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Escalation of commitment-the tendency to remain committed to a course of action, often despite negative prospects-is common. Why does it persist? Across three preregistered experiments (N = 3,888), we tested the hypothesis that escalating commitment signals trustworthiness. Experiments 1-2, respectively, revealed that decision makers who escalated commitment were perceived as more trustworthy and entrusted with 29% more money by third-party observers. Experiment 3 revealed that decision makers who escalated commitment subsequently made more trustworthy choices, returning 15% more money than those who de-escalated. Decision makers were equally likely to escalate commitment in public versus in private, possibly because they previously internalized how others would evaluate them. Complementing research examining cognitive factors driving escalation of commitment, the present work reveals that accounting for the reputational causes and consequences of decisions to escalate enhances understanding of why escalation is so common and suggests how organizations might reduce it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Appetitive risk behaviors (ARB), including tobacco use, alcohol consumption, consumption of calorie dense/nutrient-poor foods, and sexual risk behavior contribute substantially to morbidity and mortality. Affective states that arise from a wide array of unrelated circumstances (i.e., incidental affect) may carry over to influence ARB. A meta-analysis is needed to systematically examine causal evidence for the role of incidental affect (including specific emotions) in influencing ARB. Method: Integrating effect sizes from 91 published and unpublished experimental studies that include both an incidental-affect induction and neutral-control condition (k = 271 effect sizes: k = 183 negative affect, k = 78 positive affect), this meta-analysis examines how negative and positive affective states influenced ARB and related health cognitions (e.g., intentions, evaluations, craving, perceived control). Results: Negative affective states reliably increased ARB, in analyses where all negative affective states were analyzed (d = .29) and in stratified analyses of just negative mood (d = .30) and stress (d = .48). These effects were stronger among study populations coded as clinically at risk. Positive affective states generally did not influence ARB or related health cognitions, except in the presence of a craving cue. Design issues of extant literature largely precluded conclusions about the effects of specific positive and negative affective states. Conclusion: Taken together, findings suggest the importance of strategies to attenuate negative affect incidental to ARB to facilitate healthier behavioral patterns, especially among clinically at-risk individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Correction to: Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01173-x, published online 2 August 2021.In the version of this article initially published, the following authors were omitted from the author list and the Author contributionssection for “investigation” and “writing and editing”: Nandor Hajdu (Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest,Hungary), Jordane Boudesseul (Facultad de Psicología, Instituto de Investigación Científica, Universidad de Lima, Lima, Perú), RafałMuda (Faculty of Economics, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland) and Sandersan Onie (Black Dog Institute, UNSWSydney, Sydney, Australia & Emotional Health for All Foundation, Jakarta, Indonesia). In addition, Saeideh FatahModares’ name wasoriginally misspelled as Saiedeh FatahModarres in the author list. Further, affiliations have been corrected for Maria Terskova (NationalResearch University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia), Susana Ruiz Fernandez (FOM University of Applied Sciences,Essen; Leibniz-Institut fur Wissensmedien, Tubingen, and LEAD Research Network, Eberhard Karls University, Tubingen, Germany),Hendrik Godbersen (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Essen, Germany), Gulnaz Anjum (Department of Psychology, Simon FraserUniversity, Burnaby, Canada, and Department of Economics & Social Sciences, Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan).

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism? ispartof: Nature Human Behaviour vol:5 issue:7 pages:816-820 ispartof: location:England status: published

