Gerald Clore

University of Virginia | UVa · Department of Psychology

More than 30 years after its initial publication, this new edition of The Cognitive Structure of Emotions refines and updates Ortony, Clore, and Collins's OCC model of emotions. Starting from a three-way classification of construals of the world––events, the attribution of responsibility for events, and objects––the authors propose a systematic acc...

The way in which distinct emotions are characterized in terms of their cognitive underpinnings is established using the example of the two Well-being emotions, “Joy” and “Distress” emotions, which are the cognitively least complex Event-based emotions. The notion of type specification is introduced and described as incorporating both the valence of...

Four “Attribution” emotions relating to the attribution of responsibility for actions are presented as the emotion types that emerge from praising or blaming oneself or some other agent for some action. The intensity of these “Pride” and “Self-reproach” emotions, and “Admiration” and “Reproach” emotions is influenced by the perceived praiseworthine...

Prospect-based emotions are introduced as a subset of Event-based emotions, with the key ones being emotion types that arise from envisaging positive events, referred to as “Hope” emotions, or negative events, referred to as “Fear” emotions. The envisagement of such events is discussed as sometimes being confirmed, resulting in “Gratification” and...

More than 30 years after its initial publication, this new edition of The Cognitive Structure of Emotions refines and updates Ortony, Clore, and Collins's OCC model of emotions. Starting from a three-way classification of construals of the world––events, the attribution of responsibility for events, and objects––the authors propose a systematic acc...

Two different classes of variables capable of affecting the intensity of emotions are introduced: global variables, which can influence the intensity of many different emotion types across different emotion groups, and local variables, which have relatively local effects, influencing only the intensity of particular emotions or emotion groups. Exam...

More than 30 years after its initial publication, this new edition of The Cognitive Structure of Emotions refines and updates Ortony, Clore, and Collins's OCC model of emotions. Starting from a three-way classification of construals of the world––events, the attribution of responsibility for events, and objects––the authors propose a systematic acc...

The theory proposes that each of the three broad classes of emotions – Event-based emotions, Agent-based emotions, and Object-based emotions – is evaluated in terms of different criteria, that is, different kinds of knowledge representations: events are evaluated in terms of their desirability relative to goals, agents’ actions are evaluated in ter...

The Attraction emotions are reactions of liking or disliking objects (or aspects of objects) resulting from an object’s appeal (or lack thereof). Appeal, in turn, depends on tastes, which in contrast to goals and standards, tend to be unanalyzable, Hence, the Attraction emotions are the least cognitively complex of all emotions. Tastes are treated...

More than 30 years after its initial publication, this new edition of The Cognitive Structure of Emotions refines and updates Ortony, Clore, and Collins's OCC model of emotions. Starting from a three-way classification of construals of the world––events, the attribution of responsibility for events, and objects––the authors propose a systematic acc...

The three broad classes of emotions are characterized as Event-based emotions, Agent-based emotions, and Object-based emotions. Event-based emotions consist of a Well-being group, a Prospect-based group, and a Fortunes-of-others group. Emotion types in the first two of these groups focus on the self-relevance of focal events, while those in the For...

The goal of the theory is characterized as presenting, in computationally tractable terms, a comprehensive account of the cognitive underpinnings of the human emotion system and of the cognitions in terms of which different emotion types can be distinguished. The theory proposes three broad groups of emotions, determined by the three major perspect...

Some ancillary cognitive issues are raised, including the fact that characterizing emotions in terms of emergence conditions frees the theory from the bonds of everyday emotion terms, leaving room for projects that explore the relation between emotions cast in terms independent of language-culture and the emotion words of particular languages. Addi...

Expert advantage in making judgments about the outcomes of sporting events is well-documented. It is not known, however, whether experts have an advantage in the absence of objective information, such as the current score or the relative skill of players. Participants viewed 5-second clips of modern Olympic fencing matches and selected the likely w...

In their cognitive theory of emotion, Schachter and Singer proposed that feelings are separable from what they are about. As a test, they induced feelings of arousal by injecting epinephrine and then molded them into different emotions. They illuminated how feelings in one moment lead into the next to form a stream of conscious experience. We exami...

