Feelings-as-Information Heuristic

Beyond Moods: Specific Emotions and Other Subjective Experiences

It is also worth noting that the use of one’s feelings as a source of information is not limited to global positive and negative moods. Instead, the basic feelings-as-information logic applies to a wide range of subjective experiences, including specific emotions, arousal, bodily sensations, and cognitive experiences (see Schwarz & Clore, 1996 for a review).

With regard to specific emotions, Schwarz et al. (1985) observed that the impact of a fear-arousing communication on subjects’ attitudes was eliminated when subjects attributed their subjective experience to the arousing side effects of a pill, but was enhanced when subjects assumed the pill would have tranquilizing effects. Note, however, that the informational value of specific emotions is more restricted than the informational value of global moods. Emotions are specific reactions to specific events (see Clore et al., 1994, for a review of emotion theories), whereas moods are of a diffuse and unfocused nature (Morris, 1989). As a result of their undifferentiated and unfocused nature, mood states may be used as information in making a wide variety of different judgments. In fact, when subjects are induced to attribute their mood to specific causes – as in the Schwarz and Clore (1983) experiments reviewed previously – its impact on judgments that are unrelated to that source vanishes. The source of a specific emotion, however, is more likely to be in the focus of attention, thus rendering the emotion uninformative for judgments that are unrelated to the emotion-inducing event. Support for this prediction comes from research by Keltner, Locke, and Audrain (1993b), who induced a sad mood by having subjects imagine vividly a negative life event. Subsequently, some subjects were asked to describe what emotions they felt, whereas others indicated where and when the negative event took place. As expected, having to label their current feelings with specific emotion terms induced subjects to identify specific causes for their current feelings, thus undermining their informational value for unrelated targets. Accordingly, these subjects reported higher life satisfaction than subjects who merely identified the time and location of the event, despite being in a similarly depressed mood. In fact, describing one’s current specific emotions was as effective in reducing the impact of a sad mood as misattributing one’s sad feelings to the experimental room.

If specific emotions imply the identification of a specific cause, they may be unlikely to affect unrelated judgments shortly after their onset, when the event that elicited them is still salient. Once the emotion dissipates, however, it may leave the individual in a diffuse mood state (Bollnow, 1956), which would be likely to affect a wide range of judgments. If so, the impact of an emotion-eliciting event may be quite limited shortly after the onset of the emotional reaction, but may generalize to unrelated targets after a sufficient delay.

In addition to being more restricted with regard to the range of applicable targets, the informational value of specific emotions is also more specific than that of diffuse moods. On theoretical grounds, we may expect that the information conveyed by specific emotions reflects the implications of the appraisal pattern that underlies the respective emotion. In line with this hypothesis, Gallagher and Clore (1985) observed that feelings of fear affected judgments of risk but not of blame, whereas feelings of anger affected judgments of blame but not of risk. Similarly, Keltner, Ellsworth, and Edwards (1993) observed in several experiments that angry subjects assigned more responsibility to human agents than to impersonal circumstances, whereas sad subjects assigned more responsibility to impersonal circumstances than to human agents, reflecting the differential appraisal patterns of anger and sadness.

In combination, these findings illustrate that unlike global mood states, specific emotions have very localized effects on judgment. Much as in the case of moods, however, these effects are eliminated when the informational value of the emotion for the judgment at hand is called into question (e.g., Keltner et al., 1993b; Schwarz et al., 1985). Research into the informative functions of physical arousal and cognitive experiences reiterates this theme. For example, Zillman and colleagues (for a review, see Zillman, 1978) had subjects engage in various forms of exercise. Shortly after the exercise, subjects’ heightened excitation level did not affect evaluative judgments, presumably reflecting that subjects were still aware of the source of their arousal. After some delay, however, judgments were affected by the residual arousal, suggesting that subjects misinterpreted their arousal as a reaction to the target, once the temporal distance of the exercise rendered this alternative source less accessible and plausible. Finally, the informational value of cognitive experiences, like ease or difficulty of recall, has also been found to depend on individuals’ assumptions about their source, as reviewed by Schwarz and Vaughn (Chapter 5, this volume). Throughout, the accumulating findings indicate that feelings and phenomenal experiences are an important source of information that individuals draw on in forming evaluative judgments, unless their informational value is called into question.