Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Emotions and cognition – psychological aspects“

There is abundant evidence of anxiety-linked threat-biased attention and anxiety-linked threat-biased interpretation (cf. Mathews & MacLeod, 1994, 2005). The present research aimed to determine whether these cognitive biases reflect a single common underlying mechanism (the Common Mechanism Account) or multiple independent underlying mechanisms (the Independent Mechanisms Account). To address this question, a battery of eight experimental tasks was developed; four tasks measured attention bias and four measured interpretation bias. Participants with different levels of trait anxiety, completed pairs of these tasks. The pattern of associations amongst all eight tasks was compared with the pattern of associations between the four tasks that measured attention bias and the pattern of associations between the four tasks that measured interpretation bias. Both Accounts predicted strong associations between the four tasks that measured attention bias, and between the four tasks that measured interpretation bias. However, the Common Mechanism Account predicted generally strong associations between all of the eight tasks, that were equivalent in strength to the associations between tasks measuring attention bias and to the associations between tasks measuring interpretation bias. In contrast, the Independent Mechanisms Account predicted weaker associations between all of the eight tasks than the associations either between the tasks measuring attention bias or between the tasks measuring interpretation bias. The obtained pattern of associations between internally reliable measures of anxiety-linked attention bias and anxiety-linked interpretation bias failed to support the Common Mechanism Account, but rather was consistent with the predictions of the Independent Mechanisms Account. Theoretical and applied implications of the results are discussed.

A packaging model is presented in this study which attempts to show some important aspects of a consumer's cognitive process in relation to packaging. This packaging model is based on the theories of imagery, emotion, and perception (and sensation). Perception of a packaged good occurs because the motivation system of a consumer selects particular information that the packaged good provides. Unlike the situation which occurs in behaviorism, stimulus is as important as response, and motivation explains why people don't perceive all the information available in the environment. When perception occurs, two subsequent responses are possible in the mind of a consumer: the connotative response and the denotative response. A connotative response is an evaluation of the perceived, i.e. emotion. Denotative response is imagery which is produced by conditioned sensory response. Imagery may elicit emotional response. Thus, imagery may reinforce consumer behavior positively or negatively. Emotion with regard to a packaged good is, then, the combination of emotions elicited by the perceived and the imagery evoked. This packaging model tries to explain purchasing behavior through the concepts of imagery and emotion.

[Truncated abstract] It has consistently been found that individuals who are more highly vulnerable to anxious mood selectively attend to emotionally negative stimuli as compared to those lower in anxiety vulnerability, suggesting that such anxiety-prone individuals possess an attentional bias favouring negative information. Two of the most consistent tasks used to reveal this bias have been the attentional probe and emotional Stroop tasks. It has been noted, however, that these tasks have not been capable of differentiating the relative role of attentional engagement with, and attentional disengagement from emotionally valenced stimuli, suggesting that either of these attentional processes could account for the attentional bias observed in individuals with high levels of anxiety vulnerability on the attentional probe and emotional Stroop tasks. A number of resent studies have claimed support for the operation of biased attentional disengagement in anxiety using a modified attentional cueing paradigm, concluding that individuals more vulnerable to anxious mood have a selective difficulty disengaging attention from emotionally negative stimuli. The current thesis highlights the possibility, however, that the structure of the modified cueing paradigm could allow individual differences in initial attentional engagement with differentially valenced stimuli to be interpreted as a selective disengagement bias. ... The modified emotional Stroop task employed in the current research measured participant's ability to engage with the emotional content of differentially valenced stimuli having initially processed non-emotional information (stimulus colour), and measured their relative ability to disengage attention from such emotional content to process non-emotional stimulus information. Results using this modified Stroop task suggested that those with high vulnerability to anxious mood were disproportionately fast to engage with the content of negative as compared to non-negative stimuli whereas those with low vulnerability to anxious mood did not display this pattern. The results provided no support for presence of an anxiety-linked bias in attentional disengagement from the content of differentially valenced stimuli. Results derived from the modified emotional Stroop task therefore provided support for the presence of an anxiety-linked bias in attentional engagement with the content of emotionally negative stimuli, but no support for a bias in attentional disengagement from the content of such material. The final study in the present series of experiments was designed to address the novel possibility that a bias in attentional disengagement could result in ongoing semantic activation of negatively valenced stimuli which would not necessarily be indexed by previous tasks assessing biased attentional disengagement. The results of this final study, however, provided no evidence to suggest the presence of anxiety-linked differences in ongoing semantic activation of differentially valenced stimuli. The present series of studies therefore provide support for the presence of an anxiety-linked bias in attentional engagement with the content of emotionally negative stimuli, while providing no support for the presence of an anxiety-linked bias in attentional disengagement from negative stimuli.