Scientists Making a Difference is a fascinating collection of first-person narratives from the top psychological scientists of the modern era. These readable essays highlight the most important contributions to theory and research in psychological science, show how the greatest psychological scientists formulate and think about their work, and illu...

Simonsohn (2015) proposed to use effect sizes of high powered replications to evaluate whether lower powered original studies could have obtained the reported effect. His focus on sample size misses that effect size comparisons are informative with regard to a theoretical question only when the replications (i) successfully realize the theoretical...

Firestone & Scholl (F&S) assume that pure perception is unaffected by cognition. This assumption is untenable for definitional, anatomical, and empirical reasons. They discount research showing nonoptical influences on visual perception, pointing out possible methodological “pitfalls.” Results generated in multiple labs are immune to these “pitfall...

Three variables were hypothesized to affect liking for an actor in a social setting: whether the actor's behavior was intended (intentionality), whether he enjoyed it (actor implications), and whether the recipient of the behavior enjoyed it (perceiver implications). First, in a factorial design, 100 undergraduates rated their liking for actors in...

Despite decades of research demonstrating a dedicated link between positive and negative affect and specific cognitive processes, not all research is consistent with this view. We present a new overarching theoretical account as an alternative – one that can simultaneously account for prior findings, generate new predictions, and encompass a wide r...

Despite decades of research demonstrating a dedicated link between positive and negative affect and specific cognitive processes, not all research is consistent with this view. We present a new overarching theoretical account as an alternative-one that can simultaneously account for prior findings, generate new predictions, and encompass a wide ran...

Romantic emotions can grip adolescents' lives. A 14-year-old reports feeling so in love that he can think of nothing else. A 15-year-old is distressed that “everyone has a boyfriend but me” and broods for hours in her room. Another girl finds herself in a passionate lesbian relationship and feels elated, affirmed, and “chosen.” And a boy reports fe...

This article presents six ideas about the construction of emotion: (a) Emotions are more readily distinguished by the situations they signify than by patterns of bodily responses; (b) emotions emerge from, rather than cause, emotional thoughts, feelings, and expressions; (c) the impact of emotions is constrained by the nature of the situations they...

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that stress-induced arousal enhances long-term memory for experiences associated with arousing events. Contrary to expectations, in each experiment exposure to a stressor (arm immersion in ice water) interfered with, rather than enhanced, long-term memory for associated material. Despite varying the stimuli...

Administered the Mandler-Sarason Test Anxiety Questionnaire and a specially constructed vocabulary test to 80 undergraduates. Later Ss studied the vocabulary responses of a stranger that were similar to the S's on 17 (83%) of the 24 words. With objective cues to the correctness of response minimized by the difficulty of the items, the similarity or...

Purity is commonly regarded as being physically embodied in the color white, with even trivial deviations from whiteness indicating a loss of purity. In three studies, we explored the implications of this "white = pure" association for disgust, an emotion that motivates the detection and avoidance of impurities that threaten purity and cleanliness....

Although psychologists have generally conceptualized emotions in light of individual- and group- level approaches, in the current paper we propose that there are also system-level emotional events, including both system-based emotions (experienced as a direct or indirect consequence of system-level characteristics) and system-targeted emotions (ref...

Questions addressed by recent psychological research on emotion include questions about how thought shapes emotion and how emotion, in turn, shapes thought. Research on emotion and cognition paints a somewhat different picture than that seen in traditional discussions of passion and reason. This article reviews several aspects of this research, con...

Emotions are important to personality and social psychology and to the relationship between them. In this chapter, we contrast traditional views of emotion with more recent social-personality views and then contrast these with emerging new perspectives. We consider five questions and conclude that: (1) the components of emotion are not sufficiently...

Research in South Korea and the United States examined how affective states facilitate or inhibit culturally dominant styles of reasoning. According to the affect-as-information hypothesis, affective cues of mood influence judgements by serving as embodied information about the value of accessible inclinations and cognitions. Extending this line of...

Visual perception and emotion are traditionally considered separate domains of study. In this article, however, we review research showing them to be less separable than usually assumed. In fact, emotions routinely affect how and what we see. Fear, for example, can affect low‐level visual processes, sad moods can alter susceptibility to visual illu...

