No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
On being happy and gullible: Mood effects on skepticism and the detection of deception
Abstract
Are we more likely to believe or disbelieve another person depending on our mood state? Based on past research on interpersonal communication and recent work on affect and social cognition, we predicted and found that negative mood increased and positive mood decreased people’s skepticism and their ability to detect deception, consistent with the more externally focused, accommodative processing style promoted by negative affect. After a mood induction using positive, neutral or negative films, participants viewed deceptive or truthful interviews with individuals who denied committing a theft. Judgments of the targets’ guilt and their truthfulness were collected. As predicted, negative mood increased judges’ skepticism towards the targets, and improved their accuracy in detecting deceptive communications, while judges in a positive mood were more trusting and gullible. The relevance of these findings for everyday judgments of trust and the detection of deception are considered, and their implications for recent affect-cognition theories are discussed.
... Furthermore, prior studies show that customers make inferences and judgements depending on their levels of happiness (Isen, 2001). People who are happy tend to "see the world through rose-colored glasses," expect that they will encounter favourable events, have high confidence in their intuitions and choices, believe that their decisions lead to positive outcomes and are optimistic and flexible ( Areni et al., 2000;Forgas and East, 2008;Menon and Kahn, 2002;Myers, 2000). By contrast, people who are less happy are more sceptical about the future outcomes of their decisions, believe that they will encounter unfavourable events and are less self-confident, risk-averse and pessimistic ( Areni et al., 2000;Forgas and East, 2008;Menon and Kahn, 2002;Myers, 2000). ...
... People who are happy tend to "see the world through rose-colored glasses," expect that they will encounter favourable events, have high confidence in their intuitions and choices, believe that their decisions lead to positive outcomes and are optimistic and flexible ( Areni et al., 2000;Forgas and East, 2008;Menon and Kahn, 2002;Myers, 2000). By contrast, people who are less happy are more sceptical about the future outcomes of their decisions, believe that they will encounter unfavourable events and are less self-confident, risk-averse and pessimistic ( Areni et al., 2000;Forgas and East, 2008;Menon and Kahn, 2002;Myers, 2000). Hellén and Sääksjärvi (2011) posit that happy people evaluate one given service more favourably compared to those who are less happy. ...
... Design aesthetics might thus lead to greater emotional value for those who are happy. Also, because happy individuals are more concerned with their social identity and peer acceptance (Forgas and East, 2008), it is expected there will be a greater effect of design aesthetics on social value for such individuals. In addition, customers who are happy are more curious and stimulated by novelty, unfamiliar and atypical stimuli, while those who are less happy are less open to new ideas and less interested in exploration behaviours ( Wang et al., 2012;Raju, 1980). ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how customers derive value (functional, emotional, social and epistemic value) from the design aesthetics of mobile banking applications and then form intention to adopt mobile banking. Furthermore, this research investigates the moderating effect of happiness, which is predicted – and showed – to strengthen the effects of design aesthetics on value.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey using screenshots of mobile banking applications was administered to a sample of 281 bank customers. Data were analysed using SmartPLS.
Findings
The results show that design aesthetics have a positive effect on functional, emotional, social and epistemic value. In turn, these value dimensions positively affect intention to adopt mobile banking. The findings also demonstrate that happiness moderates the effects of design aesthetics on these value dimensions.
Practical implications
This work can be useful to designers of banking applications and other practitioners to improve their policies and strategies related to mobile applications.
Originality/value
This research represents an initial attempt to examine how customers derive functional, emotional, social and epistemic value from design aesthetics in mobile banking. In addition, this research demonstrates that happiness moderates – and more specifically strengthens – the effects of design aesthetics on customer value. The results provide a theoretical contribution to the importance of value in customer decision making, and in the current case, in the seldom-researched area of mobile banking.
... Some of the studies mentioned in the sections above could be taken to suggest that better interviewers are those who behave in a 'positive' rather than a 'negative, way. However, Forgas and East (2008) found that people in a 'negative' mood were better at detecting whether video-recorded interviewee accounts were deceptive. These authors noted that affective states can influence in interactional settings the types of information processing strategies people adopt, but that very little research had been published regarding such effects in the investigative interview/information gathering setting. ...
... 1366). Forgas and East (2008) further suggested that positive mood might "prime a more positive, trusting evaluation of a message" (p. 1363) and that people in a negative mood may well be less likely to form lenient, optimistic inferences. ...
... They cited previous studies that found negative mood to reduce tendencies to accept communications as genuine -which could especially be important where veracity judgements have to go beyond the available information. Thus, Forgas and East (2008) hypothesised that negative mood could enhance the detection of deception. In their own study they manipulated observers' mood (by film watching) and found those induced to be in negative mood to be significantly better at detecting lying than those in a positive or neutral mood, in part via a reduction in truth bias (i.e. an increase in scepticism). ...
... Many studies have found that different affective states can influence an individual's information processing style in a variety of ways (e.g. Bless et al., 1996;Converse et al., 2008;Forgas & East, 2008;Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2010a;Moons & Mackie, 2007;Niedenthal et al., 1997). Based on this, it is not difficult to imagine that this differential influence on information processing, also extends to speech production, given that information processing and speech production are intimately linked (as evidenced by Levelt (1989)). ...
... Similar to happiness, sadness is generally thought to be an affective state that is low in approach motivation and motivational intensity , but, in contrast to happiness, promotes analytical thinking and perspective taking (Bless et al., 1990(Bless et al., , 1996Clore & Huntsinger, 2007;Converse et al., 2008;Forgas & East, 2008). ...
... The use of modifiers in referring expressions is also thought to be modulated by affect. Given that sad and moderately angry speakers have a greater tendency to be analytical (Bless et al., 1990;Forgas, 2007;Forgas & East, 2008;Moons & Mackie, 2007), we expect that they will spend more time analysing the contribution of modifiers before including them in a referring expression. So, compared to happy, disgusted, and neutral speakers, sad and moderately angry speakers will use fewer modifiers per referring expression, regardless of whether the expression is under-or overspecified. ...
Many studies have provided evidence for the influence of affect on cognitive processing. However, experimental investigations of the relationship between affect and speech production are scarce. This study explores whether a speaker’s affective state influences the production of referring expressions. In two experiments, affective states were elicited using film excerpts, after which speakers referred to target stimuli in a way that differentiated them from distractors. The affective states were opposites, either in terms of valence (happiness versus sadness) or approach-avoidance motivation (anger versus disgust). Affective conditions were then compared with respect to the frequency with which participants referred to a target’s affect, whether this affect was congruent with the speaker's affective state, the number of modifiers per expression, the ambiguity of referring expressions, and overspecification. Results revealed no differences between different affective states concerning these factors, suggesting that a speaker’s affective state does not influence the production of referring expressions.
... Moreover, these effects were unique from positive and negative emotions, suggesting that mixed emotions are distinctive affective states (Vaccaro et al., 2020). Although positive emotions may also broaden thought processes (Fredrickson, 2001), they may encourage uncritical acceptance of pro-attitudinal or mood-congruent information (Forgas & East, 2008;Ziegler, 2014). Furthermore, while negative emotions may reduce gullibility (Forgas, 2019), they also encourage impulsivity (Selby et al., 2016) and ineffective coping (Tran et al., 2019). ...
... Moreover, mixed emotions were unrelated to atypical virus-prevention behaviors, while links with unsupported virus-prevention behaviors were found only in one study and were not replicable. Conversely, positive and negative emotions predicted unsupported and atypical virusprevention behaviors, which is consistent with findings that positive emotions may promote gullibility (Forgas & East, 2008) and negative emotions may promote maladaptive coping (Tran et al., 2019). Links between eudaimonic functioning with positive and negative emotions were inconsistent, with both significant and nonsignificant associations across studies. ...
We report four studies (N=1419) examining emotional reactions from March to April 2020, when COVID-19 exhibited exponentially increasing infections and fatalities. Specifically, we examined associations between emotions with self-reported intentions to enact virus-prevention behaviors that protect oneself from COVID-19 and eudaimonic functioning. Study 1A, 1B, and Study 2 provided naturalistic evidence that mixed emotions predicted legitimate virus-prevention behaviors and eudaimonic functioning in the USA and Singapore, and Study 2 also supported receptivity as a mediator. Finally, Study 3 provided experimental evidence that mixed emotions causally increased legitimate virus-prevention behaviors relative to neutral, positive emotion, and negative emotion conditions, whereas eudaimonic functioning was increased only relative to the neutral condition. Across all studies, positive and negative emotions were unrelated to legitimate virus-prevention behaviors, while relationships with eudaimonic functioning were inconsistent. While self-reported measures do not represent actual behaviors, the findings suggest a potential role for mixed emotions in pandemic-related outcomes.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00045-x.
... This model proposes that people use their current affective state as an information basis for judgments about an object under consideration. Accordingly, various research has shown the impact of emotional and affective states on attention, perception, judgments, attitudinal responses, and behaviors in human interaction (e.g., Forgas and George, 2001;Brief and Weiss, 2002;Dunn and Schweitzer, 2005;Forgas and East, 2008). In conclusion, robot-related psychological outcomes such as trust are expected to be attenuated by users' affective states in a state-congruent direction (Brave and Nass, 2007). ...
... Regarding trust in interpersonal relationships, emotional states were found to influence a person's trust level (Jones and George, 1998;Dunn and Schweitzer, 2005;Forgas and East, 2008). For example, the results from Dunn and Schweitzer (2005) indicate that positive emotional states (e.g., happiness) positively and negative emotional states (e.g., anger) negatively affect trust in an unfamiliar trustee. ...
With service robots becoming more ubiquitous in social life, interaction design needs to adapt to novice users and the associated uncertainty in the first encounter with this technology in new emerging environments. Trust in robots is a significant
psychological prerequisite to achieve safe and convenient cooperation between users and robots. This research focuses on psychological processes in which user dispositions and states affect trust in robots, which in turn is expected to impact the behavior and reactions in the interaction with robotic systems. In a laboratory experiment, the influence of propensity to trust in automation and negative attitudes towards robots on state anxiety, trust, and comfort distance towards a robot were explored. Therefore, participants were approached by a humanoid domestic robot two times and indicated their comfort distance and trust. The results favor the differentiation and interdependence of dispositional, initial, and dynamic learned trust layers. Equally, the mediation from the propensity to trust to initial learned trust by state anxiety provides an insight into the psychological processing mechanisms through which personality traits operate and determine interindividual outcomes in human-robot interaction. The findings underline the meaningfulness of user characteristics as predictors for the initial approach to robots and
the importance of considering users’ individual learning history regarding technology and robots in specific.
... Emotional states were defined as "a state of physiological arousal and of a cognition appropriate to this state of arousal" (Schachter and Singer, 1962, p. 380). The impact of emotional states on judgments and behavior has been subject to a great deal of research (e.g., Forgas and George, 2001;Dunn and Schweitzer, 2005;Forgas and East, 2008). Prominently, the affect-as-information model (Schwarz and Clore, 1988) proposes that people tend to misattribute a momentary experienced mood to their judgments by asking themselves how they feel about an object of evaluation. ...
