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Emotion Concepts and Self-Focused Attention: Exploring Parallel Effects of Emotional States and Emotional Knowledge

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Abstract

Many experiments have found that emotional experience affects self-focused attention. Several approaches to cognition and emotion predict that conscious emotional experience may be unnecessary for this effect. To test this hypothesis, two experiments primed emotion concepts without affecting emotional experience. In Experiment 1, subliminal exposure to sad faces (relative to happy faces and neutral faces) increased self-focused attention but not subjectively experienced affect. In Experiment 2, a scrambled-sentences task that primed happy and sad emotion concepts increased self-focused attention relative to a neutral task. Thus, simply activating knowledge about emotions was sufficient to increase self-focused attention. The discussion considers implications for research on how emotional states affect self-awareness.

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Notes

  1. We do not review every experiment on mood and self-focus here. Some experiments lacked neutral-mood control conditions (e.g., Carr, Teasdale, & Broadbent, 1991; Green & Sedikides, 1999; Krohne, Pieper, Knoll, & Breimer, 2002), which are important comparisons. A significant difference between positive and negative mood conditions could mean that (1) both moods increased self-focus, but one increased it more; (2) both moods decreased self-focus, but one decreased it more; (3) one mood increased and the other mood decreased self-focus; or (4) only one mood affected self-focus. Another experiment (Green, Sedikides, Saltzberg, Wood, & Forzano, 2003) included happy, neutral, and sad conditions, but segments of the design had non-random assignment to condition. Most of these studies, along with additional unpublished studies, are reviewed in detail elsewhere (Duval & Silvia, 2001, chap. 10).

  2. Responses to the funneled debriefing were coded conservatively. Four participants (3 in the sad priming group, and 1 in the happy priming group) mentioned the emotional quality of the scrambled sentences. Excluding these participants did not change the pattern of results.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Åse Innes-Ker and Paula Niedenthal for providing the scrambled sentences used in Experiment 2 and Will Krause for assistance with data collection. This research was presented at the 2004 meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association and at the 2005 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The measures of self-awareness are available at http://www.uncg.edu/~p_silvia/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, P. O. Box 26170, Greensboro, NC, 27402-6170, USA

    Paul J. Silvia, Ann G. Phillips, Miriam K. Baumgaertner & Emily L. Maschauer

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  1. Paul J. Silvia
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  2. Ann G. Phillips
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  3. Miriam K. Baumgaertner
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  4. Emily L. Maschauer
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Correspondence to Paul J. Silvia.

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Silvia, P.J., Phillips, A.G., Baumgaertner, M.K. et al. Emotion Concepts and Self-Focused Attention: Exploring Parallel Effects of Emotional States and Emotional Knowledge. Motiv Emot 30, 225–231 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-006-9033-x

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