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods sh...

Memory is susceptible to illusions in the form of false memories. Prior research found, however, that sad moods reduce false memories. The current experiment had two goals: (1) to determine whether affect influences retrieval processes, and (2) to determine whether affect influences the strength and the persistence of false memories. Happy or sad m...

Human thought is often automatic, heuristic, unconscious, and guided by emotion instead of being strictly logical and reasoned. Rather than regarding these characteristics as limitations, however, they actually allow rational outcomes to be achieved without the high cost of conscious deliberation. For example, negative affective reactions to illogi...

Previous research has shown that hills appear steeper to those who are fatigued, encumbered, of low physical fitness, elderly, or in declining health (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Proffitt, Bhalla, Gossweiler, & Midgett, 1995). The prevailing interpretation of this research is that observers' perceptions of the environment are influenced by their capac...

Previous research by Proffitt et al. (1999, 2003) showed that the perception of spatial layout (geographical slant, egocentric distance) is influenced by altering the observer's bodily state. For example, hills appear steeper and distances appear farther to participants who are fatigued, of old age, or wearing a heavy backpack. Research investigati...

Positive moods promote a focus on the forest (global focus) and negative moods, a focus on the trees (local focus). Is this well-established link fixed or variable? Does it reflect a direct influence of affect, as usually assumed, or is it frequently observed simply because a global perspective is often dominant? If affect serves as information abo...

Perception can be influenced by physical properties of the perceiver, such as whether the perceiver is encumbered, or is feeling fatigued (Proffitt, Bhalla, Gossweiler, & Midgett, 1995). However, it is unclear to what extent social properties of a situation influence perception. People use space in specific ways as a function of social relationship...

Prior research has found that positive affect, compared to negative affect, increases stereotype activation. In four experiments the authors explore whether the link between affect and stereotype activation depends on the relative accessibility of stereotype-relevant thoughts and response tendencies. As well as manipulating mood, the authors measur...

We investigated whether the desire to have a smooth and pleasant interaction with an anticipated interaction partner caused participants' moods to become similar to their imminent partners' moods. We found evidence of anticipatory mood matching when participants were motivated to affiliate with a partner through goal priming (Experiments 1 and 2) a...

Three studies examined automatic associations between words with moral and immoral meanings and the colors black and white. The speed of color naming in a Stroop task was faster when words in black concerned immorality (e.g., greed), rather than morality, and when words in white concerned morality (e.g., honesty), rather than immorality. In additio...

Three experiments indicate that affective cues regulate expression of implicitly measured stereotypes and attitudes. In Experiment 1, negative mood led to less stereotypic bias on the weapon-identification task [Payne, B. K. (2001). Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon. Journal of Person...

Emotions and moods color cognition. In this article, we outline how emotions affect judgments and cognitive performance of human agents. We argue that affective influences are due, not to the affective reactions themselves, but to the information they carry about value, a potentially useful finding for creators of artificial agents. The kind of inf...

Commentaries focused on the emotional appraisal part of our article. Cunningham and Van Bavel argued for distinguishing core disgust from moral disgust, and we describe how the theory might accommodate their proposal. They also suggested that temporal and other comparisons could account for emotional variety. We concur, but see such comparisons as...

In this article, we examine how affect influences judgment and thought, but also how thought transforms affect. The general thesis is that the nature and impact of affective reactions depends largely on their objects. We view affect as a representation of value, and its consequences as dependent on its object or what it is about. Within a review of...

How, and for whom, does disgust influence moral judgment? In four experiments participants made moral judgments while experiencing extraneous feelings of disgust. Disgust was induced in Experiment 1 by exposure to a bad smell, in Experiment 2 by working in a disgusting room, in Experiment 3 by recalling a physically disgusting experience, and in Ex...

The affect-as-information framework posits that affect is embodied information about value and importance. The valence dimension of affect provides evaluative information about stimulus objects, which plays a role in judgment and decision-making. Affect can also provide evaluative information about one's own cognitions and response inclinations, in...

