Who am I?: The influence of affect on the working self-concept

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the impact of affect on the working self-concept. Following an affect induction, participants completed the twenty statements test (TST) to assess their working self-concepts. Participants in predominantly happy and angry states used more abstract statements to describe themselves than did participants in predominantly sad and fearful states. Evaluations of the statements that participants generated (Experiment 2) demonstrate that these effects are not the result of (1) participants describing positively and negatively valenced information at different levels of abstraction, or (2) valence-based affective priming. Further, half of the participants in Experiment 2 were led to attribute their affect to the manipulation prior to completing the TST. This manipulation eliminated the influence of affect on the working self-concept. Taken together, these results are consistent with theory and research on the informative functions of affect.

Sometimes Happy People Focus on the Trees and Sad People Focus on the Forest

“…Relatedly, Beukeboom and Semin (2006) found that the influence of affect-induced global and local processing styles led happy participants to describe a film in more abstract language than sad participants; however, this difference was eliminated when the source of participants’ affect was made salient. Isbell et al (2011) reported a similar effect in an investigation of the influence of affective states on individuals’ spontaneous self-descriptions.…”

“…Evidence of this tendency is ubiquitous. Compared to individuals in sad (or neutral) moods, those in happy moods rely on stereotypes to a greater extent during impression formation (Bless, 2000; Bodenhausen, Kramer, & Susser, 1994; Isbell, 2004), actively select global traits over behaviors when forming impressions of others (Isbell, Burns, & Haar, 2005), rely on scripts (Bless et al, 1996), are less influenced by argument strength in persuasion tasks (e.g., Bless, Bohner, Schwarz, & Strack, 1990; Schwarz, Bless, & Bohner, 1991), create and use categories more flexibly (Isen & Daubman, 1984; Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987; Murray, Sujan, Hirt, & Sujan, 1990), and describe behaviors, events, and themselves in more abstract language (Beukeboom & Semin, 2005,2006; Isbell, McCabe, Burns, & Lair, 2011). Happy moods also increase the likelihood of the fundamental attribution error (Forgas, 1998), an error that results when individuals fail to correct their global dispositional judgments for situational details.…”

The affective control of thought: Malleable, not fixed.

“…Predictions derived from the motivational intensity model also appear inconsistent with at least some past research. For example, the motivational intensity model predicts that anger, an experience of high motiva tional intensity, narrows attention, yet research discussed earlier (e.g., Isbell, McCabe, et al, 2013) demonstrates instead that anger widens conceptual attention. Sad ness, an experience of low motivational intensity, is frequently found to narrow attention (Biss & Hasher, 2011;Gasper, 2004;Gasper & Clore, 2002;Kuhbandner et al, 2011;Rowe et al, 2007), yet the motivational intensity view predicts increased per ceptual and cognitive broadening.…”

Who am I? Differential effects of three contemplative mental trainings on emotional word use in self-descriptions

“…Change in the emotional content of the self-concept was assessed before training onset and at the end of each training module by means of emotional word use extracted from the Twenty Statement Test (TST) (Kuhn & McPartland, 1954). The open-ended response format of the TST allows to measure different structural features of the self-concept, including the emotional content of the self-concept (Isbell, McCabe, Burns, & Lair, 2013;Krans et al, 2015). The emotional content of the selfconcept was operationalized with emotional words used in the self-descriptions of the TST.…”