Joseph Forgas

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Papers by Joseph Forgas

Affect, memory, and social cognition

by Joseph Forgas and Gordon Bower

Cognition and emotion, 2000

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Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms

by Joseph Forgas and Diana Matovic

European Journal of Social Psychology, 2013

ABSTRACT Can temporary mood influence people&#39;s communication strategies? According to Gri... more ABSTRACT Can temporary mood influence people&#39;s communication strategies? According to Grice&#39;s cooperative principle, conversational utterances should ideally conform to the maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner. Three experiments predicted and found that participants in a negative mood complied significantly better with Grice&#39;s maxims than did participants in a positive mood when using natural language to describe a previously observed social event. Experiments 2 and 3 further confirmed that mood influenced communication strategies, and not merely the encoding (Exp. 2) and retrieval (Exp. 3) of the relevant information. These findings are consistent with affect–cognition theories predicting that positive affect promotes a more internally focused and assimilative thinking and communication style, and negative mood promotes more externally focused and accommodative thinking, resulting in the closer observance of communication norms. The relevance of these findings for recent affect/cognition theories is considered, and the practical implications of the results for everyday conversational strategies are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Evolutionary psychology and social thinking: History, issues and prospects

Psychology has undergone a profound paradigmatic shift in the past few decades. For most of the s... more Psychology has undergone a profound paradigmatic shift in the past few decades. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, a kind of unquestioning belief in the power of environmental influences on social thinking and behavior has ruled supreme in the social sciences. This environmentalist ideology rested on some notably fallacious scientific claims, such as Margaret Mead's now debunked arguments that even patterns of mating behavior are essentially culturally determined. In hindsight, it is puzzling why well-meaning psychologists and social scientists should have chosen to deny the obvious for so long -that biological, genetic and evolutionary influences do play a fundamental role in understanding social behavior.

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Affective influences on the ability to detect ambiguous communication

by Joseph Forgas and Diana Matovic

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2000

On being happy and possessive: The interactive effects of mood and personality on consumer judgments

Psychology and Marketing, 2001

Evaluations of consumer items may often be based on affective reactions, and many marketing strat... more Evaluations of consumer items may often be based on affective reactions, and many marketing strategies rely on affective manipulations to influence a desire of ownership. Surprisingly, there has been relatively little empirical work investigating the influence of short-term mood states on how people evaluate their material possessions. In particular, the role of individual differences in mediating these effects received little attention. In these two experiments, participants who scored high or low on the Openness to Feelings scale were induced to feel good or bad and were then asked to estimate the subjective and objective value of a variety of consumer items they already owned or wanted to own. Results showed a mood-congruent pattern. People who were feeling good valued both actual and potential possessions more highly than did people in a negative mood. However, individual differences significantly influenced these effects. People who scored high on the Openness to Feelings scale were most influenced by their moods. In contrast, people who scored low on this measure showed the reverse pattern. The findings are discussed in terms of the psychological

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On Managing Moods: Evidence for the Role of Homeostatic Cognitive Strategies in Affect Regulation

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2002

What are the cognitive strategies that allow people to manage and maintain their daily mood fluct... more What are the cognitive strategies that allow people to manage and maintain their daily mood fluctuations within reasonable limits? Despite intense recent interest in affective phenomena, spontaneous changes over time in mood effects have rarely been studied. Three experiments evaluated the temporal sequence of positivity and negativity in social responses by people who received an initial positive and negative mood induction. Following different mood manipulations, participants performed three kinds of serial social tasks: They generated person descriptions (Experiment 1), completed trait words (Experiment 2), or produced a series of self-descriptions (Experiment 3). Results were consistent with the operation of a spontaneous, homeostatic mood management mechanism. The authors found that initially mood-congruent responses were spontaneously reversed and replaced by mood-incongruent reactions over time. The implications of these results for recent affect-cognition theorizing, and for our understanding of people's everyday mood management strategies, are discussed.

format_quoteExperiments reveal a spontaneous reversal from mood-congruent to incongruent responses over time, supporting the mood management hypothesis.format_quote

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Cultural Influences on the Perception of Interaction Episodes

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1985

... the Australian Research Grants Commission and the Institute of Humanities and the Social Scie... more

Affective Influences on Judgments and Behavior in Organizations: An Information Processing Perspective

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2001

This article reviews and integrates recent research in experimental social psychology and organiz... more 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

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Us and them: Mood effects on intergroup discrimination

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1996

Mood effects on person-perception judgments

by Joseph Forgas and Gordon Bower

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987

How does mood affect the way we learn about, judge, and remember characteristics of other people?... more 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 moodconsistent 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.