Context Being diagnosed with cancer often forces patients and families to make difficult medical decisions. How patients think they and others will feel in the future, termed affective predictions, may influence these decisions. These affective predictions are often biased, which may contribute to suboptimal care outcomes by influencing decisions related to palliative care and advance care planning. Objectives This study aimed to translate perspectives from the decision sciences to inform future research about when and how affective predictions may influence decisions about palliative care and advance care planning. Methods A systematic search of two databases to evaluate the extent to which affective predictions have been examined in the palliative care and advance care planning context yielded 35 relevant articles. Over half utilized qualitative methodologies (n = 21). Most studies were conducted in the U.S. (n = 12), Canada (n = 7), or European countries (n = 10). Study contexts included end of life (n = 10), early treatment decisions (n = 10), pain and symptom management (n = 7), and patient-provider communication (n = 6). The affective processes of patients (n = 20), caregivers (n = 16), and/or providers (n = 12) were examined. Results Three features of the palliative care and advance care planning context may contribute to biased affective predictions: 1) early treatment decisions are made under heightened emotional states and with insufficient information; 2) palliative care decisions influence life domains beyond physical health; and 3) palliative care decisions involve multiple people. Conclusion Biases in affective predictions may serve as a barrier to optimal palliative care delivery. Predictions are complicated by intense emotions, inadequate prognostic information, involvement of many individuals, and cancer's effect on non–health life domains. Applying decision science frameworks may generate insights about affective predictions that can be harnessed to solve challenges associated with optimal delivery of palliative care.

Do negative feelings in general trigger addictive behavior, or do specific emotions play a stronger role? Testing these alternative accounts of emotion and decision making, we drew on the Appraisal Tendency Framework to predict that sadness, specifically, rather than negative mood, generally, would 1) increase craving, impatience, and actual addictive substance use and 2) do so through mechanisms selectively heightened by sadness. Using a nationally representative, longitudinal survey, study 1 (n = 10,685) revealed that sadness, but not other negative emotions (i.e., fear, anger, shame), reliably predicted current smoking as well as relapsing 20 years later. Study 2 (n = 425) used an experimental design, and found further support for emotion specificity: Sadness, but not disgust, increased self-reported craving relative to a neutral state. Studies 3 and 4 (n = 918) introduced choice behavior as outcome variables, revealing that sadness causally increased impatience for cigarette puffs. Moreover, study 4 revealed that the effect of sadness on impatience was more fully explained by concomitant appraisals of self-focus, which are specific to sadness, than by concomitant appraisals of negative valence, which are general to all negative emotions. Importantly, study 4 also examined the topography of actual smoking behavior, finding that experimentally induced sadness (as compared to neutral emotion) causally increased the volume and duration of cigarette puffs inhaled. Together, the present studies provide support for a more nuanced model regarding the effects of emotion on tobacco use, in particular, as well as on addictive behavior, in general.

National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into falsifiable hypotheses which we evaluate through survey experiments involving national security professionals. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that decision makers responding to quantitative probability assessments are less willing to support risky actions and more receptive to gathering additional information. Yet we also find that when respondents estimate probabilities themselves, quantification magnifies overconfidence, particularly among low-performing assessors. These results hone wide-ranging concerns about probabilistic precision into a specific and previously undocumented bias that training may be able to correct.

How does trait negative affect shape somatic memory of stressful events? We hypothesized that negative affect would impair accurate recall of one's own heart rate during stressful situations. Two bio-behavioral studies used a new paradigm to test retrospective visceral perception and assessed whether negative affective states experienced during aversive events (i.e., the Trier Stress Task—Time 1) would retrospectively shape recall of past heart rate (Time 2), even when accounting for actual heart rate at the time of each stressful event (Time 1). Results across both studies showed that individual differences in negative affect in response to a stressful task predicted visceral recollections, and those who experienced more negative affect were more inaccurate. Negative affect was associated with a tendency to remember visceral reactions as worse than they actually were.

Cultivating successful personal and professional relationships requires the ability to accurately infer the feelings of others — i.e., to be empathically accurate. Some are better than others at this, which may be explained by mode of thought, among other factors. Specifically, it may be that empathically-accurate people tend to rely more on intuitive rather than systematic thought when perceiving others. Alternatively, it may be the reverse — that systematic thought increases accuracy. In order to determine which view receives empirical support, we conducted four studies examining relations between mode of thought (intuitive versus systematic) and empathic accuracy. Study 1 revealed a lay belief that empathic accuracy arises from intuitive modes of thought. Studies 2-4, each using executive-level professionals as participants, demonstrated that (contrary to lay beliefs) people who tend to rely on intuitive thinking also tend to exhibit lower empathic accuracy. This pattern held when participants inferred others’ emotional states based on (a) in-person face-to-face interactions with partners (Study 2) as well as on (b) pictures with limited facial cues (Study 3). Study 4 confirmed that the relationship is causal: experimentally inducing systematic (as opposed to intuitive) thought led to improved empathic accuracy. In sum, evidence regarding personal and social processes in these four samples of working professionals converges on the conclusion that — contrary to lay beliefs — empathic accuracy arises more from systematic thought than from gut intuition.

