The Impact Of Integral Feelings On Unconscious Thought Effect

Unconscious thought theory(UTT) which proposed by Dijksterhuis and his colleaguespointed out that human beings exist two modes of thought--conscious thought and unconsciousthought, both have their respective features and applicable situation. When faced with complexproblems, the unconscious thought is superior to conscious thought(Dijksterhuis&Nordgren,2006).This theory receives a lot of attention since it was proposed, but there are some problemsneed further perfection and solution. Among them, research on many variables affectingunconscious thought effect is one of the focus.Unlike the past studies which focus on the externalfactors, this research tries to explore internal factors-the effect of integral feelings on unconsciousthought.The integral feelings are those experienced in relation to the cognitive task (Bodenhausen,1993) or good and bad feelings experienced about a stimulus(Peters E,2012).Relationship betweenintegral feelings and unconscious thought reflected in the definition of unconscious thoughtProposed by Dijksterhuis(2006)-“Unconscious thought refers to object-relevant or task-relevantcognitive or affective thought processes that occurwhile conscious attention is directed elsewhere.”However, Dijksterhuis only investigated the effects of cognitive factors on unconscious thinking,there is no research exploring the emotional dimension about unconscious thought process.So thisstudywillexplorethisissue.This research will based on the previous research paradigm of unconscious thought, and useclassical unconscious thought research tasks combine with the tasks materials prepared ourself toinvestigate the effects of the integral feelings on unconscious thought.228people from NingboUniversity are selected randomly to conducted two studies: Study one confirmed that the emotionalfactors have an impact on unconscious thought. Study two took representative positive andnegative integral emotional task and language variables, to further explore the impact of integralfeelingson unconscious thought.The studyhasthefollowingconclusions:First, the study found that the role of unconscious thought in complex decision-making isconditional, in addition to external cognitive variables of previous researchers found, the internalfactors-integralfeelings willalsoaffecttheunconscious thought. Second, the effect of different integral feelings have different effects on unconscious thinking,subjects in positive integral feelings produced a more accurate judgment than those in negativeintegralfeelings. Thepositiveintegralfeelingsis moreconducivetounconscious thought.Third, when using the foreign language reduces the role of integral feelings on unconsciousthought. The effect of positive integral feelings to the benefit of the unconscious thought reduces inforeign language context, and the impact of negative integral feelings to the unconscious thoughtalso changes with the different languages expressed, but the difference did not reach the significantlevels.