Affective intelligence.doc

Affective intelligence: Towards understanding the role of affect in social thinking and behaviorJoseph P. ForgasUniversity of New South Wales,Sydney, Australia This work was supported by a Special Investigator award from the Australian Research Council, and the Research Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The contribution of Joseph Ciarrochi, Stephanie Moylan, Patrick Vargas and Joan Webb to this project is gratefully acknowledged. Please address all correspondence in connection with this paper to Joseph P. Forgas, at the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia; email .au. For further information on this research project, see also website at .au/joef/jforgas.htm .IntroductionIt is a bright sunny day outside, and you are in an excellent mood. As you stop for cappuccino on your way to work, a person in the bar reminds you of a childhood friend, and happy memories about your school years come flooding back. At work, you are on a selection committee, and as you interview the first applicant, you notice with delight what a pleasant person he is. As you discuss your decision with your colleagues, you act in a cooperative and friendly way. What role does mood play in the way people think and act in such everyday situations? How and why do mild affective states influence our thoughts, memories and behaviors? This chapter reviews recent evidence documenting the pervasive influence of affect on social thinking and behavior, and argues that emotional intelligence necessarily involves knowing how, when and why such effects occur.Arguably, affect remains perhaps the last frontier in our quest to understand the dynamics of human behavior. Although most of us intuitively know that our feelings and moods can have a crucial influence on our mental life and actions, until recently we did not fully understand how and why these influences occur. A critical and so far rather neglected component of emotional intelligence is to be aware of how affective states will influence our thoughts and behaviors. Most of these effects are subtle, subconscious and difficult to detect introspectively. It is only as a result of the recent impressive growth of experimental research on affect that we begin to understand the multifaceted influence of feelings on everything that we think and do. An important aspect of emotional intelligence is to know how these affective influences function, and to know how to control and manage them.The issues covered here are not only of interest to psychologists, but to everyone who wants to understand the complex role that affect plays in human affairs. This chapter presents an integrative review of past and present ideas about the role of subconscious mood states in how we think and behave in everyday social situations. Moods, unlike emotions, are relatively low-intensity, diffuse and enduring affective states that are often subconscious and have no salient cause. Because moods tend to be less subject to conscious monitoring than more intense emotions, paradoxically, their effects on social thinking and behavior tend to be potentially more insidious, enduring, and subtle. The main message of this chapter is simple. Although affect may color everything we think and do, it only does so in certain circumstances that require us to think in on open, constructive way. It is only this kind of thinking style that invites incidental affect infusion. The chapter surveys recent empirical evidence for affect infusion into thoughts, judgments and behaviors, and highlights the conditions that facilitate or inhibit these effects.Surprisingly, most of what we know about the role of affect in social cognition and behavior has only been discovered during the past two decades. Recent studies showed that affect and cognition are not separate, independent faculties of the mind as often assumed by philosophers and psychologists alike. Rather, there is a fundamental interdependence between feeling and thinking in human social life. Our affective experiences are integrally linked with the way information about the world is stored and represented. In turn, experiences of even mild moods have a profound influence on the memories we retrieve, the information we notice and learn, and the way we respond to social situations. Affect can influence both the process of thinking (how we deal with social information), and the content of thinking, judgments and behavior (what we think and do). It is these effects we want to explore in this chapter. However, we will first take a brief look at some historical ideas about the role of affect in human affairs.Emotional thought: sometimes intelligent, sometimes not?Since the dawn of human civilization, philosophers such as Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Pascal and Kant have been fascinated by the role of affect in thinking and behavior. Plato was among the first who thought that affect constitutes a more primitive, animal aspect of human nature that is incompatible with reason. The idea that affect subverts rational thinking survives to this day thanks to the speculative ideas of Freud and others. Writers such as Arthur Koestler (1978) even suggested that our inability to know and control our violent affective reactions is due to a fatal flaw in the way our central nervous system developed, an evolutionary mistake that threatens the very survival of our species.However, recent research in psychology and neuroanatomy suggests a radically different picture. According to these views, affect is often a useful and even essential component of an adaptive response to a social situation. Research with brain damaged patients shows that people who cannot experience affective reactions due to isolated frontal lobe damage also tend to make disastrous social decisions and their social relationships suffer accordingly, even though intellectual abilities remain unimpaired. Indeed, Adolphs