That anger elicited in one situation can carry over to drive risky behavior in another situation has been described since the days of Aristotle. The present studies examine the mechanisms through which and the conditions under which such behavior occurs. Across three experiments, as well as a meta-analytic synthesis of the data, results reveal that incidental anger is significantly more likely to drive risky decision making among males than among females. Moreover, the experiments document that, under certain circumstances, such risk-taking pays off financially. Indeed, the present experiments demonstrate that, because the expected-value-maximizing strategy in these studies rewarded risk-taking, angry-male individuals earned more money than did both neutral-emotion males and angry females. In sum, these studies found evidence for robust disparities between males and females for anger-driven risk-taking. Importantly, although men did not experience more anger than women, they did show a heightened tendency to respond to anger with risk-taking. Published 2016. This article has been contributed to by US Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002, American policymakers have relied primarily on outcome-based accountability in the form of high-stakes testing to improve public school performance. With NCLB supplanted in 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act—which gives states far greater discretion in the design of accountability systems—the time is ripe for policymakers to consider extensive behavioral science literature that shows outcome-based accountability is only one of multiple forms of accountability, each invoking distinct motivational mechanisms. We review rule-based, market-based, and professional accountability alongside outcome-based accountability, using evidence from the laboratory and the field to describe how each can produce favorable or unfavorable effects. We conclude that policymakers should (a) make greater use of professional accountability, which has historically been underutilized in education; (b) use transparency to promote professional accountability; and (c) use multiple, complementary forms of accountability, creating a complete system that encourages and supports the continuous improvement of educational practice.

Recent research has explored the relationship between social hierarchy and empathic accuracy—the ability to accurately infer other people’s mental states. In the current research, we tested the hypothesis that, regardless of one’s personal level of status and power, simply believing that social inequality is natural and morally acceptable (e.g., endorsing social dominance orientation, or SDO) would be negatively associated with empathic accuracy. In a sample of managers, a group for whom empathic accuracy is a valuable skill, empathic accuracy was lower for managers who possessed structural power and also for managers who endorsed social dominance, regardless of their structural power. Moreover, men were less empathically accurate than women, a relationship that may be explained by men’s higher SDO and greater structural power. These findings suggest that for empathic abilities, it matters just as much what you think about social hierarchies as it does where you stand within them.

The human mind tends to excessively discount the value of delayed rewards relative to immediate ones, with “hot†affective processes believed to drive desires for short-term gratification. Supporting this view, recent findings demonstrate that sadness exacerbates financial impatience even when the sadness is unrelated to the economic decision at hand (Lerner, Li, & Weber, 2012). Such findings might reinforce the view that emotions must always be suppressed to combat impatience. But if emotions serve adaptive functions, then certain emotions might be capable of reducing excessive impatience for delayed rewards. We find evidence supporting this alternative view. Specifically, we find that (1) the emotion gratitude reduces impatience even with real money at stake, and (2) the effects of gratitude are differentiable from those of the more general positive state of happiness. These findings challenge the view that individuals must tamp down affective responses through effortful self-regulation to reach more patient and adaptive economic decisions.

National security is one of many fields where public officials offer imprecise probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice is often justified with arguments about how quantifying subjective judgments would bias analysts and decision makers toward overconfident action. We translate these arguments into testable hypotheses, and evaluate their validity through survey experiments involving national security professionals. Results reveal that when decision makers receive numerals (as opposed to words) for probability assessments, they are less likely to support risky actions and more receptive to gathering additional information, disconfirming the idea of a bias toward action. Yet when respondents generate probabilities themselves, using numbers (as opposed to words) magnifies overconfidence, especially among low-performing assessors. These results hone directions for research among both proponents and skeptics of quantifying probability estimates in national security and other fields. Given that uncertainty surrounds virtually all intelligence reports, military plans, and national security decisions, understanding how national security officials form and interpret probability assessments has wide-ranging implications for theory and practice.

