Experienced ease of recall was found to qualify the implications of recalled content. Ss who had to recall 12 examples of assertive (unassertive) behaviors, which was difficult, rated themselves as less assertive (less unassertive) than subjects who had to recall 6 examples, which was easy. In fact, Ss reported higher assertiveness after recalling 12 unassertive rather than 12 assertive behaviors. Thus, self-assessments only reflected the implications of recalled content if recall was easy. The impact of ease of recall was eliminated when its informational value was discredited by a misattribution manipulation. The informative functions of subjective experiences are discussed.

The authors tested whether happy moods increase, and sad moods decrease, reliance on general knowledge structures. Participants in happy, neutral, or sad moods listened to a "going-out-for-dinner" story. Happy participants made more intrusion errors in recognition than did sad participants , with neutral mood participants falling in between (Experiments 1 and 2). Happy participants outperformed sad ones when they performed a secondary task while listening to the story (Experiment 2), but only when the amount of script-inconsistent information was small (Experiment 3). This pattern of findings indicates higher reliance on general knowledge structures under happy rather than sad moods. It is incompatible with the assumption that happy moods decrease either cognitive capacity or processing motivation in general, which would predict impaired secondary-task performance.

, Federal Republic o f G erm any Experienced ease of recall was found to qualify the implications of recalled content. Ss who had to recall 12 examples o f assertive (unassertive) behaviors, which was difficult, rated themselves as less assertive (less unassertive) than subjects who had to recall 6 examples, which was easy In Fact, Ss reported higher assertiveness after recalling 12 unassertive rather than 12 assertive behaviors. Thus, self-assessments only reflected the implications of recalled content if recall was easy. The impact of ease of recall was eliminated when its informational value was discredited by a misattribution manipulation. The informative functions of subjective experiences are discussed.

No abstract

No abstract

The authors propose that the experience of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) as reflected in the deep involvement in an activity perceived as intrinsically rewarding represents a regulatory compatibility experience. The research addresses the notion that the compatibility of critical person (e.g., skills) and environmental factors (e.g., demands) involved in a given activity elicits subjective experiences that render the respective activity rewarding. Two studies are reported that investigate the consequences of compatibility of skills and task demands during task engagement. Departing from correlational research, the present studies employ a newly developed experimental paradigm to document the causal impact of such a skills/demands compatibility on the emergence of flow. Experiment 2 revealed that individuals characterized by a strong habitual action-orientation were most sensitive to the manipulation of the skills-demands compatibility.

Although people have been shown to rely on feelings to make judgments, the conditions that moderate this reliance have not been systematically reviewed and conceptually integrated. This article addresses this gap by jointly reviewing moderators of the reliance on both subtle affective feelings and cognitive feelings of ease-of-retrieval. The review revealed that moderators of the reliance on affective and cognitive feelings are remarkably similar and can be grouped into five major categories: (a) the salience of the feelings, (b) the representativeness of the feelings for the target, (c) the relevance of the feelings to the judgment, (d) the evaluative malleability of the judgment, and (e) the level of processing intensity. Based on the reviewed evidence, it is concluded that the use of feelings as information is a frequent event and a generally sensible judgmental strategy rather than a constant source of error. Avenues for future research are discussed.

In the present study, subjects had to generate an evaluative judgment about a target person on the basis of his behaviour that had both positive and negative implications. In a previous phase of the study that was ostensibly unrelated to the judgment task, the relevant trait categories were primed. Subsequently, half of the subjects were reminded of the priming episode. Consistent with earlier research (e.g. Lombardi, Higgins and Bargh, 1987;Newman and Uleman, 1990)