Automatic activation of self-discrepancies and emotional syndromes: When cognitive structures influence affect.

Different types of self-discrepancies are associated with different negative affects. Two studies were conducted to determine whether automatic activation of specific actual-self: self-guide mismatches, as cognitive structures, would induce distinct emotional states. Subjects possessing significant discrepancies between their actual self and either their ideal self-guide (attributes that someone wishes or hopes the person would possess) or their ought self-guide (attributes that someone believes the person has the duty or obligation to possess) responded verbally to an audiotape while "thinking about other people." Study 1 involved two kinds of priming attributes: self-relevant and yoked (another subject's self-relevant attributes). Activating mismatches induced momentary syndromes of dejection (sadness, decreased arousal) in ideal-discrepant subjects but induced agitation (nervousness, increased arousal) in ought-discrepant subjects. In Study 2, subjects were randomized to either self-relevant/nondiscrepant, self-discrepant, or yoked priming. The findings of Study 1 were replicated for the self-discrepant priming condition alone. Results indicate that (a) mismatches constitute cognitive structures and (b) automatic activation of different mismatches via contextual priming induces distinct types of emotional discomfort. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-discrepancies in clinical depression and social phobia: Cognitive structures that underlie emotional disorders?

Previous research indicates that self-discrepancies are cognitive structures that can induce emotional discomfort. The present study compared clinically depressed and social phobic subjects (plus controls) to determine whether different self-discrepancies were associated with the two disorders. In Part 1, it was shown that the depressives possessed the greatest discrepancy between their actual and ideal/own self-states, whereas the social phobics possessed the greatest discrepancy between their actual and ought/other self-states. In a later, ostensibly unrelated study, Ss responded verbally to questions about other people while their mood changes, skin conductance responses, and verbalizations were recorded. The questions included attributes from the S's ideal and ought self-states that were mismatches with attributes from his or her actual self, as well as mismatch attributes from other Ss. Priming with self-referential mismatches induced momentary syndromes of dejection or agitation (depending on the type of mismatch). The depressives and social phobics showed the greatest increase in dejection and agitation, respectively, according to their dominant self-discrepancy. Specific cognitive structures may underlie clinical depression and anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive and social bases of emotional experience: Outcome, attribution, and affect.

Analyzed the relations between cognition and emotion, particularly emotions experienced upon success or failure in achievement-related contexts and their dependencies on causal attributions for the outcome. National survey data were used to investigate emotions reported by 1,507 respondents in terms of their perceived financial position in life and their attributions for their position. The study also examined direct and indirect effects of social status and demographic variables on emotions when outcome and attributions were controlled. Results suggest the extension of past models of cognition-emotion links to include consideration of the individual's social context. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognition and affect in emotional disturbance.

The present author commends articles by R. S. Lazarus (see record 1984-30606-001) and R. B. Zajonc (see record 1984-30610-001) on the relationship between cognition and affect. Because the present author believes that the opposing conclusions of these articles might lead to confusion and dissension, he summarizes 6 hypotheses regarding the role of cognition as a prime factor not merely in the creation of emotion in general but as an exceptionally vital factor in the instigation, maintenance, and alleviation of emotional disturbances. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Belief and feeling: Evidence for an accessibility model of emotional self-report.

This review organizes a variety of phenomena related to emotional self-report. In doing so, the authors offer an accessibility model that specifies the types of factors that contribute to emotional self-reports under different reporting conditions. One important distinction is between emotion, which is episodic, experiential, and contextual, and beliefs about emotion, which are semantic, conceptual, and decontextualized. This distinction is important in understanding the discrepancies that often occur when people are asked to report on feelings they are currently experiencing versus those that they are not currently experiencing. The accessibility model provides an organizing framework for understanding self-reports of emotion and suggests some new directions for research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Negative affect, emotional expression, and forgetting in young infants.

Ss were trained for 3 days to move an overhead mobile containing 10 objects, changed to 2 objects during the 3rd session. The change resulted in crying in half of the Ss. A retention test was given 1 or 7 days later. Measures of facial expressions during nonreinforcement phases at the outset of each session showed that interest was the predominant expression. Interest decreased and surprise increased during the 3rd session and continued into the 4th session for Ss in the 1-day retention group. When shifted to the 2-object mobile, criers exhibited decreasing interest and increasing anger and sadness as their state escalated toward crying. Consistent with earlier research, all Ss showed retention at 1 day, but only noncriers exhibited retention at 7 days. Criers displayed significantly more anger than noncriers during the 1- but not the 7-day retention test. Data suggest that the negative affect induced by the violation of infants' learned expectancies for a previously afforded reinforcer is stored as part of their memory of the experience and that components of this affective memory may be retrieved when the target memory is retrieved. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-focused attention, gender, gender role, and vulnerability to negative affect.

