Beyond Moods: Specific Emotions, Bodily Feedback, and Situational Cues in Feelings-as-Information

Beyond Moods

As in the case of evaluative judgment, the conceptual logic can be extended from global moods to other feelings, including specific emotions and bodily sensations.

Specific Emotions

Theoretically, experiencing a specific emotion can be expected to inform the individual that the appraisal pattern underlying this emotion has been met (Schwarz, 1990): Feeling angry, for example, informs us that somebody has faulted us and angry individuals have been found to assign more responsibility to human actors than to situational circumstances, as noted earlier (Keltner et al., 1993a). We may therefore expect that specific emotions elicit processing strategies that are tuned to meet the requirements entailed by the appraisal pattern that underlies the respective emotion. To date, experimental research bearing on this possibility is limited, although the available data are generally consistent with this proposal.

Recall that earlier research into mood and persuasion documented more systematic message processing under sad rather than happy moods. Extending this work, Tiedens and Linton (in press) noted that the appraisal pattern underlying sadness entails a sense of uncertainty, whereas other negative emotions, like anger or disgust, do not. Consistent with this proposal, they found that uncertainty-related emotions elicited more systematic message processing, whereas other negative emotions did not. Presumably, when we are angry or disgusted, we know what our feeling is about and see no need to engage in detailed processing of unrelated information. Sadness or anxiety, however, entail a sense of uncertainty and hence motivate the kind of detail-oriented systematic processing observed in earlier research.

Although sadness and anxiety share an uncertainty appraisal, they differ in other respects. In general, sadness is a response to the loss or absence of a reward, whereas anxiety is a response to threats (e.g., Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988). As a result, sadness may prompt a goal of reward acquisition, whereas anxiety may prompt a goal of uncertainty reduction. Raghunathan and Pham (1999) tested these predictions in a choice paradigm. They provided sad or anxious participants with a choice task that required a trade-off between risk and rewards. As expected, they observed that sad individuals pursued a goal of reward acquisition and preferred high risk/high reward options over any other combination. Conversely, anxious individuals pursued a goal of uncertainty reduction and preferred low-risk/low-reward options over any other combination. These findings demonstrate that incidental feelings, induced by an unrelated task, can influence which goal an individual pursues. Whether individuals’ processing strategies were also influenced by these affect-elicited goals was not assessed in this study, but seems likely in light of a wide range of findings that suggest that processing strategies are tuned to meet individuals’ current goals (for a review, see Kunda, 1999).

As these examples illustrate, systematic explorations of the role of specific emotions in reasoning and decision making provide a promising avenue for future research.

Bodily Feedback

Further extending the logic of the feelings-as-information approach, Friedman and Förster (2000) suggested that bodily sensations may also signal benign or problematic situations. In general, people try to approach situations that are characterized by a promise of positive, or a lack of negative, outcomes. Conversely, they try to avoid situations that entail a threat of negative outcomes or lack positive ones. If so, bodily responses that are typically associated with approach situations may elicit the heuristic, top-down processing style spontaneously preferred in benign situations, whereas bodily responses that are typically associated with avoidance situation may elicit the systematic, bottom-up processing style spontaneously preferred in problematic situations. One bodily response closely associated with approach is the contraction of the arm flexor, which is involved in pulling an object closer to the self. Conversely, contraction of the arm extensor is involved in pushing an object away from the self and is closely associated with avoidance. Therefore, arm flexion provides bodily feedback that is usually associated with approaching positive stimuli, whereas arm extension provides bodily feedback that is usually associated with avoiding negative stimuli (see Cacioppo, Priester, & Berntson, 1993). In fact, affectively neutral stimuli encoded during arm flexion are later preferred over neutral stimuli encoded during arm extension, presumably reflecting the approach/avoidance information provided by the bodily feedback (Cacioppo et al., 1993).

Taking advantage of this association, Friedman and Förster (2000) asked seated participants to press the right palm upward against the bottom of the table (arm flexion), or downward against the top of the table (arm extension). Although these movements engage the same muscles, they have no surface similarity to pulling an object closer or pushing it away, thus avoiding the introduction of demand characteristics. As theoretically predicted, arm flexion fostered a heuristic processing style, whereas arm extension fostered a systematic processing style, across a variety of problem solving tasks.

Situational Cues

Theoretically, the observed effects of moods, emotions, and bodily sensations reflect that our thought processes are tuned to meet the processing requirement signaled by our feelings. If so, affective cues in the environment may serve similar functions. To test this conjecture, some researchers have presented reasoning tasks from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE; e.g., Soldat, Sinclair, & Mark, 1997) or persuasive messages (Soldat & Sinclair, 2001) on colored paper – namely, an “upbeat” red or a “depressed” blue. Paralleling the effects of happy and sad moods, they observed that upbeat colors fostered heuristic processing, whereas more depressing colors fostered systematic processing, resulting in differential performance on the GRE tasks and differential persuasion effects.

In combination, the available findings suggest that internal (moods, emotions, bodily sensations) as well as external (e.g., colored paper) affective cues can elicit different processing styles, presumably by providing a “benign” or “problematic” signal.