... This allows for an approximation of causality in a correlative design. Also, the proposed direction of effects from personality via states to trust in automation is in line with theory and empirical findings on the associations between personality and emotional states and judgments in general and trust in specific (Schwarz and Clore, 1988;Forgas, 1995;Dunn and Schweitzer, 2005;Forgas and East, 2008). Any other order of these constructs in the mediation process would not be meaningful from a theoretical perspective. ...
he advantages of automated driving can only come fully into play if these systems are used in an appropriate way, which means that they are neither used in situations they are not designed for (misuse) nor used in a too restricted manner (disuse). Trust in automation has been found to be an essential psychological basis for appropriate interaction with automated systems. Well-balanced system use requires a calibrated level of trust in correspondence with the actual ability of an automated system. As for these far-reaching implications of trust for safe and efficient system use, the psychological processes, in which trust is dynamically calibrated prior and during the use of automated technology, need to be understood. At this point, only a restricted body of research investigated the role of personality and emotional states for the formation of trust in automated systems. In this research, the role of the personality variables depressiveness, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and locus of control for the experience of anxiety before the first experience with a highly automated driving system were investigated. Additionally, the relationship of the investigated personality variables and anxiety to subsequent formation of trust in automation was investigated. In a driving simulator study, personality variables and anxiety were measured before the interaction with an automated system. Trust in the system was measured after participants drove with the system for a while. Trust in the system was significantly predicted by state anxiety and the personality characteristics self-esteem and self-efficacy. The relationships of self-esteem and self-efficacy were mediated by state anxiety as supported by significant specific indirect effects. While for depression the direct relationship with trust in automation was not found to be significant, an indirect effect through the experience of anxiety was supported. Locus of control did not show a significant association to trust in automation. The reported findings support the importance of considering individual differences in negative self-evaluations and anxiety when being introduced to a new automated system for individual differences in trust in automation. Implications for future research as well as implications for the design of automated technology in general and automated driving systems are discussed.
... This robust finding applies to such ostensibly non-political topics as an increase in student services fees (Bless et al. 1990) and to such divisive issues as prejudice against African Americans (Park and Banaji 2000). Germane to our project, incidental happiness also decreases individuals' skepticism and their ability to identify deceitful suspects (Forgas and East 2008). In short, happiness should make people less likely to scrutinize political information. ...
... Additionally, Levendusky (2018a) found no heterogeneous treatment effects for either strong or sorted partisans. With regard to misinformed beliefs, Forgas and East (2008), who tested the effects of happy, neutral, and sad moods on skepticism and the detection of deception did not report effect sizes. Based on these studies, we adopted a conservative approach, with the goal of obtaining .80 ...
Affective polarization is a key concern in America and other democracies. Although past evidence suggests some ways to minimize it, there are no easily applicable interventions that have been found to work in the increasingly polarized climate. This project examines whether irrelevant factors, or incidental happiness more specifically, have the power to reduce affective polarization (i.e., misattribution of affect or “carryover effect”). On the flip side, happiness can minimize systematic processing, thus enhancing beliefs in conspiracy theories and impeding individual ability to recognize deep fakes. Three preregistered survey experiments in the US, Poland, and the Netherlands (total N = 3,611) induced happiness in three distinct ways. Happiness had no effects on affective polarization toward political outgroups and hostility toward various divisive social groups, and also on endorsement of conspiracy theories and beliefs that a deep fake was real. Two additional studies in the US and Poland (total N = 2,220), also induced anger and anxiety, confirming that all these incidental emotions had null effects. These findings, which emerged uniformly in three different countries, among different partisan and ideological groups, and for those for whom the inductions were differently effective, underscore the stability of outgroup attitudes in contemporary America and other countries.
... This robust finding applies to such ostensibly non-political topics as an increase in student services fees (Bless et al. 1990) and to such divisive issues as prejudice against African Americans (Park and Banaji 2000). Germane to our project, incidental happiness also decreases individuals' skepticism and their ability to identify deceitful suspects (Forgas and East 2008). In short, happiness should make people less likely to scrutinize political information. ...
... Additionally,Levendusky (2018a) found no heterogeneous treatment effects for either strong or sorted partisans. With regard to misinformed beliefs,Forgas and East (2008), who tested the effects of happy, neutral, and sad moods on skepticism and the detection of deception did not report effect sizes. Based on these studies, we adopted a conservative approach, with the goal of obtaining .80 ...
Affective polarization is a key concern in America and other democracies. Although past evidence suggests some ways to minimize it, there are no easily applicable interventions that have been found to work in the increasingly polarized climate. This project examines whether irrelevant factors, or incidental happiness more specifically, have the power to reduce affective polarization (i.e., misattribution of affect or "carryover effect"). On the flip side, happiness can minimize systematic processing, thus enhancing beliefs in conspiracy theories and impeding individual ability to recognize deep fakes. Three preregistered survey experiments in the US, Poland, and the Netherlands (total N = 3611) induced happiness in three distinct ways. Happiness had no effects on affective polarization toward political outgroups and hostility toward various divisive social groups, and also on endorsement of conspiracy theories and beliefs that a deep fake was real. Two additional studies in the US and Poland (total N = 2220), also induced anger and anxiety, confirming that all these incidental emotions had null effects. These findings, which emerged uniformly in three different countries, among different partisan and ideological groups, and for those for whom the inductions were differently effective, underscore the stability of outgroup attitudes in contemporary America and other countries.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-021-09701-1.
... Participants watched short emotion-appropriate videos to induce corresponding emotion as per the procedures in previous studies (Forgas and East, 2008;Forgeard, 2011). The negative emotionappropriate clips (3 min 13 s) were excerpted from movie clips "My Brothers and Sisters" (Jin et al., 2009). ...
... Participants watched short emotion-appropriate videos to induce corresponding negative or positive emotion as in previous studies (Forgas and East, 2008;Forgeard, 2011). The negative emotionappropriate clips were the same as those in Experiment 1. ...
The regulatory effect of embodied emotion on one's general emotion and the impact of the compatibility or incompatibility of the two types of emotion on creative thinking are still debatable. The purpose of this study is to investigate these issues experimentally. In Experiment 1, participants completed an explicit positive and negative emotion test [Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)] and an implicit positive and negative emotion test [Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT)] twice on a computer after emotional video priming was used to induce negative emotions and facial expression manipulation was performed to induce embodied positive or negative emotions. It was found that maintaining the expression of a suppressed smile was helpful in regulating negative emotions (p = 0.047). Specifically, the implicit negative emotions induced by facial expression manipulation had a positive regulating effect on the implicit negative emotions induced by the video (T1, M = 47.813; to T2, M = 44.188). In Experiment 2, the positive or negative emotions of the participants were induced using emotional videos, and facial expression manipulation was used to induce their embodied positive or negative emotions. Then, the participants completed a creative test by completing alternative use tasks (AUTs) and Chinese character riddles. The AUT fluency score in the emotionally compatible group was significantly higher than that in the emotionally incompatible group (p = 0.032), but while experiencing negative emotions, the emotionally compatible group had a significantly higher originality score and insight in Chinese character riddle score than the emotionally incompatible group (p = 0.017, p = 0.004). Therefore, embodied negative emotion has a significant regulating effect on implicit negative emotion. The compatibility of emotion activated by facial expression and viewing a video contributes to creative thinking, whereas the incompatibility of emotion hinders creative thinking. The compatibility of emotion under positive emotions improved thinking fluency, whereas under negative emotions, it activated originality and insight in creative thinking. The influence of such emotional compatibility on creative thinking may be due to the regulating effect of embodied emotions on implicit emotions induced by emotional stimuli.
... Under these conditions, observers may become aware of and rely on their automatic reactions to make veracity judgments. Relatedly, there is evidence that when experiencing some broadly defined form of threat, the truth bias is reduced, and lie-detection accuracy improves; for example, when feeling powerless , anxious (Ein-Dor & Perry, 2014), in a negative mood (Forgas & East, 2008), or when mortality is made salient (Schindler & Reinhard, 2015). ...
... In Experiment 5, we sought to replicate Experiment 4 and to rule out an alternative hypothesis that the effects of the interoceptivity intervention are driven mainly by the increased self-focused attention. There are at least two reasons why self-focused attention may account for the effect observed in Experiment 4. First, self-focus is associated with negative affect (Mor & Winquist, 2002), which has been shown to improve lie detection accuracy (Forgas & East, 2008). Second, diminished attention toward lie detection tasks, more generally (i.e., engaging in a secondary task while assessing credibility), has also been shown to improve lie detection accuracy (Albrechtsen, Meissner, & Susa, 2009). ...
Humans consistently face the challenge of discerning liars from truth-tellers. Hundreds of studies in which observers judge the veracity of laboratory-created lies and truths suggest that this is a difficult task; in this context, lie-detection accuracy is notoriously poor. Challenging these findings and traditional methodologies in lie-detection research, we draw upon the somatic marker hypothesis and research on interoception to find that: (a) people experience physiological reactions indicating increased sympathetic arousal while observing real, high-stakes lies (vs. truths), and (b) attending to these physiological reactions may improve lie-detection accuracy. Consistent with the tipping point framework, participants demonstrated more physiological arousal and vasoconstriction while observing real crime liars versus truth-tellers, but not mock crime liars versus truth-tellers (Experiment 1; N = 48). Experiment 2 replicated this effect in a larger sample of participants (N = 169). Experiment 3 generalized this effect to a novel set of stimuli; participants demonstrated more physiological arousal to game show contestants who lied (vs. told the truth) about their intention to cooperate in a high-stakes economic game (N = 71). In an intervention study (Experiment 4; N = 428), participants were trained to attend to their physiological signals; lie-detection accuracy increased relative to a control condition. Experiment 5 (N = 354) replicated this effect, and the addition of a bogus training condition suggested that increased accuracy was not simply attributable to self-focused attention. Findings highlight the limitations of relying on laboratory-created lies to study human lie-detection and suggest that observers have automatic, physiological reactions to being deceived. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
... Baker et al. (2013) suggested that high-EI individuals may be lacking in skepticism, which makes them gullible and compromises their ability to detect deception. Similarly, a Emotional Intelligence and Detection Deception 11 number of researchers have highlighted the relevance of skepticism to deception detection (e.g., Forgas & East, 2008), but empirical examination of this relationship is scarce. In the auditing literature, skepticism has been variously defined as (1) taking an unbiased neutral approach or ...
... In Study 2, we similarly showed that skepticism was unrelated to deception detection accuracy. Although other researchers have suggested that skepticism or suspicion should be associated with deception detection by reducing the truth bias (e.g., Forgas & East, 2008;Kim & Levine, 2011), the present results did not support that theory. ...
Being able to identify if someone is telling the truth or lying is essential in many social situations, for instance in police interrogations or employment interviews. Unfortunately, people are generally poor at lie detection. Some researchers have argued that a small category of individuals are detection wizards who can achieve substantially higher detection accuracy because they have high levels of emotional intelligence (EI) and are better able to identify non-verbal cues to deceit. These propositions have been popularized in the media and are appealing to some practitioners, but are based on very limited empirical evidence. We conducted three experimental studies to test these propositions, relying on different samples and using both trait and ability measures of EI. We measured deception detection using different approaches (in-person and video-based) and contexts (social interaction and job interview). One study measured skepticism, and another used eye-tracking technology to capture participants' reliance on non-verbal information. Results showed that high-EI individuals indeed rely more on non-verbal information. However, EI, skepticism, and the use of non-verbal cues are unrelated to deception detection. We thus argue that detection wizards are likely a myth, and it would be more productive to focus on evidence-based methods to improve deception detection.
... An inability to detect subtle cues could result from such situational factors as fatigue, divided attention, cognitive load, or even different types of emotional states. For example, a study on mood priming and deception detection found that participants primed to be happy were more likely to make errors in detecting deceptive communications, whereas priming a negative mood, such as sadness, increased participants' skepticism and accuracy in detecting deceptive communications (Forgas & East, 2008). However, a chronic inability to detect untrustworthiness cues may derive from such traits as low social intelligence. ...
