Level 4 Emotion Option. Louise Phillips. Emotion and Cognition.

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Level 4 Emotion Option.Louise Phillips.Emotion
and Cognition.

• Lecture 2 Experimental manipulations of mood
  The good and bad effects of happiness on
  cognition.

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Cognitive biases in happy mood states
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Effect of happy mood on lexical deicsion

• Olafson Ferraro (2001) Brain and Cognition, 45
• Induced into either sad/happy mood with music
• Given lexical decision task
• Sad words, happy words, nonwords
• E.g. DEPRESSED, EXCITED, FOROUGH
• Asked to make decision word or non-word?
• Happy mood causes quicker lexical decisions about
  happy compared to sad words.
• Sad mood quicker decision to sad words

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Happy mood effects on cognition. Does being
happy help or hinder cognition?
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Facilitating effects of happy mood

• Isen (1999)
• Happy mood causes more flexible reinterpretation
  of information and improves cognitive processing.
• perhaps due to AROUSAL
• Ashby et al. (1999)
• Happy mood increases dopamine flow in frontal
  lobes and anterior cingulate
• Causes better performance on tasks demanding
  cognitive flexibility

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Disruptive effects of happy mood

• Impairments of systematic processing
• happy mood results in
• depleted cognitive resources?
• OR poor motivation on boring tasks?
• Oaksford et al. (1996)
• Happy mood loads working memory capacity thus
  causing poorer performance on a range of
  cognitive tasks.
• perhaps due to TASK IRRELEVANT THOUGHTS

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Happy mood and cognitive tasks creativity,
memory, reasoning and executive functioning.
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Positive affect and creative problem solving

• Isen, Daubman Nowicki (1987).
• Positive affect changes the way
• semantic material is stored and retrieved,
• Experiment 1 Duncker creativity task.
• positive mood (film), creativity task
• neutral mood (film), creativity task
• positive mood more likely to solve task

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Varying nature of mood induction

• Experiment 2
• positive affect sweets
• positive affect film
• negative affect film
• neutral affect film
• arousal exercise
• Positive film improved creativity
• Exercise did not affect creativity
• Suggests not arousal
• Negative affect did not impair creativity

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Irrelevant thoughts, emotional mood states and
cognitive task performance.

• Seibert Ellis (1991)
• Happy or neutral mood induction
• Velten procedure
• plus a difficult memory task
• recall ALL thoughts during memory task
• Happy group poorer recall than neutral.
• Happy group more task-irrelevant thoughts.

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Mood, reasoning and executive processes.

• Oaksford et al. (1996)
• Experiment 3
• Compare neutral and positive mood on executive
  task (Tower of London)
• Executive function deficit was found in positive
  mood group.
• Positive mood impairs executive functioning.

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Mood, creativity and executive functioning

• Fluency tasks used to assess both
  creativity/flexibility and executive function
• Phillips et al. (2002) compared positive and
  neutral mood groups on
• alternating fluency - executive task
• letter fluency - flexibility/strategic retrieval
• uses fluency - creativity

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Effects of positive mood on fluency
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Happy mood and social cognition
When happy people can be bigots?
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Happiness and stereotypic thinking in social
judgement.

• Bodenhausen, Kramer Susser (1994)
• Effect of mood manipulations on stereotyping
  outgroup members
• social judgement task
• crime described
• participants judge probability of guilt.
• stereotype manipulation half Hispanic name,
  half ethnically nondescript name.

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Bodenhausen et al. Experiment 1

• recall happy memory (positive) or mundane events
  of previous day (neutral)
• Greater reliance on stereotypes if in a happy
  mood.

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Bodenhausen et al. Experiment 2

• happy condition contract facial muscles until
  resembled a smile.
• neutral condition hand position specified.
• Happy mood resulted in more stereotyping.

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Bodenhausen et al. Experiment 3

• Arousal?
• Identified music which induced two different
  types of happy mood excitement v tranquillity.
• In both groups, stereotypical judgements

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Bodenhausen et al. Experiment 4

• Effort conservation hypothesis.
• happy or neutral mood as Expt 1
• half of participants high accountability
  condition
• High accountability reverses effect of happy mood
  on stereotyping

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Conclusions from Bodenhausen study

• happy people use simple judgement heuristics
• they therefore jump to stereotypical conclusions
• not because of happy ruminations
• nor disruptive excitement
• happy people are not motivated to engage in
  cognitive effort unless there is direct bearing
  on their own well-being.

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Park Banaji (2000) JPSP

• Looked at effects of happy and sad mood on ethnic
  stereotyping.
• Replicated Bodenhausen finding for happy mood
• Happy more stereotyping than neutral
• Happy mood reliance on heuristic processing
• Sad mood effects different
• Sad mood less stereotyping than neutral
• Sad mood more analytic processing?

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Conclusions on cognitive effects of happy mood
states
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Pattern of results

• Happy mood improves
• Creativity
• Some types of fluency
• Use of systematic processing where the outcome
  matters.
• Happy mood impairs
• Working memory
• Reasoning
• Executive processing
• Use of systematic processing where outcome
  unimportant.

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Theory 1 Diffuse thought patterns

• Happy mood increases diffuse semantic activation
  and causes more task irrelevant thoughts.
• Performance improvements
• divergent tasks, creativity. (Isen, fluency)
• Performance decrements
• on convergent reasoning, (Oaksford)
• executive tasks (fluency)
• tendency to use social stereotypes because
  cognitive system loaded (Bodenhausen)

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Theory 2 Effort conservation hypothesis

• Happy mood reduces motivation for systematic
  processing unless threat to happiness or task
  enjoyable.
• People in a happy mood
• make an effort to do well on enjoyable tasks
• avoid use of stereotypes when held accountable
  for consequences
• do poorly at boring and demanding tasks

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Next week

• Effects of anxiety on cognition.
• Role of conscious attention.