under a default abstract mindset that gender-inconsistent negative emotions (anger for men and disgust for women) serve to invalidate the mindset and induce more concrete processing, whereas gender-consistent negative emotions (disgust for men and anger for women) maintain the default abstract processing. In Study 2, participants primed with abstract or concrete mindsets wrote about an angry or disgusting life event before making likelihood judgments. The abstract prime condition replicated the results from Study 1. As theorized, the concrete prime condition produced opposite results, as gender-consistent negative emotions invalidated the concrete mindset and induced more abstract processing, whereas gender-inconsistent emotions maintained the concrete mindset. Study 3 investigated whether men’s gender identification influenced and interacted with affective intensity to provide feedback about a concrete cognitive mindset. High gender-identifying men tended to express anger more than disgust, regardless of affective condition. Further, greater felt anger led to invalidation of the primed mindset, and greater felt disgust led to maintenance of the primed mindset. The reverse pattern emerged for low gender-identifying men. This work extends the affect-as-cognitive feedback approach by investigating construal levels and establishes that gender moderates the affect-cognition relationship when affect is associated with gender normative expectations

The impact of negative emotions on self-concept abstraction depends on accessible information processing styles

Research suggests that anger promotes global, abstract processing whereas sadness and fear promote local, concrete processing (see Schwarz & Clore, 2007 for a review). Contrary to a large and influential body of work suggesting that specific affective experiences are tethered to specific cognitive outcomes, the affect-as-cognitive-feedback account maintains that affective experiences confer positive or negative value on currently dominant processing styles, and thus can lead to either global or local processing (Huntsinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2014). The current work extends this theoretical perspective by investigating the impact of discrete negative emotions on the self-concept. By experimentally manipulating information processing styles and discrete negative emotions that vary in appraisals of certainty, we demonstrate that the impact of discrete negative emotions on the spontaneous self-concept depends on accessible processing styles. When global processing was accessible, individuals in angry (negative, high certainty) states generated more abstract statements about themselves than individuals in either sad (Experiment 1) or fearful (Experiment 2; negative, low certainty) states. When local processing was made accessible, however, the opposite pattern emerged, whereby individuals in angry states generated fewer abstract statements than individuals in sad or fearful states. Together these studies provide new insights into the mechanisms through which discrete emotions influence cognition. In contrast to theories assuming a dedicated link between emotions and processing styles, these results suggest that discrete emotions provide feedback about accessible ways of thinking, and are consistent with recent evidence suggesting that the impact of affect on cognition is highly context-dependent

Emotion provides feedback about thinking styles to influence natural hazard likelihood and perceived response preparedness

Making judgments about whether one is prepared for a natural hazard (e.g., tornado, earthquake) involves processing information, experiencing emotions, and considering the short-term and long-term tradeoffs. However, few experimental investigations exist of momentary social cognitive factors that influence natural hazard likelihood and perceived response preparedness. Drawing on the Affect-as-Cognitive-Feedback approach, in which positive emotions (and anger) tend to validate thinking styles whereas negative emotions tend to invalidate them, the current work investigates how emotion and thinking styles interact to influence natural hazard judgments. In Study 1, participants completed a task to induce abstract or concrete thought and wrote about a happy or sad memory before making natural hazard likelihood and preparedness judgments. As expected, those under abstract thought and feeling happy judged natural hazards as more likely than those feeling sad. The opposite pattern emerged under concrete thought. Emotion and thinking styles also interacted to indirectly influence perceived preparedness via likelihood judgments. Study 2 participants under abstract or concrete thinking styles watched a happy, sad, or neutral video before completing the same judgments from Study 1 and rating their judgment confidence. High confidence individuals replicated the findings from Study 1, whereas low confidence individuals demonstrated the opposite pattern. In Study 3, a US national sample completed a global or local prime and wrote about an angry or sad memory before making the same judgments from Study 1. After controlling for age and prior natural hazard experience, emotion and thinking style interacted to influence perceived response preparedness

The Impact of Affect on Out-Group Judgments Depends on Dominant Information-Processing Styles:Evidence From Incidental and Integral Affect Paradigms

Two studies tested the affect-as-cognitive-feedback model, in which positive and negative affective states are not uniquely associated with particular processing styles, but rather serve as feedback about currently accessible processing styles. The studies extend existing work by investigating (a) both incidental and integral affect, (b) out-group judgments, and (c) downstream consequences. We manipulated processing styles and either incidental (Study 1) or integral (Study 2) affect and measured perceptions of out-group homogeneity. Positive (relative to negative) affect increased out-group homogeneity judgments when global processing was primed, but under local priming, the effect reversed (Studies 1 and 2). A similar interactive effect emerged on attributions, which had downstream consequences for behavioral intentions (Study 2). These results demonstrate that both incidental and integral affect do not directly produce specific processing styles, but rather influence thinking by providing feedback about currently accessible processing styles

A Multi-Site Collaborative Study of the Hostile Priming Effect

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 2018) that closely followed the methods described by Srull and Wyer (1979) found a hostile priming effect that was nearly zero, which casts doubt on whether these methods reliably produce an effect. To address some limitations with McCarthy et al. (2018), the current multi-site collaborative study included data collected from 29 labs. Each lab conducted a close replication (total N = 2,123) and a conceptual replication (total N = 2,579) of Srull and Wyer’s methods. The hostile priming effect for both the close replication (d = 0.09, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.22], z = 1.34, p = .16) and the conceptual replication (d = 0.05, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.15], z = 1.15, p = .58) were not significantly different from zero and, if the true effects are non-zero, were smaller than what most labs could feasibly and routinely detect. Despite our best efforts to produce favorable conditions for the effect to emerge, we did not detect a hostile priming effect. We suggest that researchers should not invest more resources into trying to detect a hostile priming effect using methods like those described in Srull and Wyer (1979)