Sadness influences consumption, leading individuals to pay more to acquire new goods and to eat more unhealthy food than they would otherwise. These undesirable consumption effects of sadness can occur without awareness, thus representing more than just conscious attempts at “retail therapy.†In an experiment with real food consumption, the present paper examines the hypothesis that sadness’ impact on consumption could be attenuated if the choice context counteracted appraisals of helplessness and enhanced a sense of individual control. Results revealed that: (1) sadness elevates self†reports of helplessness in response to the emotion inducing situation, (2) helplessness mediates the sadness†consumption effect, and (3) inducing a sense of control (via choice) attenuates sadness’ effect.

Individuals tend toward status quo bias: preferring existing options over new ones. There is a countervailing phenomenon: Humans naturally dispose of objects that disgust them, such as foul-smelling food. But what if the source of disgust is independent of the object? We induced disgust via a film clip to see if participants would trade away an item (a box of unidentified office supplies) for a new item (alternative unidentified box). Such “incidental disgust†strongly countered status quo bias. Disgusted people exchanged their present possession 51% of the time compared to 32% for people in a neutral state. Thus, disgust promotes disposal. A second experiment tested whether a warning about this tendency would diminish it. It did not. These results indicate a robust disgust-promotes-disposal effect. Because these studies presented real choices with tangible rewards, their findings have implications for everyday choices and raise caution about the effectiveness of warnings about biases.

The authors examined the evolution of cognitive and emotional responses to terror risks for a nationally representative sample of Americans between late 2001 and late 2002. Respondents' risk judgments changed in ways consistent with their reported personal experiences. However, they did not recognize these changes, producing hindsight bias in memories for their judgments. An intensive debiasing procedure failed to restore a foresightful perspective. A fear-inducing manipulation increased risk estimates, whereas an anger-inducing manipulation reduced them-both in predictions (as previously observed) and in memories and judgments of past risks. Thus, priming emotions shaped not only perceptions of an abstract future but also perceptions of a concrete past. These results suggest how psychological research can help to ensure an informed public.

When making decisions, people sometimes deviate from normative standards. While such deviations may appear to be alarmingly common, examining individual differences may reveal a more nuanced picture. Specifically, the personality factor of need for cognition (i.e., the extent to which people engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) may moderate decision makers’ susceptibility to bias, as could personality factors associated with being a leader. As part of a large-scale assessment of high-level leaders, participants completed a battery of decision-making competence and personality scales. Leaders who scored higher on need for cognition performed better on two of four components of a decision-making competence measure: framing and honoring sunk costs. In addition, the leader sample performed better than published controls. Thus, both individual differences in need for cognition and leadership experience moderate susceptibility to decision biases. Implications for broader theories of individual differences and bias are discussed.

People often encounter one emotion-triggering event after another. To examine how an emotion experience affects those that follow, the current article draws on the appraisal-tendency framework and cognitive appraisal theories of emotion. The emotional blunting hypothesis predicts that a specific emotion can carry over to blunt the experience of a subsequent emotion when defined by contrasting appraisal tendencies. Results support the hypothesis: Inducing sadness blunted subsequent anger (Studies 1 and 2), and inducing anger blunted subsequent sadness (Study 2). Situational (human) agency appraisals mediated the effect of anger (sadness) on subsequent sadness (anger) elicitation (Study 2). Priming agency appraisals (Study 3) also moderated results. Finally, the effect of emotional blunting carried over to cognitive outcomes in each of the three studies. Together, the results reveal the importance of examining the sequence of emotional experiences. Implications for emotion and judgment in applied settings (e.g., the courtroom) are discussed.

