0.4 Attention and thought control  (Page 3/3)

What types of thoughts do you have in between the first appraisal process and the second one? What occurres with your levels of feelingduring this process? - i.e., what happens to you emotionally after a strong appraisal or a strong thought? Does that influence yoursubsequent thoughts and appraisals? How is your attention to external stimuli fluctuating during this process? What sequence does yoursignificant thoughts/appraisals/emotions occur in, and how does that impact your attention? Do you focus on your emotions or your ownthoughts when you pause to consider what happened after you had a significant thought or a significant stimulus input (experience).

It appears that anxiety is only positively associated with on-task effort under rather special circumstances, where there is a strong andimmediate perceived threat, or, perhaps, where task performance is appriased as instrumental in effecting avoidance or escape (seeEysenck, 1982) Eysenck, M.W. (1982). Attention and arousal: Cognition and performance. New York: Springer. That probably means that the decreased performance from anxiety in most othercircumstances is a result of people being distracted by the anxiety i.e., scanning their environment for threats or just being distractedby the pain.

Negative mood, which indicates that the environment poses a problem and might be a source of potential dangers, motivates people to changetheir situation. Negative mood is then thought to be associated with a systematic elaboration of information and greater attention todetails. Bodenhausen and colleagues (1994) Bodenhausen, G,V., Shappard, L. A., + Kramer, G. P. (1994). Negative affect and social judgment: The differential impactof anger and sadness. European Journal of Social Psychology , 24, 45-62. , investigating the impact of negative affect of social judgment, showed that inducedsadness promotes the use of an analytic, detail-oriented mode of processing, whereas anger induction leads participants to processinformation on a shallow or automatic mode. If sadness (negative valence, lower arousal) triggered a type of processing identical tothat fostered by the negative mood usually induced, anger (negative valence, higher arousal) fostered the hueristic or global mode ofprocessing commonly associated with positive mood states (e.g., happiness or joy). This last result suggests that mood states ofopposite valence may have similar effects as they share the same level of arousal (like happiness and anger). Likewise, it has beensuggested that motivational-related approach and avoidance behaviors are independent of valence, leading to evidence that both happinessand anger moods are approach oriented, whereas serenity and sadness are avoidance oriented (when someone is depressed they avoid).

A sad mood experienced at our own wedding or birthday party may result in attempts to improve the mood, thus triggering systematicprocessessing in order to understand why we are sad in a situation that should normally make us happy. The same motivations are lesslikely to be aroused when the sad mood is experienced in situations where sadness is socially expected (e.g., at a funeral). According toMartin's model (2001) Martin, L.L.(2001). Mood as input: A configural view of mood effect. In J. P. Forgast(Ed.) Feeling and thinking: The role of affect in social cognition (pp.135-157). New York: Cambridge University Press. people not ask merely: "How do I feel about it?" They ask "What does it mean that I am feeling thisway in this context?" In other words, people evaluate the targets by taking into consideration both their mood and some features ofsituation and doing this configurally. Moods are processed in parallel with contextual information in such a way that the meaning of the moodinfluences and is influenced by the meaning of other information. The meaning of a mood experience can change in different context, andtherefore the evaluative and motivational implications of mood are mutable.

To sum up, the informational value of mood lies not so much in the moods themselves as in the interaction between mood and context. Moodsprovide input for evaluative, decisional and inference-making processes, and these processes determine the effects that one's moodwill have on one's evaluations, motivations, and behaviors. This course of reasoning, known as the context- dependent effect of mood , implies that the influence of mood on one's evaluations, motivations, and behaviors depends on theinteraction of mood and the situational conditions.

In accordance with the context-dependent effect of mood , one's mood is not synonymous with one's evaluation. Whether a positive or negative mood leads to a favorableor unfavorable evaluation depends on the meaning of one's mood in that context. The question about the meaning of one's mood in differentcontexts is therefore a crucial one. In order to answer it, the mood as input model relies on the role-fulfillment process (Martin, 2001),also known as the "What would I feel if...?" process. This process can be characterized broadly as follows: when people make evaluations,they act as if they were asking themselves the question "What would I feel if...?: (For example, "what would I feel if the horror movie Ijust saw was a good horror movie?"). An evaluation is rendered subjectively when the person compares his/her current moods with theexpected feelings. Favorable evaluations arise to the extent to which the person's moods (positive or negative) are congruent with whatwould be expected if the target had fulfilled a positive role (i.e., if this was a good thing I would feel good, I feel good, so I thinkthis positive thing about it). Unfavorable evaluations, in contrast, arise to the extent to which the person's moods are incongruent withwhat would be expected if the target had fulfilled a negative role (i.e., if this party was bad, it would make me feel bad, however Ifeel good).

When people make evaluations, they are thinking more about what is going on then when they don't make evaluations. That is why negativemood enhances attention to detail - because it puts you in the state where you are questioning why the event or environment you are in ismaking you feel bad. Asking how you might feel if something is felt a certain way is a good way of analyzing the situation. If you think about it, asking how something makes you feel is important - peopleprobably constantly evaluate the events they experience for value or what they got from them. Your mood is going to help you to evaluatethose things because those events caused you to have that mood. The mood provides the information of what that event or stimulus does toyou - how it makes you feel. If people didn't evaluate how an event or stimulus makes them feel, then they wouldn't really be analyzing thatinput any further than they normally would.

You basically can be put into a state where you are thinking about what the event or stimulus you are evaluating is like. This state iswhen you are questioning what the feelings the event made in you are like or what you think about the event. It is interesting that someonecan simply not think about those things if they wanted. On the other hand, it seems natural for people who experience negative emotions tothink more deeply about the source of those emotions. I guess the trouble that the negative emotions causes them forces one to thinkmore deeply.