Semantic and affective priming are classic effects observed in cognitive and social psychology, respectively. The authors discovered that affect regulates such priming effects. In Experiment 1, positive and negative moods were induced before one of three priming tasks; evaluation, categorization, or lexical decision. As predicted, positive affect l...

In five studies, the authors examined the effects on cognitive performance of coherence and incoherence between conceptual and experiential sources of affective information. The studies crossed the priming of happy and sad concepts with affective experiences. In different experiments, these included approach or avoidance actions, happy or sad feeli...

In recent years there has been an increasing awareness that a comprehensive understanding of language, cognitive and affective processes, and social and interpersonal phenomena cannot be achieved without understanding the ways these processes are grounded in bodily states. The term 'embodiment' captures the common denominator of these developments,...

Emotions are described as emergent states, which exist only to the extent that multiple affective reactions to the same object occur at the same time. Emotions are thus the confluence of thoughts, feelings, expressions, desires, and so on. They emerge as meta-cognitive representations of embodied affective reactions. Emotions may be initiated by lo...

Previous studies have shown that conscious awareness of hill slant is overestimated, but visually guided actions directed at hills are relatively accurate. Also, steep hills are consciously estimated to be steeper from the top than the bottom, possibly because they are dangerous to descend. In the present study, participants stood at the top of a h...

In this chapter, we review behavioral research connecting affective embodiment and evaluative cognition. We argue that affect and belief exist in a dynamic relationship. Evaluative beliefs elicit affective experience, and affective experience provides data for evaluative conception. We propose that such reciprocal relationships exist because emotio...

The recent publication of David Heise's Expressive Order (2007) provides an occasion for discussing some of the key ideas in Affect Control Theory. The theory proposes that a few dimensions of affective meaning provide a common basis for interrelating personal identities and social actions. It holds that during interpersonal interactions, social be...

Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conve...

Recent theories suggest that trait neuroticism gains its pernicious power particularly among individuals less capable of making distinctions concerning present reality. Four studies, involving 272 undergraduates, sought to provide some basic, assessment-related support for such theories in the context of individual differences in choice reaction ti...

Affect and cognition have long been treated as independent entities, but in the current review we suggest that affect and cognition are in fact highly interdependent. We open the article by discussing three classic views for the independence of affect. These are (i) the affective independence hypothesis, that emotion is processed independently from...

A series of three naturalistic field experiments are reported which investigated the norm of social responsibility by examining the effects of dependency and sex on helping. Experiment I examined the effect of physical disability on the likelihood of passing motorists helping with a flat tire. Females were helped significantly more than males, but...

Do approach-avoidance actions create attitudes? Prior influential studies suggested that rudimentary attitudes could be established by simply pairing novel stimuli (Chinese ideographs) with arm flexion (approach) or arm extension (avoidance). In three experiments, we found that approach-avoidance actions alone were insufficient to account for such...

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm lures people to produce false memories. Two experiments examined whether induced positive or negative moods would influence this false memory effect. The affect-as-information hypothesis predicts that, on the one hand, positive affective cues experienced as task-relevant feedback encourage relational processing...

The authors present in this study a damped oscillator model that provides a direct mathematical basis for testing the notion of emotion as a self-regulatory thermostat. Parameters from this model reflect individual differences in emotional lability and the ability to regulate emotion. The authors discuss concepts such as intensity, rate of change,...

The first half of this chapter is titled, "Direct Influence of Affect on Attitude," which is divided into valence-based and arousal-based influences. We suggested that: (1) Two dimensions of affect, valence and arousal, each play a different role in attitude formation. The valence component can be thought of as embodied evaluation and the arousal c...

Does simple displeasure cause anger without appraisals or agency attributions? The authors offer 8 observations: (a) Appraisal theory also predicts that displeasure promotes anger, (b) An emotion of frustration can be usefully distinguished from anger, (c) Aggressive reactions to norm violations among animals suggest that they too distinguish bad b...

In three studies, the authors show that unconscious expressive cues can lead to opposite evaluations, depending on the context in which they occur. In Study 1, brow (vs. cheek) tension reduced preferences in an easy judgment context but increased preferences in a difficult context. In Study 2, head shaking (vs. nodding) either increased or decrease...