When making decisions about a welfare case, it is reasonable for one's thoughts and feelings about the potential welfare recipient to influence the decision. It is less reasonable for one's “incidental” feelings (e.g., sadness or anger arising from an event in one's personal life) to influence such decisions. In two studies, however, data reveal that incidental anger and sadness do in fact carry over, shaping welfare policy preferences. Study 1 found that incidental anger decreased the amount of welfare assistance participants recommended providing relative to neutral emotion, whereas sadness increased the amount recommended. Study 2 replicated the results and found that limiting participants’ cognitive resources eliminated the difference between sadness and anger, thus implying that differences in depth-of-thought drove the effects. In sum, the results reveal ways in which: (a) personal emotions carry over to shape preferences for public policies, (b) emotions of the same valence have opposing effects, and (c) differential depth-of-cognitive-processing contributes to such effects.

The target article (Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007) presents the Appraisal-Tendency Framework as a basis for predicting the influence of specific emotions on consumer decision making. The 3 thought-provoking commentaries by Shiv (2007); Yates (2007); and Cavanaugh, Bettman, Luce, and Payne (2007) highlighted the need to (a) distinguish different types of emotional inputs; (b) specify constructs and mechanisms more concretely; and (c) extend the framework in new, creative ways. This response integrates the specific comments into overarching themes and addresses them.

This article presents the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF; Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001; Lerner & Tiedens, 2006) as a basis for predicting the influence of specific emotions on consumer decision making. In particular, the ATF addresses how and why specific emotions carry over from past situations to color future judgments and choices. After reviewing the main assumptions and the 5 main principles of the framework, 2 streams of research are presented. One stream addresses emotional carryover effects on the assessment of risk; the other addresses carryover effects on the assessment of monetary value. Because risk assessment and value assessment are fundamental psychological processes, understanding them has the potential to yield manifold implications for consumer judgment and decision making. The concluding sections highlight limitations and future directions of the framework.

Background The classic conception of stress involves undifferentiated negative affect and corresponding biological reactivity. The present study hypothesized a new conception, disaggregating stress into emotion-specific, contrasting patterns of biological response. Specifically, it hypothesized contrasting patterns for indignation (comprised of anger and disgust) versus fear. Moreover, it hypothesized that facial expressions of these emotions would signal corresponding biological stress responses. Methods Ninety-two adults engaged in annoyingly difficult stress-challenge tasks, during which cardiovascular responses, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis responses (i.e., cortisol), emotional expressions (i.e., facial muscle movements), and subjective emotional experience were assessed. Results Pronounced individual differences emerged in specific emotional responses to the stressors. Analyses of facial expressions revealed that the more fear individuals displayed in response to the stressors, the higher their cardiovascular and cortisol responses to stress. By contrast, the more indignation individuals displayed in response to the same stressors the lower their cortisol levels and cardiovascular responses. Conclusions Facial expressions of emotion signal biological responses to stress. Fear expressions signal elevated cortisol and cardiovascular reactivity; indignation signals attenuated cortisol and cardiovascular reactivity, patterns that implicate individual differences in stress appraisals. Rather than conceptualizing stress as generalized negative affect, studies can be informed by this emotion-specific approach to stress responses.

Are hormone levels associated with the attainment of social status? Although endogenous testosterone predicts status-seeking social behaviors, research suggests that the stress hormone cortisol may inhibit testosterone's effects. Thus, individuals with both high testosterone and low cortisol may be especially likely to occupy high-status positions in social hierarchies while individuals with high testosterone and high cortisol may not. We tested this hypothesis by recruiting a sample of real executives and examining testosterone, cortisol, and a concrete indicator of attained status: the number of subordinates over which the executive has authority. Despite the myriad nonhormonal factors that determine organizational promotion, the executives' endogenous testosterone and cortisol interacted to significantly predict hierarchical position: Testosterone positively predicted executives' number of subordinates, but only among low-cortisol executives. The results imply that reducing cortisol levels via stress reduction may be a critical goal not only because doing so will improve health but also because doing so may enhance leadership potential. (PsycINFO Database Record

The terrorist attacks of September 11 elicited many forms of negative affect, including anger and sadness. They also elicited a search for explanations. A national field study that experimentally primed emotion evaluated how priming anger and sadness differentially evoked causal judgments about the attacks. It found that priming anger triggered more causal attributions than did priming sadness. Thus, specific emotions, rather than general negativity, shaped citizens' attributions regarding September 11. In addition to its theoretical implications, the study demonstrates a method for studying ecologically valid emotions, under conditions of experimental control, with a nationally representative sample.