and Damasio (2001) believe affective processing to be an evolutionary antecedent to more complex forms of information processing; higher cognition requires the guidance provided by affective processing (p. 45). Thus, we have two diametrically opposed views of the role of affect in human affairs: as an essential component of effective responses to social situations; or, as a dangerous, invasive influence on rational thinking that contributes to judgmental errors, and produces maladaptive responses. Neither of these positions is entirely true. Rather, affect may either facilitate, or impair effective thinking and responses depending on the circumstances involved. Thus emotional thought can be either intelligent or unintelligent, adaptive or maladaptive. A key tasks of contemporary research and this review - is to help us to understand how, when and why such affective influences occur.Affect and predicting the futureHow happy would you be, and for how long, if you won the lottery? And how devastated would you feel if your current romantic relationship ended? Many of our everyday choices are made on the basis of expected emotional reactions to possible future events. However, such affective forecasting can be subject to serious distortions. Winning the lottery may not make you as happy and for as long as you expected, and the end of a relationship may not be as traumatic as anticipated. Most people overestimate the intensity and duration of their anticipated positive and negative reactions to future events. Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University coined the term miswanting to describe the common mistake of wanting things that will not make us nearly as happy as we hope, and avoiding things that will not be as bad as we fear (Gilbert & Wilson, 2000). Why do these mistakes of affective forecasting occur?We can go wrong because we often focus on the wrong (non-representative) details when imagining a future event, and then misunderstand and misread our own likely reactions. When thinking about winning the lottery, we focus on having all that money but dont think about the difficult investment decisions well have to take, how our relatives might react, and what being much richer than our friends it might do to our relationships. Such focalism (focussing on the salient features of emotional events and ignoring the rest) produces unrealistic expectations and subsequent disappointment. Many fervently desired consumer acquisitions leave us less happy than we expected. It is for such reasons that people keep on buying goods they will never use such as exercise equipment or dieting products. They focus on the positive feelings linked to having a beautiful body, but fail to forecast the pain, exhaustion and hunger that necessarily goes with the purchase.Similarly, negative events are often less traumatic than we expect. We have many spontaneous and subconscious cognitive strategies a psychological immune system - for coping with problems, and people typically underestimate and neglect to consider this when anticipating adversity. Distraction, self-affirmation and rationalization are just some of the highly effective and spontaneous strategies that make up the psychological immune system. Immune neglect ignoring the immune system leads to an overestimation of negative affective reactions. Numerous experiments now confirm that actual emotional reactions to both positive and negative events are far less intense and enduring than people expect (Gilbert & Wilson, 2000). How can we avoid these mistakes? Emotional intelligence requires that we consider all features of a future event and not just its focal aspects, and take into account the proven efficacy of our psychological immune system. Consumer decisions in particular should always be based on a skeptical assessment of real utility outcomes, rather than just subjective feelings that many advertisers prefer us to focus on.Affect infusion: Feeling good, and thinking good.Perhaps the most universal influence of affect is that it colors our thoughts and responses. When we feel good, we tend to see the world through rose-colored glasses. When depressed, everything appears bleak and gloomy. Some sixty years ago Razran (1940) found that people who were made to feel bad by an aversive smell also made more negative judgments about unrelated issues than those who felt good after receiving a free lunch. Such affect congruence appears to be a very common and reliable everyday phenomenon (Mayer, 2001). Why exactly do these effects occur, and what can we do about them?Psychodynamic theories suggested that affective impulses will invade and infuse unrelated thoughts unless sufficient pressure is exerted to control them. Indeed, attempts to suppress affect can sometimes increase the pressure and the likelihood affect infusion. Thus, people who feared electric shocks and were trying to suppress their fear were more likely to see fear to others (Feshbach & Singer, 1957). Alternative, conditioning theories maintained that such dynamic assumptions are not necessary. According to this view, affect will spontaneously attach itself to unrelated thoughts and judgments due to simple temporal and spatial conditioning. For example, when people are made to feel bad because of the excessive heat and humidity in a room, they will form more negative impressions of people they meet due to a conditioned association between their affect and the target person (Clore & Byrne, 1974). However, neither psychoanalytic theories, nor theories based on blind conditioning principles could explain the apparent situation- and context-sensitivity of affect infusion. In contrast, contemporary theories emphasize cognitive, information processing mechanisms that link affect to thinking and behavior.Affect appears to play a key role in how our memory representations about the world are organised and activated, and it is this link that