The aim of this research was to explore the predictors of gullibility and to develop a self-report measure of the construct. In Studies 1 to 3, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on a large pool of items resulting in a 12-item scale with two factors: Persuadability and Insensitivity to cues of untrustworthiness. Study 4 confirmed the criterion validity of the scale using two distinct samples: scam victims and members of the Skeptics Society. Study 5 demonstrated positive relationships between gullibility and the self-reported persuasiveness of, and likelihood of responding to, unsolicited emails. Throughout the article, analyses of a variety of measures expected to converge with the scale provided evidence for its construct validity. Overall, these studies demonstrate that the construct of gullibility is distinct from trust, negatively related to social intelligence, and that the Gullibility Scale is a reliable and valid measure of gullibility.
... People with high emotional intelligence generally report higher level of subjective well-being than others [15], which indicates that they may be more gullible, as positive mood worsens the precision of estimating messages accuracy [16]. ...
The article introduces the results of a study exploring the connection of individual characteristics with the ability to recognize hidden information. The study involves 80 psychology students. The subjects of the experiment tried to separate the lies from the truth in specially recorded videos imitating recruitment interviews. The results show that subjects who successfully recognize falsehood, compared to others, demonstrate a low level of neuroticism (F equals 5.488, p is less than 0.05) and high level of intrapersonal emotional quotient (F equals 3.581, p is less than 0.05). The data obtained suggest that the ability to recognize hidden information is associated with a low level of anxiety and high level of self-awareness.
... Indeed, a report is referenced in which people primed to be happy were more likely to make errors in detecting deceptive communications. 18 However, a chronic inability to detect untrustworthiness, as in the case of our patient, points toward low social intelligence being the cause of gullibility. Social intelligence is a complicated, multifaceted construct that draws from both behavioral components (e.g., "people skills") and cognitive components (e.g., mentalizing or perspective-taking). 19 Taking into account our patient's neuropsychological testing showing impairment in facial emotional recognition, it is perhaps not surprising that our patient repeatedly struggled to understand the perspectives of others. ...
We present here the case of a 27-year-old man with schizoaffective disorder for roughly eight years who, seven years prior to presentation at our institution, suffered a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) in a car accident. His course since that time has been marked by paranoid and guilty delusions, Cotard delusion (CD), which is the belief he is dead or does not exist, and scam susceptibility leading to the loss of nearly $200,000. He was hospitalized at our institution after his uncle called emergency medical services, concerned about the patient's increasing disorganization and worsening delusions in the setting of medication nonadherence. In our inpatient unit, clozapine was titrated to its highest tolerable dose and, while reality testing appeared and his CD resolved, he remained acutely vulnerable to scams even while hospitalized. We review the existing literature on scam vulnerability, which heretofore has focused primarily on the elderly, and also TBI rehabilitation strategies in an attempt to better understand the underpinnings of this patient's scam susceptibility and to construct a multidisciplinary approach to lessening his susceptibility to financial exploitation in the future.
... At the intrapersonal level, research on emotion and information processing indicates that mild dysphoric emotions (e.g., sadness) can increase information processing (e.g., Forgas, 2007;Forgas & East, 2008). To the extent that an actual-ideal discrepancy can be addressed by carefully scrutinizing the situation, experiencing dejection-related emotions may thus be functional for alliance partners. ...
This article utilizes a motivational perspective on emotions to reconceptualize the impact of negative emotions on relationship dynamics between alliance partners. Alliance failure is endemic and yet we know little about how alliance partners manage the interface between them. We draw upon the alliance discrepancy model, self-discrepancy theory, appraisal theory, emotions as social information theory, and Horney’s behavioral typology of moving toward, moving against, or moving away to analyze the emotional, motivational, and behavioral dynamics among alliance decision makers. We propose that process discrepancies predominantly produce agitation-related emotions such as anger and anxiety, whereas outcome discrepancies predominantly produce dejection-related emotions such as sadness and disappointment. We analyze the impact of emotions at both the intrapersonal and the interpersonal levels. The intrapersonal level captures the impact of alliance decision makers’ experienced emotions on their own behavior, whereas the interpersonal level captures the impact of alliance decision makers’ expressed emotions on their partners’ behavior. At the intrapersonal level, agitation-related emotions lead alliance decision makers to move against (or away from) their partner, whereas dejection-related emotions lead them to move toward their partner. At the interpersonal level, the expression of dejection-related emotions leads alliance decision makers to move toward their partner, whereas the expression of agitation-related emotions leads alliance partners to either move toward or against their partner depending upon the relative power of the parties and the specific agitation emotion that is expressed. We develop a series of propositions linking discrepancies with emotions and alliance management, which highlight a different way of thinking about emotions in alliances. Rather than treating negative emotions as destructive forces, our model points to the potential functionality of the experience and expression of negative emotions in alliances. We conclude by outlining some boundary conditions of our model and discussing implications for research and practice.
... Finally, we explore the importance of perceived truthfulness in predicting trust in leadership and perceived deservingness of termination. Determining whether a person is being truthful or deceptive provides the foundation for interpersonal trust to develop (Forgas and East 2008;Jones 1964). Moreover, when trust is violated in organizations, individuals desire punitive action against the perpetrators of injustice (Reb et al. 2006). ...
In what we label the “femme fatale” effect, we proposed and found support for the notion that attractive businesswomen are judged as being less truthful than less attractive women for reasons rooted in sexual insecurity. In Study 1 (n = 198; U.S. participants), attractiveness predicted less perceived truthfulness for female, but not male, leaders delivering negative organizational news. Next, we revealed limitations of the lack-of-fit explanation; this effect persisted when the attractive woman was in a feminine role in Study 2 (n = 155; U.S. participants), in a feminine industry in Study 3 (n = 286; U.S. participants), and delivering positive rather than negative news in Study 4 (n = 148; U.S. participants). In Study 5 (n = 209; U.S. participants), the effect was eliminated when participants were primed to feel sexually secure, but maintained among those primed to feel generally secure, and truthfulness predicted trust in the target’s leadership. In Study 6 (n = 206; U.S. participants), we again eliminated the femme fatale effect by priming sexual security and extended our findings by demonstrating that perceptions of truthfulness predicted perceived deservingness of termination.
... While happy employees are more likely to stay within the organization, are safer, more likely to have satisfied customers, and more likely to engage in citizenship behavior, they are also found to be more selfish (Tan & Forgas, 2010), experience loneliness, not necessarily increase productivity, and so on. Forgas and East (2008) found that while in a positive mood, people are more likely to be trusting and gullible while making judgments, diminishing their accuracy in detecting deceptive communications, unlike those in a negative mood where the skepticism towards targets improved their judgment of deception. Druckman and McDermott (2001) confirm the influence of emotions on risk-taking, but this influence is different for different positive and negative emotions, confirming the Lerner and Keltner's (2000) Appraisaltendency framework (which systematically links different judgment and choices to the appraisal processing of specific emotions).Another experimental study by Tan and Forgas (2010) showed that happiness might make people more selfish, displaying more assimilative, and internally focused processing. ...
Decision making, the process of selection of an option or course of action from possible alternatives, is one of the cognitive functions of human beings. Happiness is an emotion associated with feelings of pleasure, well-being, and sometimes meaning. Emotions, such as happiness, are said to drive behavior, and influence decision making. The present study aims to examine the effect of happiness on decision making (time taken for decision making and risk-taking behavior) through an experiment, with 60 management students from
Bangalore as participants. Results show that there is a significant positive relation between pre and post happiness. The results of the study indicate that happier people tend to take less time in making decisions and that happiness does not impact risk-taking behavior. The study also implies that we need to re-evaluate the discourse of happiness at work because happiness does not necessarily lead to risky or non- risky decisions. The findings of the present study will be significant in the fields of positive psychology, cognitive psychology, industrial psychology, human resource management, and organizational behavior.
Keywords: Happiness, Decision Making, Risk-taking, Management
... Previous studies have suggested that positive mood tends to lead to overestimating the probability of positive events and underestimating the probability of negative events (George & Dane, 2016;Nygren, Isen, Taylor & Dulin, 1996;Wright & Bower, 1992). Evoked negative moods, on the other hand, may increase skepticism and lead to increased accuracy in detecting deception (Forgas & East, 2008), which may be central in a negotiation or social decision-making task. ...
Emotions have various effects on work life and organizational social interaction.
Daily work events evoke emotional reactions, which are communicated, either intentionally or unintentionally, to colleagues and clients. These communicated emotions may evoke corresponding affective responses in the perceiver, thus making the emotions social. An existing emotional state may affect the performance of work tasks such as decision-making. It may also affect social interaction, regardless of whether it happens face-to-face or is mediated by some communication technology. The hierarchical nature of organizations may often also result in implicit rules regarding the expression of certain emotions, depending on one’s social status.
This dissertation uses self-reports and psychophysiological measurements to study emotions in organizational social interaction, in both controlled laboratory experiments and field studies in actual work settings. The four studies of the dissertation focus on two research lines: 1) The dispositional effects of personality and trait emotional intelligence on emotions during dyadic face-to-face social interaction, and 2) Emotional processes during technology-mediated social interaction when conducting work tasks such as planning and decision-making.
The current dissertation focuses on the emotions on four of the five organizational levels of Ashkanasy’s (2003) model, namely the Within-person level, Between-person level, Interpersonal interaction level, and Group and team level. The work is organized into six research questions, which address the relationship between emotional expressions and internal motivation state, behavior in a social decision- making task, the role of trait emotional intelligence and personality in emotional processes during organizational face-to-face social interaction, emotional contagion and emotion regulation in technology-mediated social interaction, and the effects of a technology-mediated group emotional state on the individual.
Regarding the first research question, the research showed how during a social decision-making task with a computer-controlled virtual character, the participant’s facial muscle activation, which is indicative of negative valence emotional expressions, was related to their decision to defect the possibility of cooperation. This defection enabled a higher pay-off in the task; the frontal asymmetry of the electroencephalogram, indexing approach motivation, was related to the anticipated high pay-off achievement rather than to establishing cooperation. During a performance review discussion, both trait emotional intelligence and the matching levels of the Extraversion personality dimension was related to self-reports and physiological activity, indicating a positive valence emotional state, thus contributing to the second and third research questions. As regards the fourth research question, the results showed that emotional contagion occurred from a virtual character, as well as within a distributed group, via a technology-mediated cue of group emotional state. We also observed emotion regulation in the participant when they interacted with a virtual character, thus contributing to the fifth research question. Finally, the sixth research question was addressed by showing that contagious negative group emotional state had detrimental effects on confidence in the group.
In sum, this dissertation contributes to the field of organizational social psychology by showing the viability of the quantitative method of psychophysiology in the study of organizational behavior in real-life contexts.
... Further, empathic individuals may be unable to analyze discourse with emotionally salient content because of difficulties in suppressing their emotion-focused processing (Baker et al., 2013). Interestingly (Forgas & East, 2008) showed that emotional experiences had significant influence on the accuracy of detecting lies. They suggested that emotional experiences influence many cognitive and behavioral strategies people adopt in social situations like attention, learning, memory, perceptions, judgments and inferences (Bless, 2001;Bless & Fiedler, 2006;Fiedler, 2001;Forgas, 2002). ...
Lies are notoriously difficult to detect. But it appears that some people are better at accomplishing this task than others even though the factors contributing to deception detection accuracy are not well understood. This study explored the influence of empathy on the detection of deception as a function of the detectors’ gender while dark personality traits were statistically controlled. Eighty men and 80 women were requested to judge whether individuals viewed in videos were giving their true opinion or not on current debatable issues (50% truthful and 50% deceptive narratives). Judges were divided into four groups according to their gender and their degree of empathy, as assessed using the Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy. It was found that women with lower levels of empathy distinguished false from true opinions better than women with higher empathy, whereas no such difference was found in men. These results suggest that the degree of empathy in women influences their ability to detect deception and supports recent studies showing that emotional skills negatively affect deception detection ability. We suggest that less empathic women are less affected by emotional contagion and thus may be more able to focus on non-emotional cues that might reveal deception.