Affect is a somewhat abstract concept that is frequently linked to physical metaphor. For example, good is often depicted as light (rather than dark), up (rather than down), and moving forward (rather than backward). The purpose of our studies was to examine whether the association between stimulus brightness and affect is optional or obligatory. I...

Abstract Affect is a somewhat abstract concept that is frequently linked to physical metaphor. For example, good is often depicted as light (rather than dark), up (rather than down), and moving forward (rather than backward). The purpose of our studies was to examine whether the association between stimulus brightness and affect is optional or obli...

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 be...

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 be...

One must consider both trait and state affect to predict individual differences in emotional processing. The present results document a novel trait-state interaction that is consistent with proposals concerning the epistemic functions of affect (A. R. Damasio, 1994). Four studies tested the effects of extraversion and mood on motivation-relevant pr...

One must consider both trait and state affect to predict individual differences in emotional processing. The present results document a novel trait-state interaction that is consistent with proposals concerning the epistemic functions of affect (A. R. Damasio, 1994). Four studies tested the effects of extraversion and mood on motivation-relevant pr...

Three studies involving 3 participant samples (Ns = 39, 55, and 53) tested the hypothesis that people retrieve episodic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over short (e.g., last few hours) time frames, but that they retrieve semantic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over long (e.g., last few months) time frames. Su...

In two samples of college students (Ns = 116 and 141), this research investigated the ways in which individuals differ in their experience of emotion. Four latent traits emerged from scales assessing such differences—Intensity, Attention, Expression, and Clarity. In both samples, these latent traits were found to be involved in reports of personali...

Three studies involving 3 participant samples (Ns = 39, 55, and 53) tested the hypothesis that people retrieve episodic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over short (e.g., last few hours) time frames, but that they retrieve semantic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over long (e.g., last few months) time frames. Su...

Two experiments employed image-based tasks to test the hypothesis that happier moods promote a greater focus on the forest and sadder moods a greater focus on the trees. The hypothesis was based on the idea that in task situations, affective cues may be experienced as task-relevant information, which then influences global versus local attention. U...

Appraisal research has relied heavily on vignette- and recall-based methodologies in theory construction; however, the validity of these methodologies in capturing the concomitants of online experience is unknown. To assess the convergence of online and simulated accounts of emotion, the authors assigned undergraduate research participants to eithe...

Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology brings together some of the research on citizen decision making. It addresses the questions of citizen political competence from different political psychology perspectives. Some of the authors in this volume look to affect and emotions to determine how people reach political judgements,...

Increasing interest in individual differences related to emotion is evident in the recent appearance of a large number of self-report instruments designed to assess aspects of the feeling experience. In this article, the authors review a sample of 18 of these scales and report technical information on each (e.g., length, format, reliability, constr...

Two experiments investigated how individual differences in attention to emotion influence the role of affect in judgments of risk. In Experiment 1, mood influenced the judgments of individuals high, but not low, in attention to emotion. When an attribution manipulation made a cause of their feelings salient, individuals high in emotional attention...

Psychologists have long been fascinated with the phenomenon of emotion regulation. Freud’s assertions about defense and anxiety, for example, represent an early but influential approach. Today, there is again a wave of interest in emotion regulation (e.g., Gross, 1999), and progress in this area is likely to be rapid. Excellent examples of this new...

This book, a member of the Series in Affective Science, is a unique interdisciplinary sequence of articles on the cognitive neuroscience of emotion by some of the most well-known researchers in the area. It explores what is known about cognitive processes in emotion at the same time it reviews the processes and anatomical structures involved in emo...

It is noted that the most active area of research and theory of social information processing that emerged in the past two decades concerns the cognitive determinants and consequences of affect and emotion. This chapter illustrates development of conceptualization that incorporates the implications of diverse phenomena's such as creativity, persuas...

Three experiments investigated how trait anxiety would influence individuals' assumptions about the relevance of their experiences of state anxiety for judgments of risk. Experiment 1 found that attributions of state anxiety to a judgment-irrelevant source reduced the risk estimates of low, but not of high, trait-anxious individuals. The results of...