Motivation and Emotion最新文献

Risk taking increases during the final round of a set of repeated risky decisions, a phenomenon known as the ending effect. Recent evidence suggests that the motivation to pursue an emotionally rewarding ending may account for this ending effect. This study tested this explanation using different task paradigms. Experiment 1 ruled out a financial motivational explanation for the ending effect. Specifically, when risk taking was only associated with emotional incentives without financial rewards, the ending effect remained significant. Experiment 2a demonstrated that the ending effect was robust after controlling for the relevant variables. Experiment 2b measured participants’ motivation using a visual reaction time task. The results revealed that perceiving an ending led participants to be more concerned with emotional satisfaction than financial rewards. These findings consistently support the notion that the perception of an approaching ending leads to an increase in emotional rather than financial motivation, and this increased emotional motivation could lead to increased risk-taking toward an ending. This study also ruled out the alternative explanation that the ending effect is driven by the need for financial rewards.

In response to intergroup threats, group members typically exhibit aggressive behaviors. These aggressive behaviors include malevolent creativity (MC), which refers to the application of novel ideas to intentionally harm others. However, whether and how intergroup threats affect MC remains unclear. This study comprehensively examines the impact of intergroup threats on MC, along with its underlying mechanisms, across three experiments. Study 1 investigated the effects of intergroup threats on MC performance. The results revealed that while intergroup threat improved MC originality, it had no significant impact on general creativity, which indicates that intergroup threat enables individuals to invest more resources in generating original malevolent ideas. Building on these findings, Study 2 focused on how the target directivity of MC influences the relationship between intergroup threat and MC performance. The results demonstrated that MC originality was higher when the MC target was directed at threatening outgroup members rather than at irrelevant persons. These findings imply that threatened individuals tend to retaliate vicariously against out-group members using original malevolent methods. Study 3 explored whether realistic and symbolic threats exerted distinct effects on MC performance. Their results showed that only symbolic threats promoted originality and fluency in MC. This indicates that only symbolic threats compelled the incentives to promote the generation of malevolent ideas. In conclusion, these findings suggested that intergroup threats significantly amplify MC, particularly when directed at perceived threatening outgroup members, while symbolic threats appear more conducive to fostering the generation of malevolent ideas.

Most past research on positive affect and emotion has focused exclusively on high-arousal positive affect (HAPA: e.g., excited), however, low-arousal positive affect (LAPA: e.g., calm) increasingly is included in emotion research. As such, there is a need to synthesize knowledge about the similarities and differences between LAPA and HAPA, the operationalization of LAPA and HAPA, and the distinct characteristics and importance of LAPA within emotional life. A systematic search identified 226 research papers comparing LAPA with HAPA from a broad spectrum of research topics; this review provides a narrative summary of their findings. Indications of differences between LAPA and HAPA were found in 89% of comparisons, with LAPA having a consistently distinguishable relationship to variables such as brain activity, cardiovascular health, decision-making, memory, mindfulness, personality, and solitude, among others. Other notable aspects of LAPA were found, including its role in stress, work, positive sociality, and well-being, as well as its importance in older adults and women. An analysis of items used to measure LAPA and HAPA revealed nuanced differences in conceptualizations, as well as emerging consensus around specific item usage. While considering item use in light of approach-avoidance motivation, we identified three possible LAPA subtypes: calm (a steady state of neither approach nor avoidance), satisfaction (having successfully approached), and relief (having successfully avoided). This review clarifies LAPA’s role in affective life, underscoring that LAPA’s differences from HAPA should be considered in research involving positive affect.

Emotional stimuli and events are better and more easily remembered than neutral ones. However, this advantage appears to come at a cost, namely a decreased accuracy for peripheral, emotion-irrelevant details. There is some evidence, particularly in the visual modality, that this trade-off also applies to emotional expressions, leading to a difficulty in identifying an unfamiliar individual’s identity when presented with an expression different from the one encountered at encoding. On the other hand, past research also suggests that identity recognition memory benefits from exposure to different encoding exemplars, although whether this is also the case for emotional expressions, particularly voices, remains unknown. Here, we directly addressed these questions by conducting a series of voice and face identity memory online studies, using a within-subject old/new recognition test in separate unimodal modules. In the Main Study, half of the identities were encoded with four presentations of one single expression (angry, fearful, happy, or sad; Uni condition) and the other half with one presentation of each emotion (Multi condition); all identities, intermixed with an equal number of new ones, were presented with a neutral expression in a subsequent recognition test. Participants (N = 547, 481 female) were randomly assigned to one of four groups in which a different Uni single emotion was used. Results, using linear mixed models on response choice and drift-diffusion-model parameters, revealed that high-arousal expressions interfered with emotion-independent identity recognition accuracy, but that such deficit could be compensated by presenting the same individual with various expressions (i.e., high exemplar variability). These findings were confirmed by a significant correlation between memory performance and stimulus arousal, across modalities and emotions, and by two follow-up studies (Study 1: N = 172, 150 female; Study 2: N = 174, 154 female), which extended the original observations and ruled out some potential confounding effects. Taken together, the findings reported here expand and refine our current knowledge of the influence of emotion on memory, and highlight the importance of, and interaction between, exemplar variability and emotional arousal in identity recognition memory.

False information may be published with the intention of misleading the public, and such fake news is often difficult to detect. Ideological fake news may pose a particular challenge, as people may be less able to detect false information that supports their prior beliefs. The difficulty of detecting fake news with an ideological slant may be compounded if people are motivated to defend their beliefs. Building on the mindset theory of action phases, we investigated motivational states as moderators of people’s ability to detect fake news. We tested two competing predictions to study the cognitive and motivational processes implicated in fake news detection. Both predictions concern an ideological belief bias, where people tend to accept information that agrees with their partisan identities and to reject information that disagrees with them. First, motivated reasoning accounts posit that deliberation should reinforce the ideological belief bias because reasoning primarily serves to defend and rationalize one’s own position. An opposing view, based on dual-process theory, assumes that deliberation attenuates the ideological belief bias by facilitating an unbiased assessment of new information. An online experiment (N = 497) tested these competing accounts. Participants were induced with deliberative/implemental/control mindsets prior to rating the veracity of (true/fake) news headlines. Some headlines favored a Republican view; others leaned toward a Democrat perspective. Based on self-reported political preference (Democrat vs. Republican), headlines were categorized as congruent or incongruent with participants’ political views. Consistent with an ideological belief bias, participants accepted more congruent than incongruent news, and they were more likely to fail to detect favorable fake news. In the main analysis, mindsets did not moderate the ideological belief bias, but showed interesting relationships with cognitive reflection and dishonest behavior. Further exploration using signal-detection theory suggested that the deliberative mindset might be associated with increased skepticism, thereby promoting fake news detection.