... Such an example is characteristic of dichotomous thinking, a well-known cognitive error (Egan et al. 2007). In addition, counteracting a negative statement such as "I am the worst" with its positive counterpart "I am the best" could reinforce positive illusions, which include unrealistic positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control or mastery, and unrealistic optimism including overgeneralizations (Forgas 1998a, b;Forgas and East 2008;Goldenberg and Forgas 2012). ...
Interpretation biases are a core feature of social anxiety. Used to automatically train positive interpretation biases, the existing versions of Cognitive Bias Modification for Interpretation (CBM-I) render mixed results. The current study presents the development and testing of a one-session novel adaptation of CBM-I for social anxiety that provides an adaptive instead of a positive meaning to socially loaded situations. Informed by Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy and latest theoretical upgrades, we argue that biases exist on a continuum from adaptive to maladaptive and defining them by valence may fuel unrealistic positive illusions. A hundred forty volunteers with high social anxiety were randomized to the CBM-I or to the sham-training condition. Baseline, post-training, and during impromptu speech assessments of self-reported anxiety were made, while adaptive interpretation bias was measured at baseline and post-training. First, near-transfer effects in favor of the CBM-I group were found. Second, no far-transfer effects were found regarding the anxiety experienced during the speech. Third, a main finding was that changes in interpretation bias fully mediated training effects on anxiety. To our knowledge, this is the first CBM-I study to evidence that experimentally induced changes in interpretation mediate changes in anxiety. The therapeutic potential of this new adaptation of CBM-I requires testing in clinical samples.
... Malleable variables can also be related to phishing susceptibility. For example, laboratory experiments on deception in general have shown that a happy mood tends to make people more gullible than a sad or neutral mood [29]. The interpersonal deception theory [25] also covers malleable variables. ...
... Nálada. Forgas a East (2008) uvádí, že lidé mající špatnou náladu rozeznají lhaní přesněji než lidé naladěni pozitivně. ...
V článku porovnáváme „běžnou“ a „lživou“ internetovou komunikaci vedenou přes Windows Live Messenger. Respondenti měli v experimentálně pojatém výzkumu nejprve za úkol komunikovat s druhou neznámou osobou, poté dostali za úkol komunikovat s jinou osobou a přitom předstírat identitu opačného pohlaví a lhát. Následně jsme porovnávali jazykové prostředky, které byly v obou typech komunikace používány. Výsledky ukázaly, že lživá komunikace obsahovala větší počet slovesných tvarů v prvním stupni, více příslovcí, vět a otázek a menší počet číslovek a slov v druhém pádě a jejich vzkazy byly kratší. Rozdíly mezi klamavou a běžnou komunikací se lišily u mužů a žen: u mužů se při klamavé komunikaci oproti pravdivé změnily spíše lingvistické charakteristiky jejich projevu (počet příslovcí), kdežto u žen spíše charakteristiky strategie komunikace (počet otázek). Článek může sloužit jako výchozí bod pro práci na nástrojích umožňujících automatickou analýzu klamání na internetu v českém jazyce.
... The other finding of the current study showed that watching melodrama movies did not significantly increase adolescents' decision making. The research of (Forgas & East, 2008) did not confirm the above result. The result of their study showed that watching melodrama movies has a positive influence on risky decision making. ...
Introduction: Brain Functional Performance is a collection of excellent mental processing that provides a framework for achieving goals based on targeted behaviors. Disorders in executive functions make it difficult for a person to perform everyday tasks. One of the phenomena that have been highlighted in various media is the violent phenomenon that adolescents welcome with the production of violent movies. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effect of violent movies on risky decision making and behavioral inhibition of adolescents and compare it with melodrama. Method: This study was conducted with a quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test with a control group among 60 adolescents in Tehran (30 girls and 30 boys) using the available sampling method. For this purpose, neurological tests of Iowa Gambling and Go-No Go were used. Findings: The results showed that violent movies caused a significant increase in risky decision making (P<0.05). In addition, these types of movies caused a significant decrease in behavioral inhibition among adolescents (P<0.05). Conclusion: Movies that have a rude story and content that glorifies violence harm adolescents' decision making and deterrence, leading them to make risky decisions and inadequate inhibition.
... From the PP perspective, this implies a more balanced approach regarding the influence of positive emotions in SLA as well. Research in psychology and education has shown that positive emotions, under certain circumstances, may induce unrealistic appraisals, fostering superficial information processing, and reducing motivation to pursue challenging goals (Forgas and East, 2008;Pekrun and Perry, 2014). For language learners, unrealistic optimism may lead to an overestimated sense of control over the learning tasks and situation, hope for an easy shortcut to achievement, and less systematic planning and preparation, which will diminish their chances of success (Komorowska, 2016). ...
Although emotion research and positive psychology (PP) have recently gained strong momentum in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), theoretical models linking language emotion and PP research, which offer insights for both research and intervention practice are lacking. To address this gap, the present article first introduces the origin, concept, and research around PP. Next, it summarizes recent research on PP and emotions in SLA. Finally, by triangulating emotion theories and research in the fields of psychology, education, and SLA, we propose a new model, which merges the three pillars of PP (positive institutions, positive characteristics, and positive emotions) with the antecedents, outcomes, and interventions of second language (L2) emotions (the L2EPP model). The value of the model to L2 pedagogy and research is highlighted in the context of the importance of integrating PP into the area of emotions and instructed SLA.
... It can range from being optimistic to being pessimistic. (Davidson, 2003;Davidson and Begley, 2012;Fox, 2012;Forgas and East, 2008;Moekenmeyer et al., 2012;Prati et al., 2003) Social intuition This implies responsiveness, or the lack thereof, in relationships and conversations. (Davidson and Begley, 2012) Self-awareness ...
... People are generally poor at detecting interpersonal deception (DePaulo, 1992), and mood may play a particularly important role in such judgments. For example, when rating the genuineness of positive and negative facial expressions displayed by professional actors, participants in a positive mood believed the expressions to be more genuine than did those in the neutral-and negative-mood conditions (Forgas & East, 2008b). This mood effect on accepting nonverbal displays at face value was further confirmed when participants evaluated the sincerity of specific, discrete facial emotions displayed by actors (happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, and fear). ...
How does affect influence gullibility? After a brief consideration of the nature of gullibility, I describe a series of experiments that explored the prediction that in situations in which close attention to stimulus information is required, negative mood can reduce gullibility and positive mood can increase gullibility. The experiments examined mood effects on truth judgments, vulnerability to misleading information, the tendency to uncritically accept interpersonal messages, the detection of deception, and the tendency to see meaning in random or meaningless information. In all of these domains, positive mood promoted gullibility and negative mood reduced it. The practical and theoretical significance of these convergent findings are discussed, and the practical implications of affectively induced gullibility in real-life domains are considered.
... Information, both positive and negative, is processed more efficiently in positive mood states. [38] Positive affect can also help increase self-esteem and selfefficacy. There are many ways to foster positive emotions in RT interventions. ...
The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the connection between complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and social identity, and describe the implications for Recreational Therapists. C-PTSD occurs when someone, typically a child, is exposed to multiple and varied traumatic events, or endures chronic exposure to the same traumatic event. This can lead to difficulty forming an individual identity, and difficulty with attachments making it hard to identify with particular social groups. Because recreation and leisure can be a place where identity is formed, Recreational Therapist are in a position to holistically approach treatment of C-PTSD including using leisure and recreation to strengthen people's sense of self as well as their sense of belonging to particular groups. Powered by Editorial Manager® and ProduXion Manager® from Aries Systems Corporation Cover Letter Click here to access/download Cover Letter Cover letter.pdf Recreational Therapy, Complex Trauma, and Social Identity Abstract The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the connection between complex post-traumatic
... For instance, people in positive moods may evaluate others more positively, and people in negative moods may evaluate others more negatively. Forgas and East (2008) found that the experience of negative affect was associated with heightened skepticism, resulting in heightened perceptions of inauthenticity. ...
Frontline service employees often feign positive displays during customer interactions to enhance service outcomes, but to what extent are customers aware of these inauthentic positive displays? The perception of inauthenticity involves a series of complex judgments, however, the influence of customers' different thinking processes on these judgments and the role of customer individual differences in emotional intelligence are seldom investigated. This article investigates how customer emotional intelligence influences the processing of frontline employees' inauthentic positive displays. Across three experimental studies, we find that experiential processes combine with high emotional intelligence to predict more accurate perceptions of frontline employees' inauthentic positive displays (Study 1). In contrast, rational processes interact with low emotional intelligence to predict less accurate perceptions (Study 2). We also find that high emotional intelligence and high dual thinking processes (both experiential and rational) predict more accurate perceptions of frontline employees' inauthentic positive displays (Study 3). These results extend knowledge of the important role of customers in detecting the frontline employee's inauthentic displays. Our findings have important practical implications for service settings where there are strong expectations for frontline employees to provide “service with a smile.”
... For instance, Bodenhausen et al. (1994) found that anger elicits greater reliance upon heuristic cues in a persuasion paradigm, whereas sadness promotes an opposite, decreased reliance on heuristic cues. Literature on the relationship between emotion and gullibility has found that a negative mood state generally increases skepticism, whereas a positive mood state increases gullibility and decreases the ability to detect deception (Forgas and East 2008;Forgas 2019). Affective feelings have also been found to demonstrate a flexible influence on cognition; that is, both positive and negative emotions may improve cognitive performance, depending on the nature of the task (e.g., creative versus analytic) and processing styles available (e.g., heuristic versus systematic; see Huntsinger and Ray 2016). ...
What is the role of emotion in susceptibility to believing fake news? Prior work on the psychology of misinformation has focused primarily on the extent to which reason and deliberation hinder versus help the formation of accurate beliefs. Several studies have suggested that people who engage in more reasoning are less likely to fall for fake news. However, the role of reliance on emotion in belief in fake news remains unclear. To shed light on this issue, we explored the relationship between experiencing specific emotions and believing fake news (Study 1; N = 409). We found that across a wide range of specific emotions, heightened emotionality at the outset of the study was predictive of greater belief in fake (but not real) news posts. Then, in Study 2, we measured and manipulated reliance on emotion versus reason across four experiments (total N = 3884). We found both correlational and causal evidence that reliance on emotion increases belief in fake news: self-reported use of emotion was positively associated with belief in fake (but not real) news, and inducing reliance on emotion resulted in greater belief in fake (but not real) news stories compared to a control or to inducing reliance on reason. These results shed light on the unique role that emotional processing may play in susceptibility to fake news.
... sadness due to the death of a loved one) could impact their abilities to detect deceit. People who are experiencing a sad mood are more accurate at detecting deception than those in neutral or happy moods (Forgas & East, 2008;Reinhard & Schwarz, 2012). They are also less likely to exhibit a truth bias. ...
Around the world, almost every aspect of people’s lives has been affected by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). We focused on one context that has received relatively little attention to date: the courtroom. Guided by established psychological findings and theories, we explored how the emergence of COVID-19 and proposed protective measures against the virus (i.e. face masks, physical distancing) could affect legal decision-making at trial. For the majority of the phenomena that we considered, the extant literature predicted negative or mixed effects. Because it appears likely that extralegal factors related to the pandemic will affect outcomes, the fairness of proceedings must be called into question. Overall, this work suggests that the reopening of the courts might be premature. It also highlights the importance of leveraging established psychological findings to address questions arising from unpredictable events when direct research is not yet available.