This paper reviews the impact of anger on judgment and decision making. Section I proposes that anger merits special attention in the study of judgment and decision making because the effects of anger often diverge from those of other negative emotions. Section II presents an Appraisal-Tendency Framework for predicting and organizing such effects. Section III reviews empirical evidence for the uniqueness of anger’s relations to judgment and decision making. Section IV connects the Appraisal-Tendency Framework to associated mechanisms and theories. Drawing on the evidence, Section V presents the question of whether anger should be considered a positive emotion. It also proposes the hypothesis that anger will be experienced as relatively unpleasant and unrewarding when reflecting back on the source of one’s anger but experienced as relatively pleasant and rewarding when looking forward. Section VI synthesizes the evidence into a new portrait of the angry decision maker. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor. Reason: The original second author of this paper, Roxana M. Gonzalez, has acknowledged that she misreported data supporting an exploratory mediation analysis reported at the end of the original paper. None of the co-authors participated in or had knowledge of the second author's actions. The second author cooperated fully in determining the scope and impact of her actions and in rectifying the research record.

When we forecast our futures, to what extent do we rely on explicit and concrete facts versus implicit and fleeting subjective experiences? Results from two studies reveal that forecasting judgments hinge on at least two fleeting experiences: the specific incidental emotions one happens to feel at the time of forming a judgment and the subjective ease-of-thought-generation. Results also reveal that imposing accountability for the accuracy of one's forecast provides no simple remedy. Incidental emotions, the ease-of-thought-generation, and accountability combine multiplicatively in a three-way interaction. Although accountability attenuates the respective effects of incidental fear and incidental anger, doing so has the undesirable effect of amplifying the ease-of-thought-generation effects that fear otherwise suppresses. In no instance does accountability completely eliminate the unintended effects of these fleeting subjective experiences. Discussion addresses implications for theories of affect and social cognition as well as for applications to risk perception.

A harsh early family environment is related to mental and physical health in adulthood. An important question is why family environment in childhood is associated with these outcomes so long after its initial occurrence. We describe a program of research that evaluates a model linking these variables to each other. Specifically, we hypothesize that low social competence and negative emotional states may mediate relations between a harsh early family environment and physiological/neuroendocrine responses to stress, as well as long-term health outcomes. We report evidence that the model characterizes self-rated health, cortisol responses to stress, and, in males only, elevated cardiovascular responses to stress. We discuss how the social context of early life (such as SES) may affect the family environment in ways that precipitate adverse health consequences. Perspectives on comorbidities in physical and mental health are discussed.

Objective To examine the relations of the family environment to adjustment to juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA), and to examine how those relations are influenced by child sex and age. Method Ninety-four children with JRA completed a questionnaire on family environment and adjustment. Results Family cohesion was related to good adjustment, whereas family conflict was related to poor adjustment. Some relations of family cohesion to adjustment were stronger for younger than for older children. The relations of child autonomy to adjustment depended on child sex and age. Conclusion The relations of the family environment to adjustment to JRA are dependent on child sex and age.

The aftermath of September 11th highlights the need to un- derstand how emotion affects citizens' responses to risk. It also provides an opportunity to test current theories of such effects. On the basis of appraisal-tendency theory, we predicted opposite effects for anger and fear on risk judgments and policy preferences. In a nationally representative sample of Americans ( N � 973, ages 13-88), fear increased risk esti- mates and plans for precautionary measures; anger did the opposite. These patterns emerged with both experimentally induced emotions and naturally occurring ones. Males had less pessimistic risk estimates than did females, emotion differences explaining 60 to 80% of the gender dif- ference. Emotions also predicted diverging public policy preferences. Dis- cussion focuses on theoretical, methodological, and policy implications. Terrorist attacks on the United States intensely affected many individu- als and institutions, well beyond those directly harmed. Financial markets dropped, consumer spending declined, air travel plummeted, and public opinion toward government shifted. These responses reflected intense thought—and emotion. The attacks—and prospect of sustained conflict with a diffuse, unfamiliar enemy—created anger, fear, and sadness.