Research has independently shown that both gender and self-focused attention are linked to depression. In this article, we report a series of studies investigating the relation between these variables. Using a standard self-focusing manipulation, Study 1 suggested that women evidence a greater propensity to self-focus than men. We replicated these findings in Study 2. In Study 3, we conducted an experiment to determine if sex role in conjuction with experimentally increased self-focused attention would lead to more emotional distress after a negative event had occurred. Results suggested that feminine individuals who received a self-focusing manipulation responded with greater levels of self-focused attention and negative affect than did any other group. We interpreted findings in terms of a tendency to self-focus that might prime feminine people to experience depression, or alternately, as a lack of self-focusing that may insulate masculine individuals from the experience of depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantics and pragmatics of social influence: How affirmations and denials affect beliefs in referent propositions.

Ss read either affirmations or denials of target propositions that ostensibly came from either newspapers or reference volumes. Denials of the validity of a proposition that was already assumed to be false increased Ss' beliefs in this proposition. The effect generalized to beliefs in related propositions that could be used to support the target's validity. When denials came from a newspaper, their "boomerang effect" was nearly equal in magnitude to the direct effect of affirming the target proposition's validity. When Ss were asked explicitly to consider the implications of the assertions, however, the impact of denials was eliminated. Affirmations of a target proposition that was already assumed to be true also had a boomerang effect. Results have implications for the effects of both semantic and pragmatic processing of assertions on belief change. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strength and vulnerability integration: A model of emotional well-being across adulthood.

The following article presents the theoretical model of strength and vulnerability integration (SAVI) to explain factors that influence emotion regulation and emotional well-being across adulthood. The model posits that trajectories of adult development are marked by age-related enhancement in the use of strategies that serve to avoid or limit exposure to negative stimuli but by age-related vulnerabilities in situations that elicit high levels of sustained emotional arousal. When older adults avoid or reduce exposure to emotional distress, they often respond better than younger adults; when they experience high levels of sustained emotional arousal, however, age-related advantages in emotional well-being are attenuated, and older adults are hypothesized to have greater difficulties returning to homeostasis. SAVI provides a testable model to understand the literature on emotion and aging and to predict trajectories of emotional experience across the adult life span. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of racial identity in minority and majority children: An affect discrepancy model.

Proposes an affect discrepancy to explain the processes by which children come to know and identify with a minority or majority group. To test this model, 203 White and 91 Indian children in kindergarten and Grades 1 and 2 answered racial identity, preference, social distance and recognition questions by pointing to pictures of Whites, Indians, and Blacks. Several weeks later Ss completed measures of concrete operational thought and self-esteem. Indian children made more cross-racial choices than did Whites, even though Indians were more accurate than Whites in recognizing the pictures. Structural equation models indicated that for both groups, cognitive development was positively associated with own-group choices. Self-esteem was positively related to own-group choices for Whites but inversely related for Indians. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Erotica and aggression: The influence of sexual arousal, positive affect, and negative affect on aggressive behavior.

95 male college students who had never taken a psychology course were first either angered or not angered by a confederate of the experimenter and were then ostensibly given an opportunity to aggress against the confederate by means of electric shock. Prior to aggressing, Ss were shown 1 of 4 sets of stimuli chosen to effect a factorial variation in the intensity of positive sexual arousal (high, low) and negative affect (high, low) elicited by exposure to such material. In addition, 1 group of angered Ss (no-exposure control) was included who did not view any of the 4 sets of stimuli prior to being given an opportunity to aggress. Results indicate that exposure to affectively positive erotic stimuli significantly reduced retaliatory behavior by angered males to a level below that exhibited by Ss exposed to neutral stimuli and by those in the no-exposure control group. In contrast, relative to baseline controls, Ss' exposure to erotic stimuli that were reported to be disgusting and unpleasant slightly enhanced subsequent aggressive behavior. Several possible mechanisms (e.g., attentional shifts, incompatible responses, cognitive labeling) are discussed in relation to the results. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-guides, autobiographical memory, and anxiety and dysphoria: Toward a cognitive model of vulnerability to emotional distress.

Several aspects of a cognitive model of vulnerability to emotional disorders based on self-discrepancy theory were tested. Anxious, dysphoric, anxious/dysphoric, and control Ss participated in 3 studies over a 4-mo period: screening, assessment of self-guides and self-discrepancies, and an autobiographical memory task in which different types of retrieval cues (including self-guides) were presented, and Ss reported childhood memories as they came to mind. Actual:ideal discrepancy was associated with persistent dysphoria, whereas actual:ought discrepancy was associated with persistent anxiety. Self-guide cues resulted in more efficient retrieval and greater unintended negative emotional content than comparable cue types. The groups were differentiated only by negative affect content in response to self-guide cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-discrepancies and persecutory delusions: Evidence for a model of paranoid ideation.

The self-discrepancies of paranoid patients, depressed patients, and nonpatients were examined using a modified version of Higgins's Selves Questionnaire (E. T. Higgins, 1987). Nonpatients showed high consistencies between all domains of the self-concept, whereas depressed patients showed marked self-discrepancies. Paranoid patients alone displayed a high degree of consistency between self-perceptions and self-guides together with discrepancies between self-perceptions and the believed perceptions of parents about the self. Paranoid patients also believed that their parents had more negative views of them than did other participants. These findings are consistent with R. P. Bentall, P. Kinderman, and S. Kaney's (1994) model, which assumes that persecutory delusions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Risk and vulnerability for marijuana use problems: The role of affect dysregulation.