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Praise or blame? Affective influences on attributions for achievement

by Joseph Forgas and Gordon Bower

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990

Three experiments showed that mood influences achievement attributions and that cognitive process... more Three experiments showed that mood influences achievement attributions and that cognitive processes underlie these effects. In Experiment 1, happy Ss made more internal and stable attributions for success than failure in typical 'life dilemmas'. In Experiment 2, attributions for real-life exam performance were more internal and stable in a happy than in a sad mood. Dysphoric moods resulted in self-critical rather than self-enhancing attributions, contrary to motivational theories, but consistent with cognitive models and the clinical literature on depression. In Experiment 3 this pattern was repeated with direct self vs. other comparisons, and for self-efficacy judgments. The results are interpreted as supporting cognitive rather than motivational theories of attribution biases. The implications of the results for clinical research, and contemporary affect-cognition theories are considered.

format_quotePositive moods lead to self and other-enhancing attributions, favoring internal and stable causes for success over failures.format_quote

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Mood, memory, and social judgments in children

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1988

The influence of positive and negative moods on children&#39;s recall and recognition memory ... more The influence of positive and negative moods on children&#39;s recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments was investigated in a two-list experimental design. A total of 161 schoolchildren, 8 to 10 years old, were presented with audiovisual information containing positive and negative details about 2 target children. Each presentation was preceded by happy or sad mood manipulations. One day later, the children were again placed in a happy or sad mood, and their recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments were assessed. Results showed that memory was better when (a) the children felt happy during encoding, retrieval, or both; (b) the material was incongruent with learning mood; (c) the 2 target characters were encountered in contrasting rather than in matching mood states; and (d) recall mood matched encoding mood. A happy mood increased the extremity of both positive and negative impression-formation judgments. Results are contrasted with experimental data obtained with normal or depressed adults, and implications are considered for contemporary theories of mood effects on cognition and for social-developmental research.

How Real is that Smile? Mood Effects on Accepting or Rejecting the Veracity of Emotional Facial Expressions

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 2008

Page 1. ORIGINAL PAPER How Real is that Smile? Mood Effects on Accepting or Rejecting the Veracit... more

Affect, Cognition and Social Behavior

Journal of Marketing Research, 1991

Feeling good and feeling truth: The interactive effects of mood and processing fluency on truth judgments

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2012

Can mood states influence the perceived truth of ambiguous or novel information? This study predi... more Can mood states influence the perceived truth of ambiguous or novel information? This study predicted and found that mood can significantly influence people's reliance on processing fluency when making truth judgments. Fluent information was more likely to be judged as true (the truth effect), and consistent with Bless and Fiedler's (2006) assimilative vs. accommodative processing model, negative mood eliminated, and positive mood maintained people's reliance on processing fluency as an indication of truth. Post hoc analyses confirmed the predicted mood-induced differences in processing style, as judges in a negative mood adopted more accommodative processing and paid greater attention to external stimulus information. The relevance of these results to contemporary affect-cognition theories is discussed, and the real-life implications of mood effects on truth judgments in applied areas are considered.

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Mood effects on eyewitness memory: Affective influences on susceptibility to misinformation

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2005

Does mood inXuence the accuracy of eyewitness recollections, and people's susceptibility to misle... more Does mood inXuence the accuracy of eyewitness recollections, and people's susceptibility to misleading information in particular? Based on recent aVect-cognition theories and research on eyewitness memory, three experiments predicted and found that positive aVect promoted, and negative aVect inhibited the incorporation of misleading information into eyewitness memories. This eVect 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 eVects, and aVect-control instructions were ineVective in preventing them (Experiment 3). The cognitive mechanisms responsible for mood eVects on eyewitness memories are discussed, and the implications of these Wndings for everyday memories, forensic practice and for current aVect/cognition theorizing are considered. 

format_quotePositive moods significantly increase the likelihood of incorporating misleading information into eyewitness accounts, while negative moods mitigate this risk.format_quote

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The Cognitive Representation of Political Personalities. A Cross-Cultural Comparison

by Joseph Forgas and Carolyn Kagan

International Journal of Psychology, 1977

The cognitive representation of salient political personalities was studied in a British and a Ge... more

On being tense yet tolerant: The paradoxical effects of trait anxiety and aversive mood on intergroup judgments

Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 1999

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The pleasure of possessions: affective influences and personality in the evaluation of consumer items

European Journal of Social Psychology, 2000

What is the role of affect in the way people perceive and evaluate their material possessions?

format_quoteOpenness to Feelings moderates mood effects, yielding significant interaction on subjective evaluations of consumer items (t(94)=-3.22, p<.01).format_quote

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BRIEF REPORT

Cognition & Emotion, 2005

In the past decade several film sets for the induction of emotions have been developed. These fil... more

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