... A limited number of psychologists have studied the role of affect on language. Perhaps most notably, Forgas and colleagues found that the affective state influences the politeness of requests, with people in a negative state being more polite (Forgas 1999(Forgas , 2013Forgas and East 2008;Koch et al. 2013). In addition, Beukeboom and Semin (2006) found that people in a negative state used more concrete language, in terms of the Linguistic Category Model (Semin and Fiedler 1991), while people in a positive mood used relatively more abstract descriptions. ...
This paper introduces a new corpus of paired football match reports, the Multilingual Emotional Football Corpus, (MEmoFC), which has been manually collected from English, German, and Dutch websites of individual football clubs to investigate the way different emotional states (e.g. happiness for winning and disappointment for losing) are realized in written language. In addition to the reports, it also contains the statistics for the selected matches. MEmoFC is a corpus consisting of comparable subcorpora since the authors of the texts report on the same event from two different perspectives—the winner’s and the loser’s side, and from an arguably more neutral perspective in tied matches. We demonstrate how the corpus can be used to investigate the influence of affect on the reports through different approaches and illustrate how game outcome influences (1) references to the own team and the opponent, and (2) the use of positive and negative emotion terms in the different languages. The MEmoFC corpus, together with the analyzed aspects of emotional language will open up new approaches for targeted automatic generation of texts.
... Several studies have suggested that people are inclined to perceive faces in a mood-congruent manner (e.g., Bouhuys et al. 1995;Terwogt et al. 1991). Forgas and East (2008) reported that positive affect increased, and negative affect decreased, the perceived genuineness of videotaped facial expressions. Experiment 2 explored the effects of participants' moods on altruism detection and their skepticism about facial expressions. ...
In this study, we investigated the cognitive processes and nonverbal cues used to detect altruism in three experiments based on a zero-acquaintance video presentation paradigm. Cognitive mechanisms of altruism detection are thought to have evolved in humans to prevent subtle cheating. Several studies have demonstrated that people can correctly estimate levels of altruism in others. In this study, we asked participants to distinguish altruists from non-altruists in video clips using the Faith game. Participants decided whether they could trust allocation of money to the targets who were videotaped while talking to the experimenter. In our first experiment, we asked the participants to play the Faith game under cognitive load. The accuracy of altruism detection was not reduced when participants simultaneously performed a cognitive task, suggesting that altruist detection is rapid and effortless. In the second experiment, we investigated the effects of affective status on the accuracy of altruism detection. Compared with participants in a positive mood, those in a negative mood were more hesitant to trust videotaped targets. However, the accuracy with which altruism levels were detected did not change when we manipulated participants’ moods. In the third experiment, we investigated the facial cues by which participants detected altruists. Participants could not detect altruists when the upper half of the target’s face was hidden, suggesting that judgment cues exist around the eyes. We also conducted a meta-analysis on the effect size in each experimental condition to verify the robustness of altruism detection ability.
... The positivity effect, aiming at achieving immediate gratification, would also lead older adults to put more effort into trusting others than do younger adults (Li and Fung 2013;Poulin and Haase 2015). Studies including younger adults have suggested that interacting with untrustworthy partners induces a negative emotional response, which in turn acts as a warning signal to avoid that person (Winston et al. 2002), while a positive mood induction has been shown to make young adults more credulous (Forgas and East 2008). Similarly, Kircanski et al. (2018) found that inducing high arousal emotions (regardless of valence) could increase older adults', but not younger adults', intention to purchase falsely advertised items. ...
While perceptions of facial trustworthiness usually serve as our first references for social interactions, these impressions may ultimately turn out to be inaccurate or unreliable. Compared with younger adults, older adults generally face a higher risk of fraudulent exploitation; the characteristics of older adults’ facial trustworthiness perception may play an important role in revealing the underlying mechanism of their being cheated. Previous studies have demonstrated that, in comparison with their younger counterparts, older adults tend to overestimate strangers’ facial trustworthiness. In the present study, two experiments were conducted, aiming at testing (1) the age-related differences in facial trustworthiness perceptions (Experiment 1) and (2) whether any interventions (e.g., encouraging more deliberative processing or more affective processing) could be applied to help older adults reduce their tendency to overestimate trustworthiness, thus reducing their facial trustworthiness ratings to a lower level (Experiment 2). The results indicated that (1) consistent with previous studies, older adults provided higher trustworthiness ratings for unfamiliar faces than did younger adults (Experiment 1) and (2) more importantly, affective processing instead of deliberative processing could benefit older adults in their assessments of facial trustworthiness, leading them toward demonstrating similar—not significantly higher—levels of trust toward strange faces as younger adults (Experiment 2). A possible mechanism was offered, suggesting that affective processing might help older adults to detect negative cues in unfamiliar faces.
... Люди с высоким эмоциональным интеллектом в целом сообщают о более высоких уровнях субъективного благополучия, чем другие [15], что указывает на то, что они могут быть более доверчивыми, так как наличие положительного настроения ухудшает точность оценки правдивости сообщений [16]. ...
... Recent experiments on discernment of photos manipulated by generative neural networks demonstrate evidence that ordinary people can quickly learn to detect manipulated content 50 , and even make judgments about the effects that manipulations will have on other systems 51 . In addition, recent research in social psychology suggests that negative emotions can reduce gullibility, which could perhaps improve individual's discernment of videos 52,53 . Yet to our knowledge, there has been little direct work on how accurately individuals perform at detecting deepfake videos and what cognitive mechanisms humans use to discern between real and fake videos. ...
The recent emergence of deepfake videos leads to an important societal question: how can we know if a video that we watch is real or fake? In three online studies with 15,016 participants, we present authentic videos and deepfakes and ask participants to identify which is which. We compare the performance of ordinary participants against the leading computer vision deepfake detection model and find them similarly accurate while making different kinds of mistakes. Together, participants with access to the model's prediction are more accurate than either alone, but inaccurate model predictions often decrease participants' accuracy. We embed randomized experiments and find: incidental anger decreases participants' performance and obstructing holistic visual processing of faces also hinders participants' performance while mostly not affecting the model's. These results suggest that considering emotional influences and harnessing specialized, holistic visual processing of ordinary people could be promising defenses against machine-manipulated media.
... Additionally, this study looked only at cognitive and metacognitive factors associated with bullshit detection. There are also important situational, emotional, and social factors that may exert measurable influences on bullshit detection that would be well-served by an approach that incorporates more personality-based and social psychological perspectives (e.g., Forgas & East, 2008;Petrocelli, 2021). ...
The growing prevalence of misinformation (i.e., bullshit) in society carries with it an increased need to understand the processes underlying many people's susceptibility to falling for it. Though several cognitive and metacognitive variables have been found to be associated with a greater propensity to falling for bullshit, little attention has been paid to people's perceptions of and confidence in their own ability to detect it and the phenomenology of the thinking processes they employ when evaluating misleading information. Here we report two studies (N = 412) examining the associations between bullshit detection accuracy, confidence in one's bullshit detection abilities, and the metacognitive experience of evaluating potentially misleading information. We find that people with the poorest bullshit detection performance grossly overestimate their detection abilities and significantly overplace those abilities compared to others. Additionally, highly bullshit receptive people reported using both intuitive and reflective thinking processes when evaluating misleading information. These results suggest that some people may have a "bullshit blind spot" and that traditional miserly processing explanations of receptivity to misleading information may be insufficient to fully account for these effects.
There is an ethical obligation to notify individuals about potential pain associated with diagnoses, treatments, and procedures; however, supplying this information risks inducing nocebo hyperalgesia. Currently there are few empirically-derived strategies for reducing nocebo hyperalgesia. Since nocebo effects are linked to negative affectivity, we tested the hypothesis that a positive affect induction can disrupt nocebo hyperalgesia from verbal suggestion. Healthy volunteers (N =147) were randomly assigned to conditions in a 2 (Affect Induction: Positive vs. Neutral) by 2 (Verbal Suggestion: No Suggestion vs. Suggestion of Pain Increase) between-subjects design. Participants were induced to experience positive or neutral affect by watching movie clips for 15 mins. Next, participants had an inert cream applied to their non-dominant hand and suggestion was manipulated by telling only half the participants the cream could increase the pain of the upcoming cold pressor test. Subsequently, all participants underwent the cold pressor test (8C ±.04C), wherein they submerged the non-dominant hand and rated pain intensity on numerical rating scales every 20 sec up to two mins. In the neutral affect conditions, there was evidence for the nocebo hyperalgesia effect: participants given the suggestion of pain displayed greater pain than participants not receiving this suggestion, ps<.05. Demonstrating a blockage effect, nocebo hyperalgesia did not occur in the positive affect conditions, ps>.5. This is the first study to show that positive affect may disrupt nocebo hyperalgesia thereby pointing to a novel strategy for decreasing nocebo effects without compromising the communication of medical information to patients in clinical settings.
Introduction: Depressive realism literature suggests that depressed individuals’ negative self-view is correlated with less self-serving positivity bias. Also, research suggests some social cognitive advantages for individuals with subclinical levels of depression (dysphoria), especially in identifying negative emotions. This study tested the hypothesis that individuals with dysphoric symptoms show less of a truth bias and are more accurate at detecting deception. Moreover, this effect was expected to be stronger in positive statements (I like) than in negative (I dislike) statements. Finally, a lower judgment confidence and a more accurate assessment of their lie detection ability were expected to be found in individuals with dysphoric symptoms. Methods: Two hundred-sixty-nine participants judged the veracity of 24 video statements. Analyses tested the hypotheses with three different measures of depression: the IPIP-240 Depression Subscale, the PHQ-9, and the DESC-I. Results: In contrast to the assumptions, results found no evidence that individuals with dysphoric symptoms were better at identifying false and true messages in general. While higher scores of the DESC-I were negatively correlated with accuracy in lie detection, the IPIP-240 and the PHQ-9 were found to be not significantly correlated with lie detection accuracy. While for like statements individuals with dysphoric symptoms and individuals without (measured with the DESC-I) were not different in accuracy, individuals with dysphoric symptoms had lower accuracy scores in dislike statements than individuals without. Moreover, the PHQ-9 found lower measures of judgment confidence in individuals with dysphoric symptoms compared to individuals without, while the other depression measurements showed no significant differences. Furthermore, no evidence for a more accurate assessment of lie detection ability in individuals with dysphoric symptoms was found. Discussion: Results and directions for future research are discussed.
Recenzie-Thomas Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2013
Most research on health interventions aims to find evidence to support better causal inferences about those interventions. However, for decades, a majority of this research has been criticised for inadequate control of bias and overconfident conclusions that do not reflect the uncertainty. Yet, despite the need for improvement, clear signs of progress have not appeared, suggesting the need for new ideas on ways to reduce bias and improve the quality of research.
With the aim of understanding why bias has been difficult to reduce, we first explore the concepts of causal inference, bias and uncertainty as they relate to health intervention research. We propose a useful definition of ‘a causal inference’ as: ‘a conclusion that the evidence available supports either the existence, or the non-existence, of a causal effect’.
We used this definition in a methodological review that compared the statistical methods used in health intervention cohort studies with the strength of causal language expressed in each study’s conclusions. Studies that used simple instead of multivariable methods, or did not conduct a sensitivity analysis, were more likely to contain overconfident conclusions and potentially mislead readers. The review also examined how the strength of causal language can be judged, including an attempt to create an automatic rating algorithm that we ultimately deemed cannot succeed.