This study examined the moderating effects of impulsivity and affect lability on relations between marijuana use frequency and use consequences. From a sample of 592 undergraduates, 300 marijuana users completed a survey that assessed marijuana problems and the hypothesized risk and vulnerability factors. Affective variables were significantly associated with increased marijuana problems above and beyond the effects of gender and lifetime use frequency. A hypothesized vulnerability mechanism, whereby impulsivity strengthened the relationship between use frequency and marijuana problems, was observed. The findings support the hypothesis that affect dysregulation enhances risk for marijuana problems among young adults who use marijuana. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What you feel is how you compare: How comparisons influence the social induction of affect.

Concordant and discordant affective reactions can occur after the mere perception of another person's affective expression. Most previous theorizing has been concerned with the explanation of affective concordance, typically referred to as emotional contagion, although discordant affect has received little attention. The authors propose an integrative account for the explanation of both outcomes based on a social comparison framework. Studies 1 and 2 suggest that two distinct types of comparison processes can trigger concordant or discordant affective reactions. Study 3 extends these findings by demonstrating that the influence of comparison processes on affect in an established mood contagion paradigm. The authors attempt to integrate previous research into the present account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Use and maintenance of strategies: The influence of accessibility to knowledge.

Conducted 2 experiments in which the interaction between strategy use and accessibility to relevant knowledge was investigated. Ss were asked to memorize a list of categorizable words, and use of a categorization strategy was assessed. Typicality of the category exemplars was varied in a between-Ss fashion to manipulate accessibility to relevant knowledge and the S's experience with the strategy. Ss were then given a 2nd list of categorizable words to memorize, and the use of a categorization strategy was again assessed. In Exp 2, attributional data regarding strategy use were also collected. Results from the 2 experiments show that variations in accessibility to knowledge have a significant effect on strategy use on the 1st memorization trial. Experiencing highly typical items on the 1st list was found to be associated with continued use of the strategy on the 2nd list (i.e., ease of use on the 1st trial affected maintenance of the strategy). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Decoding emotional messages: Influence of ethnicity, sex, message type, and channel.

Studied whether sex of sender and receiver, ethnic group of sender, positivity of affect, and communication channel would influence decoding of emotional messages. 34 male and 47 female Anglo-Australian Ss viewed videotapes of male or female Australian, British, or Italian speakers, who each presented 18 content-ambiguous messages with positive, negative, or neutral affect. Ss guessed the intended affect in each message. Analyses revealed that female encoders were better decoded than male encoders for positive and negative messages on all channels, but female decoders were more accurate than males only in the audiovisual (picture and sound) condition. Positive messages were decoded least accurately, especially when the speakers were Australian men. Although Italian men in the audiovisual condition were decoded worse than other men on neutral and negative messages, in the visual (picture only) condition, Italian men were decoded as well as other men. Italian women were decoded as accurately as other women for positive and neutral messages in both the audiovisual and visual conditions. In the audio (sound only) condition, Italian speakers of both sexes were decoded less accurately than other speakers of their sex. It is suggested that Italian accents were a distractor of decoding and that Anglo-Australian Ss paid less attention because of more negative attitudes toward male Southern European immigrants. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Malleability of attentional bias for positive emotional information and anxiety vulnerability.

Recent research supports a causal link between attentional bias for negative emotional information and anxiety vulnerability. However, little is known about the role of positive emotional processing in modulating anxiety reactivity to stress. In the current study, we used an attentional training paradigm designed to experimentally manipulate the processing of positive emotional cues. Participants were randomly assigned to complete a computerized probe detection task designed to induce selective processing of positive stimuli or to a sham condition. Following training, participants were exposed to a laboratory stressor (i.e., videotaped speech), and state anxiety and positive affect in response to the stressor were assessed. Results revealed that individual variability in the capacity to develop an attentional bias for positive information following training predicted subsequent emotional responses to the stressor. Moreover, individual differences in social anxiety, but not depression, moderated the effects of the attentional manipulation, such that, higher levels of social anxiety were associated with diminished attentional allocation toward positive cues. The current findings point to the potential value of considering the role of positive emotional processing in anxiety vulnerability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fluent rereading: Repetition, automaticity, and discrepancy.

Six experiments examined readers' sensitivity to discrepancies introduced into familiar texts. Across 4 or 5 trials, Ss crossed out misspellings as they read. Reading times decreased across repeated readings, and even though misspellings differed on every reading, their detection remained constant or improved across readings. Thus, reading became fluent but remained accurate across experiences. On the final reading, small discrepancies were unexpectedly introduced into the familiar texts. Results showed clear sensitivity to discrepancies in visual features (Exps 1, 2, and 5) and in lexical and semantic characteristics (Exps 3, 4, and 6) of familiar texts. Exps 5 and 6 showed that this sensitivity was on-line, occurring in the interval in which the discrepancy was encountered. The findings are discussed in terms of episodic transfer across repetitions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)