Feelings and Thinking

[watertank]

The intellectual contact between psychology and poetry is scarce and, when it takes place, often
tends to be exploitative. If we happen to come across a poem that appears to support one of our favorite generalizations, we are tempted to cite it (not as evidence, of course, but more in the form of a testimonial). Or we might confer upon it the status of an epigraph in one of our forthcoming chapters (commonly, to the detriment of both the poem and the chapter). But when poetry disagrees with us we are apt to ignore the conflict
altogether.

Robert Zajonc. Feeling and Thinking. Preferences Need No Inferences. AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • FEBRUARY 1980 • 151. Vol. 35, No. 2, 151-175.

Comments

[watertank.livejournal.com]

There are practically no social phenomena that do not implicate affect in some important way. Affect dominates social interaction, and it is the major currency in which social intercourse is transacted. The vast majority of our daily conversations entail the exchange of information about our opinions, preferences, and evaluations. And affect in these conversations is transmitted not only by the verbal channel but by nonverbal cues as well-—cues that may, in fact, carry the principal components of information about affect. It is much less important for us to know whether someone has just said "You are a friend" or "You are a fiend" than to know whether it was spoken in contempt or with affection.

=== what is happening with these cues in virtual/electronic communications? is language becoming more expressive, or there are additional attributes to it that allow us to detect the tone.
===
also relates to signalling
===

[watertank.livejournal.com]

One cannot be introduced to a person without experiencing some immediate feeling of attraction or repulsion and without gauging such feelings on the part of the other. We evaluate each other constantly, we evaluate each others' behavior, and we evaluate the motives and the consequences of their behavior.

== signalling ==

== OCEAN (FFM) model?

[watertank.livejournal.com]

We do not just see "a house": we see "a handsome house," "an ugly house," or "a pretentious house." We do not just read an article on attitude change, on cognitive dissonance, or on herbicides. We read an "exciting" article on attitude change, an "important" article on cognitive dissonance, or a "trivial" article on herbicides. And the same goes for a sunset, a lightning flash, a flower, a dimple, a hangnail, a cockroach, the taste of quinine, Saumur, the color of earth in Umbria, the sound of traffic on 42nd Street, and equally for the sound of a 1000-Hz tone and the sight of the letter Q.
This conjecture probably does not apply to incidental
perceptions where the attentive processes are at minimum

=== role of preconceived notions, prejudices. compare with buddhist "emptiness".

=== ability to become aware of it; turn it on and off.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

What I want to argue is that the form of experience that we came to call feeling accompanies all cognitions, that it arises early in the process of registration and retrieval, albeit weakly and vaguely, and that it derives from a parallel, separate, and partly independent system in the organism.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

Decisions are another area where thought and affect stand in tension to each other. It is generally believed that all decisions require some conscious or unconscious processing of pros and cons. Somehow we have come to believe, tautologically, to be sure, that if a decision has been made, then a cognitive process must have preceded it. Yet there is no evidence that this is indeed so. In fact, for most decisions, it is extremely difficult to demonstrate that there has actually been any prior cognitive process whatsoever.

=== see also "Music, Pandas, and Muggers: On the Affective Psychology of Value" Christopher K. Hsee and Yuval Rottenstreich, 2004.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

We buy the cars we "like," choose the
jobs and houses that we find "attractive," and
then justify those choices by various reasons that
might appear convincing to others who never fail
to ask us, "Why this car?" or "Why this house?"
We need not convince ourselves.8 We know what
we like.
In a study of consumer behavior, Quandt
(1956) found that buyers often do not attend to
the features of the article that they consider criterial
for their decisions and often base their
choices on features that they previously dismissed
as irrelevant, And Kahneman and Tversky (1979)
have demonstrated that numerous axioms of decision
theory that give decisions their rational
flavor are blatantly contradicted by experimental
results.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

categorizing facial expressions, about 50% of the variance is explained by the pleasant-unpleasant dimension (Abelson & Sermat, 1962; Hastorf, Osgood, & Ono, 1966),

=== binary control system: fast and reliable

[watertank.livejournal.com]

One might be able to control the expression of emotion but not the experience of it itself. It is for this very reason that law, science, sports, education, and other institutions of society keep devising ever new means of making judgments "objective."