Research has variously portrayed self-enhancement as an indicator of narcissistic defensiveness or as a concomitant of mental health. To address this controversy, the present study used multiple measures of self-enhancement along with multiple measures and judges of mental health, comprehensively assessing their relationship. The results indicated that self-enhancement is positively associated with multiple indicators of mental health and with a more favorable impact on others. Discussion centers on a reconciliation of discrepant portraits of the self-enhancer. The prevalence, benefits, and limitations of self-enhancement have been dominant research topics in personality and social psychology research for the past 2 decades. The empirical literature has painted two quite different portraits of the self-enhancer, however. Taylor and Brown (1988) proposed a theory of positive illusions

Self-enhancement is variously portrayed as a positive illusion that can foster health and longevity or as defensive neuroticism that can have physiological–neuroendocrine costs. In a laboratory stress-challenge paradigm, the authors found that high self-enhancers had lower cardiovascular responses to stress, more rapid cardiovascular recovery, and lower baseline cortisol levels, consistent with the positive illusions predictions and counter to the predictions of the defensive neuroticism position. A second set of analyses, replicating the “illusory mental health paradigm” (J. Shedler, M. Mayman, & M. Manis, 1993), also did not support the defensive neuroticism hypothesis. The association between self-enhancement and cortisol was mediated by psychological resources; analyses of the cardiovascular results provided no definitive mediational pathway. Discussion centers on the potential stress-buffering effects of self-enhancing beliefs.

A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices. We organize and analyze what has been learned from the past 35 years of work on emotion and decision making. In so doing, we propose the emotion-imbued choice model, which accounts for inputs from traditional rational choice theory and from newer emotion research, synthesizing scientific models.

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 theories of affective influences on judgement and choice take a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative feeling states. These approaches have not specified if and when distinct emotions of the same valence have different effects on judgement. In this article, we propose a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. We posit that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events and objects in ways that are consistent with the original cognitive-appraisal dimensions of the emotion. To pit the valence and appraisal-tendency approaches against one another, we present a study that addresses whether two emotions of the same valence but differing appraisals—anger and fear—relate in different ways to risk perception. Consistent with the appraisal-tendency hypothesis, fearful people made pessimistic judgements of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgements. In the Discussion we expand the proposed model and review evidence sup...

This study explores the conditions under which experimentally primed anger influences both attributions of responsibility and the processes by which people make such attributions. Drawing on social functional theory, it was hypothesized that people are best thought of as ‘intuitive prosecutors’ who lower their thresholds for making attributions of harmful intent and recommending harsh punishment when they both witness a serious transgression of societal norms and believe that the transgressor escaped punishment. The data support the hypotheses. Anger primed by a serious crime ‘carried over’ to influence judgments of unrelated acts of harm only when the perpetrator of the crime went unpunished, notwithstanding the arousal of equally intense anger in conditions in which the perpetrator was appropriately punished or his fate was unknown. Participants in the perpetrator-unpunished condition also relied on simpler and more punitive attributional heuristics for inferring responsibility for harm. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This experiment explored the joint impact of accountability, anger, and authoritarianism on attributions of responsibility. Participants were either accountable or anonymous while watching an anger-priming or a neutral-emotion-priming video clip. In an ostensibly separate study, participants also were either accountable or anonymous while determining responsibility and punishment in fictional tort cases. As predicted, priming anger both simplified cognitive processing(i.e., reduced the number of cues used in making judgments) and amplified the carryover of self-reported anger to punitive attributions and actual punishment. By contrast, accountability increased the complexity of the judgment process and attenuated the carryover of anger to attributions and punishment. These results generalized across four replication cases that varied in story content; degree of defendant intentionality; and target, type, and severity of harm.