This review also found that a third of the articles (94/288) used a propensity score method, highlighting the popularity of a method developed specifically for causal inference. On the other hand, 11% of the articles did not adjust for any confounders, relying on methods such as t-tests and chi-squared tests. This suggests that many researchers still lack an understanding of how likely it is that confounding affects their results.
Drawing on knowledge from statistics, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and all areas of health research, the central importance of how people think and make decisions is examined in relation to bias in research. This reveals the many hard-wired cognitive biases that, aside from confirmation bias, are mostly unknown to statisticians and researchers in health. This is partly because they mostly occur without conscious awareness, yet everyone is susceptible. But while the existence of biases such as overconfidence bias, anchoring, and failure to account for the base rate have been raised in the health research literature, we examine biases that have not been raised in health, or we discuss them from a different perspective. This includes a tendency of people to accept the first explanation that comes to mind (called take-the-first heuristic); how we tend to believe that other people are more susceptible to cognitive biases than we are (bias blind spot); a tendency to seek arguments that defend our beliefs, rather than seeking the objective truth (myside bias); a bias for causal explanations (various names including the causality heuristic); and our desire to avoid cognitive effort (many names including the ‘law of least mental effort’).
This knowledge and understanding also suggest methods that might counter these biases and improve the quality of research. This includes any technique that encourages the consideration of alternative explanations of the results. We provide novel arguments for a number of methods that might help, such as the deliberate listing of alternative explanations, but also some novel ideas including a form of adversarial collaboration.
Another method that encourages the researcher to consider alternative explanations is causal diagrams. However, we introduce them in a way that differs from the more formal presentation that is currently the norm, avoiding most of the terminology to focus instead on their use as an intuitive framework, helping the researcher to understand the biases that may lead to different conclusions.
We also present a case study where we analysed the data for a pragmatic randomised controlled trial of a telemonitoring service. Considerable missing data hampered the forming of conclusions; however, this enabled an exploration of methods to better understand, reduce and communicate the uncertainty that remained after the analysis. Methods used included multiple imputation, causal diagrams, a listing of alternative explanations, and the parametric g-formula to handle bias from time-dependent confounding.
Finally, we suggest strategies, resources and tools that may overcome some of the barriers to better control of bias and improvements in causal inference, based on the knowledge and ideas presented in this thesis. This includes a proposed online searchable causal diagram database, to make causal diagrams themselves easier to learn and use.
Consumers are increasingly exposed to scams and questionable marketing practices. The current work examines how consumers’ emotional states influence their gullibility (a belief or compliance with a request that most people would consider naïve). Across four studies, we show that the emotional experience of moral elevation reduces susceptibility to believe dubious claims or comply with suspicious requests. While past research showed that moral elevation enhances nurturance behavior (and support of a requester), the current work suggests that elevation may also play a protective function (that is, reduce gullibility). We show that decreased trust in a persuasion agent mediates the influence of elevation on gullibility, and demonstrate this effect in the context of health and financial domains.
We investigated linguistic factors that affect peoples’ trust in science and their commitment to follow evidence-based recommendations, crucial for limiting the spread of COVID-19. In an experiment ( N = 617), we examined whether complex (vs. simple) scientific statements on mask-wearing can decrease trust in information and its sources, and hinder adherence to behavioral measures. In line with former research on social exclusion through complex language, we also examined whether complexity effects are mediated via feelings of social exclusion. Results indicate that negative effects of text complexity were present, but only for participants with a strong conspiracy mentality. This finding informs how to increase trust in science among individuals with a high conspiracy mentality, a population commonly known for its skepticism towards scientific evidence.
Chronic positive mood (CPM) has been shown to confer a wide variety of social, functional, and health benefits. Some researchers have argued that humans evolved to feel CPM, which explains why most people report better than neutral mood (the "positivity offset bias") and why particularly happy people have particularly good outcomes. Here, we argue that the Duchenne smile evolved as an honest signal of high levels of CPM, alerting others to the psychological fitness of the smiler. Duchenne smiles are honest because they express felt positive emotion, making it difficult for unhappy people to produce them. Duchenne smiles enable happy people to signal and cooperate with one another, boosting their advantages. In our literature review, we found (a) that not all Duchenne smiles are "honest," although producing them in the absence of positive emotion is difficult and often detectable, and (b) that the ability to produce and recognize Duchenne smiles may vary somewhat by a person's cultural origin. In the final section of the article, we consider behavioral influences on CPM, reviewing research showing that engaging in eudaimonic activity reliably produces CPM, as posited by the eudaimonic-activity model. This research suggests that frequent Duchenne smiling may ultimately signal eudaimonic personality as well as CPM.
p align="center"> ABSTRACT
The act of avoiding or inevatibility perception of advertisements formed from the simple concept of leaving the room the ad is displayed to change the program channel. Internet users avoid advertisements caused by 3 (three) factors, namely internet media is intended as a media that is more oriented to a specific destination other than entertainment. The second factor is that internet users feel that regular advertisements will slow down access speeds and download processes. The third factor is advertising on the internet at any time can make users click links that appear intentionally or not. This study aims to analyze the determinants of the attitude of avoiding advertisements on Youtube. This research uses quantitative methods with SMART PLS 3.0. The research involving 100 samples found that the act of Avoiding Adverts was not directly affected by the perception of the user's goal being obstructed in enjoying the shows on Youtube and also by the user's skepticism as a moderating effect; Actions to avoid ads are influenced by the clutter of the advertisement when enjoying shows on Youtube, and previous negative experiences both directly and by using the moderation effect. As a recommendation in this study, the use of more specific sample characters (channel owners or hobbyist favourite channel lovers) can contribute more diverse results.
Keywords; inevatibility; advertising; scepticism; experience; youtube.
ABSTRAK
Tindakan menghindari atau persepsi keniscayaan iklan terbentuk dari konsep sederhana yaitu meninggalkan ruangan yang iklan yang ditayangkan sampai kepada mengganti kanal program. Pengguna internet menghindari iklan disebabkan oleh 3 (tiga) faktor yaitu media internet lebih ditujukan sebagai media yang lebih berorientasi pada tujuan tertentu selain hiburan. Faktor kedua yaitu pengguna internet merasa iklan yang tampil secara berkala akan memperlambat kecepatan akses dan proses unduh. Faktor ketiga yaitu iklan di internet sewaktu-waktu dapat membuat pengguna mengklik tautan yang muncul secara sengaja atau tidak. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis determinan sikap tindakan menghindari iklan di Youtube. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kuantitatif dengan Structural Equation Modelling – Partial Least Square dengan menggunakan SMART PLS 3.0. Penelitian yang melibatkan 100 sampel ini menemukan bahwa tindakan menghindari Iklan tidak dipengaruhi secara langsung oleh persepsi terhambatnya tujuan pengguna dalam menikmati tayangan yang ada di Youtube dan juga dengan sikap skeptis pengguna sebagai efek pemoderasi; Tindakan menghindari Iklan dipengaruhi oleh kesemrawutan iklan yang ada pada saat menikmati tayangan yang ada di Youtube , dan pengalaman negatif sebelumnya baik secara pengaruh langsung maupun dengan menggunakan efek moderasi. Sebagai rekomendasi dalam penelitian ini, penggunaan karakter sampel yang lebih spesifik (pemilik kanal atau penikmat kanal favorit hobi) bisa memberikan kontribusi hasil yang lebih beragam.
Kata Kunci; keniscayaan; iklan; skeptisisme; pengalaman; youtube. </p
The goal of this study is to investigate a developmental process of consumer skepticism about quick service restaurants (QSRs, also known as fast food or limited service restaurants)’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and consequences of CSR skepticism. People who are aware of QSRs’ CSR activities participated in an online survey. A conditional process analysis was used to test mediating roles of CSR motives and CSR skepticism and a moderating role of perceived restaurant healthfulness in the path from CSR timing to restaurant evaluation. When people perceive QSRs’ CSR actions as responses to public criticism (that is, being reactive), they are less likely to attribute sincere (e.g., values-driven) motives; this leads to skepticism about CSR actions, and ultimately, less favorable evaluation. However, if they perceive QSRs as very healthful, evaluation becomes favorable despite skepticism. QSRs should engage proactively in CSR actions before consumers raise concerns about their businesses. If QSRs have already faced CSR skepticism, they should attempt to mitigate consumer distrust regarding the genuineness of their CSR initiatives. Also, provision of healthful menu items needs to be considered to reduce the negative effects of CSR skepticism.
Social media is a key player in contemporary political, cultural and ethical debates. Given much of online engagement is characterised by impulsive and emotive responses, and social media platforms encourage a form of sensationalism that promotes epistemic vices, this paper explores whether there is space online for moral responses. This paper defends the need for moral engagement with online information and others, using an attitude entitled ‘critical perspectivism’. Critical perspectivism sees a moral agent adopt a critical eye, supplemented by a caring disposition, when engaging with interactive digital media and the stories of others that are technologically mediated. Such an ethical attitude is required given our globally connected, technological world features new versions of recognisable challenges to democracy and the reasonableness of citizens. There is a vital role for educationalists to play in teaching and making space and time for students to practice being critically perspectival.
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate whether and how air pollution affects auditor behavior and audit quality. Specifically, the authors draw from studies of behavioral economics and psychology to develop a new prediction that air pollution-induced negative mood causes pessimistic bias in auditors’ risk assessments of client firms, which motivates them to put more effort into achieving higher audit quality.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses a sample of Chinese public firms for the period 2013 to 2018 and an ordinary least squares model to examine the effects of air pollution on audit quality.
Findings
The results suggest that auditors exposed to higher levels of air pollution are more likely to put more effort into their audits, resulting in higher audit quality. Furthermore, the impacts of air pollution on audit quality are more pronounced when an auditor has a higher level of education, a major in accounting or a related subject and a position as a partner. A series of identification tests and sensitivity tests further support the main findings.
Practical implications
This study provides deeper insight into how air pollution affects auditors’ decision-making through its effect on mood.
Social implications
The findings have broad potential implications for auditing and other high-skill professions. Because air pollution-induced negative mood is a common occurrence and numerous psychological experiments have demonstrated the potentially adaptive and beneficial role of negative mood in decision-making for professions like auditing that need a more conservative, alert and detail-oriented cognitive style, negative mood may to some extent facilitate decision-making. Professionals may benefit from paying closer attention to the adaptive benefits of different moods.
Originality/value
Few studies empirically discuss the effects of auditors’ psychology on audit outcomes. This study responds to this research gap with analyzes of how air pollution-induced negative mood can affect auditors’ professional judgment and audit outcomes. Further, this study adds to the growing literature that examines how air pollution affects various aspects of the economy and enriches the literature on behavioral economics, providing empirical evidence from a large sample of the effects of an environmental stressor on individual auditors’ professional judgment.
The ageing population has been rapidly growing over recent years. Theoretically, religion seemingly plays an important role in improving older people's health. This study examines whether believing in religion is related to better health conditions among Chinese older adults through a meta-analysis. Two researchers independently extracted the studies from a comprehensive database and grey literature search and evaluated their scientific quality. From the 3,777 potentially eligible papers, just 76 were selected. The pooled effect size detected no significant difference between Chinese religious and non-religious older adults’ overall health and wellbeing. Dividing the outcomes into different categories, religious older adults reported both a higher level of anxiety (Hedge's g = −0.392, 95% confidence interval (CI) = −0.494, −0.290; p = 0.004) and yet a higher level of happiness (Hedge's g = 0.342, 95% CI = 0.074, 0.610; p = 0.018). Having a higher proportion of females in the sample is related to a smaller effect size in overall health outcomes (β = −2.205, 95% CI = −3.800, −0.613; p = 0.007) and social support specifically (β = −4.660, 95% CI = −6.261, −3.058; p < 0.0001). This study is among the first to synthesise the quantitative evidence regarding health differences between older religion believers and non-believers in China. It calls for future studies investigating the pathways underlying the religion–health relationship.