drives affect infusion into thinking and behavior. When in a positive mood, we are significantly more likely to access and recall positive information and information that was first encountered in a previous happy mood state (as did the hero in our introductory paragraph while reminiscing about happy childhood memories when feeling good). In contrast, negative mood selectively facilitates the recall of negative information. According to the associative network model developed by Gordon Bower (1981), affective states are closely linked to any information we store and recall. Recent neuroanatomical evidence provides strong convergent evidence for the inseparable relation between emotion and other aspects of cognition. Our everyday experience also clearly shows that affect influences essentially all other aspects of cognitive functioning, including memory, attention, and decision making (Adolphs & Damasio, 2001, p. 44).Affective influences on memory have widespread consequences for the way people think and behave. This occurs because we can only make sense of complex events by calling on our memories and prior experiences to interpret them. Surprisingly, the more complex or unusual a social event, the more likely that we will have to search our memories to make sense of it, and the greater the likelihood that affect will influence the ideas we access and the interpretations we make. In other words, affect infusion increases when an open, constructive thinking style is adopted to deal with difficult, unusual situations, as only this kind of thinking promotes the incidental use of affectively primed information (Forgas, 1995a). Ironically, it is for this reason that people may be much more influenced by their mood when thinking about difficult personal problems in their romantic relationship, but mood effects are much weaker when less difficult issues are considered (Forgas, 1994).This is not the only way that affect infusion can occur, however. Sometimes, people respond to situations without any careful or elaborate consideration of the evidence, relying on simple and readily available cues to produce a response (Clore, Schwarz & Conway, 1994). When this happens, instead of computing a judgment on the basis of recalled features of a target, individuals may. ask themselves: How do I feel about it? /and/ in doing so, they may mistake feelings due to a pre-existing state as a reaction to the target (Schwarz, 1990, p. 529). Such simplified or heuristic thinking is most likely when people lack sufficient interest, motivation or resources to produce a more elaborate response. For example, in a street survey people will often give more positive responses immediately after they have just seen a happy movie, and make more negative responses when they saw a sad film (Forgas & Moylan, 1987). This probably occurs because the simplest way to respond in such a situation is to rely on a how do I feel about it? heuristic, using the prevailing affective state to infer a quick reaction. As such decisions are by definition of limited importance we will devote little further attention to them, other than noting that affect can indeed function as a useful heuristic cue in some situations.Affect infusion into memory and judgments.Perhaps the most fundamental influence that affective states have is on our memories. People in a happy mood remember more positive memories from their childhood, recall more happy episodes from the previous week, and remember better words they have learnt in a matching mood state (Bower, 1981). It is for this reason that in a positive mood all seems well with the world and we predominantly think about and remember happy, joyful experiences. Negative mood in contrast triggers a stream of negative thoughts and ideas, depressing us even further. Becoming aware of these subtle memory effects is an important component of emotional intelligence. However, these effects are not universal. They are most likely to occur when people think in an open, constructive manner. Mood effects can be quite easily eliminated and even reversed. For example, when peoples attention is directed towards themselves they become more aware of their own affective states, and this simple manipulation often seems sufficient to reduce affect congruency (Berkowitz et al., 2000). Thus, simply becoming aware of such mood effects is in itself an important step towards increasing our emotional intelligence. Once we know how and why these effects occur, we are in a much better position to predict and manage their consequences.Affective states can also influence many other tasks that require the use of memory-based ideas. For example, when people are asked to look at pictures depicting ambiguous social scenes (such as two people having an animated conversation), happy persons construct more cheerful, positive stories, and those in a sad mood respond by constructing negative stories (Bower, 1981). Ultimately, affect can also impact on real social judgments about people.For example, observing others and interpreting what their actions mean is one of the most fundamental judgmental tasks we face in everyday life. Affect seems to have a profound influence even on such very basic judgments. We looked at this possibility by asking happy or sad participants to observe and rate their own and their partners behaviors on a videotaped social encounter (Forgas, Bower & Krantz, 1984). As predicted, happy people saw significantly more positive, skilled and fewer negative, unskilled behaviors both in themselves and in their partners than did sad subjects. These effects occur because affect directly influences the kinds of thoughts and memories that come to mind as observers try to interpret complex and inherently ambiguous social behaviors.In other words, the same smile that is seen as warm and friendly by a person in a good mood can easily be judged as condescending or awkward by somebody in a bad mood. T