This article evaluates the impact of a program promoting student-faculty research partnerships on college student retention. The program, built on the premise that successful retention efforts integrate students into the core academic mission of the university, targets first-year and sophomore undergraduates. Findings of a participant-control group design show that the research partnerships are most effective in promoting the retention of students at greater risk for college attrition-African American students and students with low GPAs.

This study explored competing normative interpretations of the dilution effect: the tendency for people to underutilize diagnostic evidence in prediction tasks when that evidence is accompanied by irrelevant information. From the normative vantage point of the intuitive statistician, the dilution effect is a judgmental bias that arises from the representativeness heuristic (similarity-matching of causes and effects). From the normative prospective of the intuitive politician, however, the dilution effect is a rational response to evidence presented in a setting in which Gricean norms of conversation are assumed to hold. The current experiment factorially manipulated conversational norms, the degree to which diagnostic evidence was diluted by irrelevant evidence, and the accountability of subjects for their judgments. Accountable subjects demonstrated a robust dilution effect when conversational norms were explicitly primed as well as in the no-priming control condition, but no dilution when conversational norms were explicitly deactivated. Non-accountable subjects demonstrated the dilution effect across norm activation conditions, with the strongest effect under the activation of conversational norms. Although the results generally support the conversational-norm interpretation of dilution, the significant dilution effect among non-accountable subjects in the norm-deactivated condition is more consistent with the judgmental-bias interpretation.

9 Background: Oncologist-patient end-of-life (EOL) discussions are associated with less aggressive care at EOL. Prior research on EOL discussions has not explored the role of oncologists’ dispositional affect, trait patterns of emotional responses. Affect could possibly facilitate or hinder broaching difficult EOL topics. We examined associations between oncologists’ disposition for experiencing positive and negative affect and likelihood of EOL discussions reported by their patients with advanced cancers. Methods: 350 patients with incurable lung and GI cancers were enrolled in a randomized trial of early palliative care within 8 weeks of diagnosis. Oncologists providing care for participants completed a measure of dispositional affect, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Positive and negative affect scales were analyzed dichotomously (above/below sample median). At 24 weeks in the trial, patients reported if they had ever discussed with their oncologist the care they would want to receive if they were dying (yes/no). Associations between oncologists’ affect and patient-reported EOL discussions were tested with multilevel models clustered by oncologist, adjusting for patient age, cancer type, and randomization. Results: At 24 weeks, 57/242 (23.6%) patients reported having had EOL discussions. The PANAS was completed by 17/19 (89%) oncologists with patients in the trial. Patients treated by oncologists with higher negative affect reported more EOL conversations, but this did not reach statistical significance: OR = 1.76 [.81, 3.83], p = .15. Patients treated by oncologists with higher positive affect also reported more EOL conversations, but this did not reach statistical significance: OR = 1.66 [.83, 3.35], p = .15. However, patients treated by oncologists with both higher positive and higher negative affect were over 3 times as likely to report having had EOL discussions: OR = 3.22 [1.02, 10.23], p = .046. Conclusions: Patients treated by oncologists with greater propensity to experience both positive and negative affect were more likely to report EOL discussions compared to those treated by oncologists who experience lower levels of affect. More research is needed to better understand these relationships.

We hypothesized a phenomenon that we term myopic misery. According to our hypothesis, sadness increases impatience and creates a myopic focus on obtaining money immediately instead of later. This focus, in turn, increases intertemporal discount rates and thereby produces substantial financial costs. In three experiments, we randomly assigned participants to sad- and neutral-state conditions, and then offered intertemporal choices. Disgust served as a comparison condition in Experiments 1 and 2. Sadness significantly increased impatience: Relative to median neutral-state participants, median sad-state participants accepted 13% to 34% less money immediately to avoid waiting 3 months for payment. In Experiment 2, impatient thoughts mediated the effects. Experiment 3 revealed that sadness made people more present biased (i.e., wanting something immediately), but not globally more impatient. Disgusted participants were not more impatient than neutral participants, and that lack of difference implies that the same financial effects do not arise from all negative emotions. These results show that myopic misery is a robust and potentially harmful phenomenon.