Research across various disciplines has addressed personality traits that can account for dishonest behavior. This study examines the role of narcissism, a multifaceted personality construct typified by an inflated self-view, in the labor market as an influence on resume deception and counterproductive work behavior. Our findings confirmed the hypotheses and showed that job applicants with higher narcissism scores reported greater fabrication, embellishment, and omission of relevant information on their resumes. We also found that only the maladaptive aspects of narcissism were correlated with counterproductive work behavior. This finding show that narcissists may also offer positive value to organizations, related to their natural inclination toward leadership and positions of power. Knowing which personality traits are linked with dishonesty in the labor market allows for more effective applicant screening and informed decision making in the selection process.
This piece was the first in history to posit the notion of "truth-bias," which has now become foundational within the field of deception. It also posits what has come to be known as The McCornack-Parks Model of Deception Detection; namely, that as relational intimacy increases, detection confidence increases, truth-bias increases, and detection accuracy decreases.
Deception research has consistently shown that accuracy rates tend to be just over fifty percent when accuracy rates are averaged across truthful and deceptive messages and when an equal number of truths and lies are judged. Breaking accuracy rates down by truths and lies, however, leads to a radically different conclusion. Across three studies, a large and consistent veracity effect was evident. Truths are most often correctly identified as honest, but errors predominate when lies are judged. Truth accuracy is substantially greater than chance, but the detection of lies was often significantly below chance. Also, consistent with the veracity effect, altering the truth‐lie base rate affected accuracy. Accuracy was a positive linear function of the ratio of truthful messages to total messages. The results show that this veracity effect stems from a truth‐bias, and suggest that the single best predictor of detection accuracy may be the veracity of message being judged. The internal consistency and parallelism of overall accuracy scores are also questioned. These findings challenge widely held conclusions about human accuracy in deception detection.
Frontiers of Social Psychology is a new series of domain-specific handbooks. The purpose of each volume is to provide readers with a cutting-edge overview of the most recent theoretical, methodological, and practical developments in a substantive area of social psychology, in greater depth than is possible in general social psychology handbooks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
How does mood influence verbal communication, such as the use of requests? On the basis of the Affect Infusion Model (J. P. Forgas, 1995a), 3 experiments predicted and found that (a) negative moods increase and positive moods decrease request politeness and (b) they do so most in difficult situations that require more substantive processing. In Experiment 1, sad mood enhanced and happy mood reduced request politeness, especially in difficult situations. In Experiment 2, similar mood effects on the politeness and elaboration of self-generated requests were found. In Experiment 3, these findings were replicated in a variety of request situations by use of a different mood induction. Recall data confirmed that more substantive processing enhanced mood effects on requesting. The cognitive mechanisms mediating mood effects on requesting are discussed, and the implications of the results for interpersonal communication and for recent affect–cognition theories are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in Ss by hypnotic suggestion to investigate the influence of emotions on memory and thinking. Results show that (a) Ss exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences; (b) Ss recalled a greater percentage of those experiences that were affectively congruent with the mood they were in during recall; (c) emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities; (d) when the feeling-tone of a narrative agreed with the reader's emotion, the salience and memorability of events in that narrative were increased. An associative network theory is proposed to account for these results. In this theory, an emotion serves as a memory unit that can enter into associations with coincident events. Activation of this emotion unit aids retrieval of events associated with it; it also primes emotional themata for use in free association, fantasies, and perceptual categorization.
The generation effect refers to the memory advantage of words that have been generated rather than read. Such a read-generate comparison confounds qualitative task differences and raises methodological problems. A revised methodology is proposed circumventing these problems in that the encoding task is held constant and all stimuli have to be generated, but the degree of generativeness (i.e. the amount of cueing) is varied. In Experiment 1, 1, the (refined version of the) generation effect is demonstrated in a within-subjects design; with increasing generation activity left to the subject, free recall performance increases. No effect is obtained for degree of target masking. The same finding is replicated and shown to be independent of self-paced study time when generative activity is manipulated between subjects (Experiment 2) or within subjects (Experiment 3). As all learning trials involve generation, encoding time is controlled statistically, and free recall is used as a measure of memory, this refined generation effect cannot be explained as an artifact of selective attention or elaboration. Rather, generative activity seems to increase the mobilization of cognitive resources. This motivational account is supported by Experiment 4 showing an enhanced generation effect for positive mood.
How does mood affect the way we learn about, judge, and remember characteristics of other people? This study looked at the effects of mood on impression formation and person memory. Realistic person descriptions containing positive and negative details were presented to subjects experiencing a manipulated happy or sad mood. Next, impression-formation judgments were obtained, and subjects' recall and recognition of details of the characters were assessed. Results showed that subjects spent longer learning about mood-consistent details but were faster in making mood-consistent judgments. Overall, happy subjects formed more favorable impressions and made more positive judgments than did sad subjects. Both cued recall and recognition memory were superior for mood-consistent characteristics. Positive mood had a more pronounced effect on judgments and memory than did negative mood. These findings are discussed in terms of recent theories of mood effects on cognition, and the likely implications of the results for everyday person-perception judgments are considered.
Evidence for the role of affective states in social judgments is reviewed, and a new integrative theory, the affect infusion model (AIM), is proposed as a comprehensive explanation of these effects. The AIM, based on a multiprocess approach to social judgments, identifies 4 alternative judgmental strategies: (a) direct access, (b) motivated, (c) heuristic, and (d) substantive processing. The model predicts that the degree of affect infusion into judgments varies along a processing continuum, such that judgments requiring heuristic or substantive processing are more likely to be infused by affect than are direct access or motivated judgments. The role of target, judge, and situational variables in recruiting high- or low-infusion judgmental strategies is considered, and empirical support for the model is reviewed. The relationship between the AIM and other affect-cognition theories is discussed, and implications for future research are outlined.
Does temporary mood influence the occurrence of the fundamental attribution error (FAE)? Based on recent affect-cognition theorizing and research on attributions, 3 experiments predicted and found that negative moods decrease and positive moods increase the FAE, because of the information-processing consequences of these affective states. In Experiment 1, happy mood enhanced and sad mood reduced dispositional attributions based on coerced essays advocating unpopular opinions. Experiment 2 replicated this effect using an unobtrusive mood induction in a field study. Experiment 3 further confirmed these results and also showed that changes in the FAE were linked to mood-induced differences in processing style, as indicated by memory data and confirmed by mediational analyses. The results are discussed in terms of the cognitive processing strategies that mediate mood effects on attributions. The implications of the findings for everyday inferences and for contemporary theories of affect and cognition are considered.
We analyze the accuracy of deception judgments, synthesizing research results from 206 documents and 24,483 judges. In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. Relative to cross-judge differences in accuracy, mean lie-truth discrimination abilities are nontrivial, with a mean accuracy d of roughly .40. This produces an effect that is at roughly the 60th percentile in size, relative to others that have been meta-analyzed by social psychologists. Alternative indexes of lie-truth discrimination accuracy correlate highly with percentage correct, and rates of lie detection vary little from study to study. Our meta-analyses reveal that people are more accurate in judging audible than visible lies, that people appear deceptive when motivated to be believed, and that individuals regard their interaction partners as honest. We propose that people judge others' deceptions more harshly than their own and that this double standard in evaluating deceit can explain much of the accumulated literature.
A new method is presented for examining effects of emotion in the detection of change in facial expression of emotion. The method was used in one experiment, reported here. Participants who were induced to feel happiness, sadness, or neutral emotion, saw computerized 100-frame movies in which the first frame always showed a face expressing a specific emotion (e.g. happiness). The facial expression gradually became neutral over the course of the movie. Participants placed the movie, changing the facial expression, and indicated the frame at which the initial expression as no longer present on the face. Emotion congruent expressions were perceived to persist longer than were emotion incongruent expressions. The findings are consistent with previous findings documenting enhanced perceptual processing of emotion congruent information. The value of the current technique, and the types of everyday, situations that it might model are discussed. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Does temporary mood influence the occurrence of the fundamental attribution error (FAE)? Based on recent affect-cognition theorizing and research on attributions, 3 experiments predicted and found that negative moods decrease and positive moods increase the FAE, because of the information-processing consequences of these affective states. In Experiment 1, happy mood enhanced and sad mood reduced dispositional attributions based on coerced essays advocating unpopular opinions. Experiment 2 replicated this effect using an unobtrusive mood induction in a field study. Experiment 3 further confirmed these results and also showed that changes in the FAE were linked to mood-induced differences in processing style, as indicated by memory data and confirmed by mediational analyses. The results are discussed in terms of the cognitive processing strategies that mediate mood effects on attributions. The implications of the findings for everyday inferences and for contemporary theories of affect and cognition are considered.
The term “suggestive communication” refers to those pragmatic aspects of communication which are not stated explicitly by the sender but have to be “read between the lines” or inferred from contextual cues by the receiver. Suggestive processes come into play to the extent that communication goes beyond the mere coding and decoding of language signs or body signs (Austin, 1962; Higgins, 1981; Rommetveit, 1974). In fact, the directly stated contents of verbal messages often serve to distract the receiver from noticing subtle influences that reach the receiver via indirect paths (Loftus, 1975). One prominent variant of these phenomena, which the present chapter addresses, is the communication of credibility or, stated differently, the impression conveyed by the sender that he/she is telling the truth rather than lying. Accordingly, the problem of lie detection (DePaulo & Rosenthal, 1979; Ekman & Friesen, 1974) is conceived here as a paradigm for studying suggestive communication.
What is the role of mood in the way people explain interpersonal conflicts in their close relationships? On the basis of the multiprocess Affect Infusion Model (AIM) of judgments (J. P. Forgas, 1992a, in press), 3 experiments found a nonobvious pattern of greater mood effects on attributions for serious rather than simple conflicts. In Experiment 1, sad Ss blamed themselves more for conflicts than did happy Ss. Experiment 2 found that in a field setting, sad persons attributed real-life conflicts more to internal, stable, and global causes and did so more for serious than for simple conflicts. Experiment 3 replicated these findings in the laboratory and also produced reaction time data showing that it was the longer processing recruited by more serious conflicts that accentuated these affect-priming effects, as predicted by the AIM. The cognitive mechanisms linking affect and judgments are discussed, and the role of moods in everyday explanations of conflict is considered.
How does mood influence verbal communication, such as the use of requests? On the basis of the Affect Infusion Model (J. P. Forgas, 1995a), 3 experiments predicted and found that (a) negative moods increase and positive moods decrease request politeness and (b) they do so most in difficult situations that require more substantive processing. In Experiment 1, sad mood enhanced and happy mood reduced request politeness, especially in difficult situations. In Experiment 2, similar mood effects on the politeness and elaboration of self-generated requests were found. In Experiment 3, these findings were replicated in a variety of request situations by use of a different mood induction. Recall data confirmed that more substantive processing enhanced mood effects on requesting. The cognitive mechanisms mediating mood effects on requesting are discussed, and the implications of the results for interpersonal communication and for recent affect-cognition theories are considered.
Describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in Ss by hypnotic suggestion to investigate the influence of emotions on memory and thinking. Results show that (a) Ss exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences; (b) Ss recalled a greater percentage of those experiences that were affectively congruent with the mood they were in during recall; (c) emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities; (d) when the feeling-tone of a narrative agreed with the reader's emotion, the salience and memorability of events in that narrative were increased. An associative network theory is proposed to account for these results. In this theory, an emotion serves as a memory unit that can enter into associations with coincident events. Activation of this emotion unit aids retrieval of events associated with it; it also primes emotional themata for use in free association, fantasies, and perceptual categorization. (54 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Accuracy in the ability to detect truths and lies is important in a legal setting. It might be used as a tool in police investigations to eliminate potential suspects, to check the truthfulness of informants or to examine contradictory statements of witnesses and suspects in the same case. A consistent finding in the detection of deception literature is the truth bias: People's accuracy at detecting truths is usually higher than their accuracy at detecting lies. The present article examines whether the existence of a truth bias depends on the type of lie. It is argued that a truth bias may occur when people judge extensive statements (e.g. elaborations), but that a lie bias may occur when people judge statements which do not provide much verbal information (e.g. denials). Fifty participants (college students) were exposed to 20 video fragments of 20 people telling elaborations (10) or denials (10). Half of the elaborations and denials were truthful, the other half were deceptive. After each fragment, the participants were asked to indicate whether the person was lying or telling the truth and how confident they were in their decision making. As predicted, with regard to elaborations a truth bias was found and with regard to denials a lie bias was found. In other words, people have difficulty in accurately judging deceptive elaborations and truthful denials. The study further revealed individual differences in participants' confidence at detecting deceit. The more socially anxious/shy the participants reported themselves to be, the less confident they were in their ability to detect deceit. Also, the more extraverted they themselves reported to be, the more confident they were in their ability to detect deceit. The importance of confidence on improving people's ability to detect deceit will be discussed.
When interpreting an interaction in the analysis of variance (ANOVA), many active researchers (and, in turn, students) often ignore the residuals defining the interaction Although this problem has been noted previously, it appears that many users of ANOVA remain uncertain about the proper understanding of interaction effects To clear up this problem, we review the way in which the ANOVA model enables us to take apart a table of group means or the individual measurements contributing to the means to reveal the underlying components We also show how (using only published data) to compute a contrast on the question that may be of primary interest and illustrate strategies for interpreting tables of residuals We conclude with an exercise to check on students' understanding of ANOVA and to encourage increased precision in the specification of research results
Two experiments demonstrate a positivity bias in person memory. Recall is superior for statements endorsed by a target person than for denied statements. This effect of informational positivity is independent of affective positivity (Experiment 1) and on holds for statements associated with one individual as an organizing category (Experiment 2).
Everyday lie detectors lack the necessary knowledge to use nonverbal cues that discriminate lies from truthful communications. Instead, they rely on general heuristics like infreqtuency of reported events or falsifiability. Lie detectors judged the veracity of 40 reports on minor delinquency that were either truthful or not and referred either to falsifiable manifest actions or to nonfalsifiable subjective feelings. In the uninformed condition, detectors were free to use their intuitive strategies. In the informed condition, they were given detailed instructions about valid nonverbal cues. In the informed feedback condition, they received additional outcome feedback. Performance was generally above chance but further improved through cue information and feedback. Falsifiability caused a bias toward reduced veracity judgments. A lens model analysis supports the interpretation that naive lie detectors follow content-related heuristics but can flexibly change their strategy as they learn about authentic nonverbal cues.
What is the role of mood in the way people explain interpersonal conflicts in their close relationships? On the basis of the multiprocess Affect Infusion Model (AIM) of judgments (J. P. Forgas, 1992a, in press), 3 experiments found a nonobvious pattern of greater mood effects on attributions for serious rather than simple conflicts. In Experiment 1, sad Ss blamed themselves more for conflicts than did happy Ss. Experiment 2 found that in a field setting, sad persons attributed real-life conflicts more to internal, stable, and global causes and did so more for serious than for simple conflicts. Experiment 3 replicated these findings in the laboratory and also produced reaction time data showing that it was the longer processing recruited by more serious conflicts that accentuated these affect-priming effects, as predicted by the AIM. The cognitive mechanisms linking affect and judgments are discussed, and the role of moods in everyday explanations of conflict is considered.
Gardner, Dalsing, Reyes, and Brake (1984) supplied a table of criterion values (β) related to hit and false-alarm rates in signal detection theory. Other methods of calculatingβ are suggested as more accurate alternatives to using that table. A short computer program is provided to calculate β and
the sensitivity indexd’.
Interpreting our own and others' social behaviors is an important cognitive task in everyday life. Recent work in cognitive psychology suggests that temporary mood states may have a significant effect on the way information about common social events is processed. This study investigated how (a) a person's current mood, (b) the target of the judgments (self vs other), and (c) the characteristics of the social episode (formal-informal; intimate-nonintimate) influenced people's assessment of, and memory for, social behaviors. Subjects were videotaped while engaging in four different kinds of interactions with trained confederates. One day later subjects were hypnotized, and a happy, positive, or depressed, negative mood was induced. They then watched and rated their own and their partner's interactions on the videotape. Results showed strong mood influence on behavior assessments and recall memory, and significant effects due to target (self vs other) and the type of interaction episode. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for contemporary research on social cognition, and their relevance to cognitively based theories of social maladjustment and depression are considered.
This article reviews and integrates recent research in experimental social psychology and organizational behavior demonstrating the pervasive influence that affective states or moods have on judgments, decision making, and behavior in organizations. An information processing theory, the Affect Infusion Model (AIM) is described that can account for many of the empirical findings and also provides a promising theoretical base for future research in this area. The article reviews a range of experimental and applied studies consistent with the predictions of this model, demonstrating the role of information processing strategies in moderating affective influences on organizational behavior. Specifically, we discuss the influence of affect on such work-related behaviors as worker motivation, creativity and performance, interpersonal judgments and communication, performance appraisal judgments and selection interviews, organizational spontaneity, employee flexibility and helpfulness, absenteeism, and bargaining and negotiation behaviors. The implications of the information processing approach for understanding the influence of affect on organizational behaviors are discussed, and we argue for the greater integration of affect into contemporary theorizing and research in organizational settings.
Based on recent affect-cognition theories and research on social influence strategies, four experiments predicted and found that people in negative mood produced higher quality and more effective interpersonal persuasive messages than did people in positive mood. This effect was obtained for messages advocating both popular and unpopular positions (Experiments 1 and 2), and arguments produced in negative mood actually induced greater attitude change in naïve recipients (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 replicated these effects in an interactive situation, and mediational analyses showed that mood influenced processing style, resulting in the production of more concrete and thus more effective messages when in a negative mood. The role of negative affect in information processing and the production of interpersonal influence strategies in particular is discussed, and the implications of these findings for everyday interaction strategies, and for contemporary affect—cognition theorizing are considered.
Does mood influence the accuracy of eyewitness recollections, and people’s susceptibility to misleading information in particular? Based on recent affect-cognition theories and research on eyewitness memory, three experiments predicted and found that positive affect promoted, and negative affect inhibited the incorporation of misleading information into eyewitness memories. This effect was obtained for both positive and negative events (Experiment 1), and for recorded as well as real-life incidents (Experiment 2). Participants had no meta-cognitive awareness of these mood effects, and affect-control instructions were ineffective in preventing them (Experiment 3). The cognitive mechanisms responsible for mood effects on eyewitness memories are discussed, and the implications of these findings for everyday memories, forensic practice and for current affect/cognition theorizing are considered.
We tested the prediction, derived from Coyne's (1976b) interpersonal model of depression, that dysphoric individuals would be more sensitive than nondysphoric individuals to false reassurances and phoniness. In Part 1 of a two-part study, dysphoric and nondysphoric individuals watched videotapes of discussants talking about paintings they liked and disliked with an art student who had created some of the paintings herself. As predicted, the dysphorics were more accurate than the nondysphorics at discerning when the discussants really did like the paintings only when the discussions were about disliked paintings that were the art student's own work. The Part 2 stimuli were audiotaped lies and truths conveyed by men and women to attractive same-sex and opposite-sex targets. The dysphorics tended to be more accurate than the nondysphorics at identifying the truths and lies told to opposite-sex targets, and they were significantly more accurate at identifying the opposite-sex communications than the same-sex ones.
The ability to detect lying was evaluated in 509 people including law-enforcement personnel, such as members of the U.S. Secret Service, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, Drug Enforcement Agency, California police and judges, as well as psychiatrists, college students, and working adults. A videotape showed 10 people who were either lying or telling the truth in describing their feelings. Only the Secret Service performed better than chance, and they were significantly more accurate than all of the other groups. When occupational group was disregarded, it was found that those who were accurate apparently used different behavioral clues and had different skills than those who were inaccurate.
This article proposes a differential sensitivity hypothesis, according to which central (i.e., relatively high in personal descriptiveness and importance) and peripheral (i.e., relatively low in personal descriptiveness and importance) self-conceptions are differentially influenced by mood: Peripheral self-conceptions are subject to a mood-congruency bias, whereas central self-conceptions are unaffected by mood. In 4 experiments, participants were first placed into a sad, neutral, or happy mood state through a guided imagery task and later completed behavior self-descriptiveness ratings, trait self-descriptiveness ratings, and trait self-descriptiveness judgmental latencies. Strong support for the differential sensitivity hypothesis was obtained. Peripheral self-conceptions were influenced by mood because they were less elaborated and consolidated and were held with lower certainty, thus increasing the likelihood for the occurrence of constructive, affect-infusing processes (J.P. Forgas, 1995a).
Drawing on an appraisal-tendency framework (J. S. Lerner & D. Keltner, 2000), the authors predicted and found that fear and anger have opposite effects on risk perception. Whereas fearful people expressed pessimistic risk estimates and risk-averse choices, angry people expressed optimistic risk estimates and risk-seeking choices. These opposing patterns emerged for naturally occurring and experimentally induced fear and anger. Moreover, estimates of angry people more closely resembled those of happy people than those of fearful people. Consistent with predictions, appraisal tendencies accounted for these effects: Appraisals of certainty and control moderated and (in the case of control) mediated the emotion effects. As a complement to studies that link affective valence to judgment outcomes, the present studies highlight multiple benefits of studying specific emotions.
Most people are unable to detect accurately when others are lying. Many explanations for this inability have been suggested but the cognitive heuristics involved in lie detection have received little attention. The present study offers evidence from two experiments, based on two different groups of observers, judging two different kinds of lies, presented in two different testing situations, that the fundamental attribution error significantly undermines the ability to detect honesty and deception accurately. Trait judgments of trustworthiness were highly correlated with state judgments of truthfulness, leading, as predicted, to positive correlations with honest detection accuracy and negative correlations with deception detection accuracy. More accurate lie detectors were significantly more likely than less accurate lie detectors to separate state and trait judgments of honesty. The effect of other biases, such as the halo effect and the truthfulness bias, also are examined. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
Mood and the use of general knowledge structures Theories of mood and cognition: A user's guidebook (pp. 9–26) Mood and the regulation of information processing and behavior Hearts and minds: Affective influences on social cognition and behavior (pp. 65–84) Accuracy of deception judgments
- H H Bless
- K Fiedler
Bless, H. (2001). Mood and the use of general knowledge structures. In L. L. Martin (Ed.), Theories of mood and cognition: A user's guidebook (pp. 9–26). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bless, H., & Fiedler, K. (2006). Mood and the regulation of information processing and behavior. In J. P. Forgas (Ed.), Hearts and minds: Affective influences on social cognition and behavior (pp. 65–84). New York: Psychology Press. Bond, C. F., Jr., & DePaulo, B. M. (2006). Accuracy of deception judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 214–234.