Influence Of Feeling To Social Cognition

Because of the development of cognitive science, the social cognition arrests psychologists'attention gradually in the social psychology from 70's in 20 centuries, and presents a mass of research results. With the behavioristic psychology's decline, affect and emotion return to the visual field of the psychologists. Since 80's, the psychologists have begun to put together these two domains, trying to comprehend the position of feeling in the social cognition. 《Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences 》——one thesis of R. B. Zajonc in 1980——bring a big discussion about the relationship between feeling and cognition. Zajonc's study challenged to the traditional study modes and views about affect in psychology. Through the mere exposure experiments and related experiment studies, Zajonc thought that psychologists should reduce to dependence on cognition while explaining affect. Affect and cognition are two independent systems. Even no the previous cognitive progress, affect also can produce. In true life, the production of affect is before cognition, sometimes more accurate than cognition. The opposite view to Zajonc is the view of cognitive psychologists delegated by R. S. Lazarus. Lazarus thought that the cognitive appraisal is just the foundation and characteristic of all affect. Feeling reflects the continuous change of relationship between individual and circumstance. The center of study should be "How cognitive appraisal influences affect?", rather than "Do affect demands cognitive appraisal?". At the same time, Zajonc also did not present definite proof to support the standpoint that affect and cognition are two independent systems. This discussion kept on 5 years, and many psychologists joined this discussion. This discussion attracts more and more attentions in area of psychology. As a result, an important influence of this discussion to other psychologists was not providing a result or criterion for this discussion, but making more and more psychologists pay attention to the influence between feeling and social cognition. Psychologists began to oppugn old views on affect and past study modes, and gradually to value the functions of feeling in whole mental life. The method of Zajonc's study was accepted and used by other psychologists. All studies have two clues: explicit feeling study and implicit feeling study. Explicit feeling study makes participants to realize and experience their own affect. Psychologists know participant's feeling by inducement and survey before study, then explore how different feelings (positive or passive) influence social cognition. Explicit feeling study has two study methods: Conscious affective priming and Natural feeling study. In implicit feeling study, participants don't fairly realize their own feeling state before response and judgement. The feeling of participants is usually induced by researchers in condition of experiment and progress unconsciously. Implicit feeling study is actualized by unconscious affective priming. Unconscious affective priming has two characters: Subliminal affecting priming effect and Masked presentation of material.Psychologists pay attention to two phenomena of daily life. One is the world would be looked better when we are in positive feeling states. The consequences of social cognition(memory,attitude,judgement, etc )has congruenced with feeling. The other is the difference of information-processing strategies when we complete judgement and decision-making in different feeling states (positive or passive). The studies to feeling's influence to social cognition focus these two topics. One is to explore whether feeling has direct influence on social cognitive consequences; The other is to study how feeling affect social cognitive strategies. Through plentiful experiment studies, psychologists test the incongruence between feeling and social cognitive consequences though existing some incongruence phenomenon. The reason is likely the differences between explicit feeling and implicit feeling and the influence of other interferential factors. At the same time , researchers have confirmed the influence of feeling to social cognitive strategies. In positive feeling states, the processes of judgement and inference will be not precise, the speed of judgement will be faster, problem solving will be more creationary and we will feel more confident to our own decision-makings. Different psychologists explain this phenomenon from three angles: information index,adaptive behavior and motivation. Fielder thinks feeling to social cognitive strategies is index while picking up information. Because of the view of adaptive behavior, Schwarz thinks feeling is a signal to accommodate different entironments in the course of human evolution. Isen deems this phenomenon can be attributable to motivation that to keep pleasedstate. Researchers established the different theories according to their own understand, and delegating by Schwarz's Affect-as-Information Model,Forgas'AIM Model ,etc. Since the study has only a short history, there're many problems in its researches. This thesis analyzes the problems from two sides, one is research methods, and the other is research objects. For the research methods, finite applicability of affective priming study,different temporal effects on affective priming study and universal significance of experimental studies weaken the power of study's explanation to true life. For the research objects, all researches'study contents are same, but there are many different concepts in researches. "Feeling"can unite all concepts. Explicit form and implicit form of feeling should be definitely distinguished too. The future research can get continuous developments from three aspects. The first is to enlarge range of feeling. The study point should change direction to advanced and intricate feeling(envy,regret, etc.)from basic and general feeling(positive and passive).The second is that researchers should enhance study to mutual effect on feeling and other factors (personality,character of circumstance, etc.)in social cognition. The third is that researchers should try to shape an integrative theory. All studies and views can be likely put together by routes of feeling influence to social cognition. These studies have great implications for modern psychology. Firstly, mutual effect between traditional mental systems becomes important content in modern psychology. Along with study technique development, all parts of mental processes should be fell together.