== another reason most legal, science, education books are boring

[watertank.livejournal.com]

And these affective reactions—and, more important, the retrieval of affect—occur without effort. In contrast, some cognitive judgments require substantial effort.

== retrieval of how it felt, not what it was.

== also relates to the connection between memory and emotion

[watertank.livejournal.com]

We can readily accept the fact that we can be wrong. But we are never wrong about what we like or dislike. Hot cognitions are seldom subjectively false. It would be much harder to persuade us that we really like scotch better than bourbon, given that we feel otherwise. Once formed, an evaluation is not readily revoked. Experiments on the perseverance effect, the strong primacy effects in impression formation, and the fact that attitudes are virtually impervious to persuasion by communication all attest to the robust strength and permanence of affect. Affect often persists after a complete invalidation of its original cognitive basis, as in the case of the perseverance phenomenon when a subject is told that an initial experience of success or failure has been totally fabricated by the experimenter (Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975).


=== impossible to convince s-one that brainstorming doesn't work b/c it "feels good".

== destruction problem. slightly scare and show the map.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

We trust our reactions,
we believe that they are "true" and that they accurately
represent an internal state or condition.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

Affective reactions are difficult to verbalize. The remarkable aspect of first impressions of persons is their immediacy. When we meet a stranger, we know within a fraction of a second whether we like the person or not. The reaction is instantaneous and automatic. Perhaps the feeling is not always precise, perhaps we are not always aware of it, but the feeling is always there. If our later experience with the stranger conflicts with the first impression, we are terribly surprised. We consider it an exception.


== never a second chance to make the first impression

[watertank.livejournal.com]

The effectiveness of communication of
affect and the accuracy of recognition of affective
expression are illustrated by the results of Pratt
and Sackett (1967). They raised rhesus monkeys
in conditions that allowed complete contact with
peers, in conditions that allowed only visual and
auditory access, and in complete isolation. The
monkeys were then examined for the kinds of
animals they preferred to approach. Those raised
under the same conditions preferred each other
twice as much as those raised under different conditions,
even when the stimulus animals were total
strangers to the test monkeys. While it could not
be determined what sorts of cues allowed the animals
to make these fine discriminations, it is very
likely that the three groups developed during the
course of their previous experience distinct patterns
of emotional responding to new stimuli and
to strange individuals, and that the animals raised
under the same conditions found each other more
attractive because of the familiarity of these emotional
patterns.

== in-group vs out-group interactions; us vs them

[watertank.livejournal.com]

The dismal failure in achieving substantial attitude
change through various forms of communication
or persuasion is another indication that affect
is fairly independent and often impervious to cognition.


=== see above: brainstorm

[watertank.livejournal.com]

Affective reactions may become separated from
content. It sometimes happens that we are reminded
of a movie or of a book whose contents •
we are unable to recall. Yet the affect present
when leaving the movie or our general impression
of the book are readily accessible. Or we are reminded
of an interpersonal conflict of long ago.
The cause of the conflict, the positions taken, the
matter at issue, who said what, may have all been
forgotten, and yet the affect that was present during
the incident may be readily retrieved.

== poses an interesting search problem.

== instant tagging

[watertank.livejournal.com]

It is a fact, of course, that all sorts of judgments
are faster and more efficient for pictures
than for words, and this may be so just because
pictures are able to evoke an affective reaction
more directly and faster than words.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

It means that the organism is
equipped with a neurochemical apparatus capable
of telling the new from the old and the good from
the bad, of remembering the old, the good, and
the bad, and of making all these decisions rapidly
without having to wait for the slow feedback from
the autonomic system.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

Because it is so heavily rooted in verbal skills,
the cognitive system in humans has properties that
are quite distinct from those of affect.

And for reasons that
must be rooted in the partial separation of the
two systems, affect can be communicated much
more efficiently and accurately than thought in
spite of the fact that its vocabulary is quite limited.
It was a wise designer who provided separately
for each of these processes instead of presenting
us with a multiple-purpose appliance that,
like the rotisserie-broiler-oven-toaster, performs
none of its functions well.


:)