Effects of Regulatory Focus and Emotions on Information Preferences: The Affect-as-Information Perspective

Abstract

This study explored the effects of regulatory focus and emotions on information preferences, specifically information selection preferences (experiment 1) and implicit information preferences (experiment 2). Our findings revealed that, in the promotionfocused condition, individuals preferred hedonic information (vs. functional information) when they were happy (vs. sad). However, emotions' effects on information preferences were attenuated in the prevention-focused condition. In experiment 3, we tested whether regulatory focus and salient emotions influenced information preferences. The results suggested that regulatory focus and salient emotions had no significant interactive effect on information selection preferences, but had a significant interactive effect on implicit preferences. These results further our understanding of the psychological dynamic mechanism involved in information preferences, which augments the affect-as-information theory.

Don’t get too emotional: How regulatory focus can condition the influence of top managers’ negative emotions on SME responses to economic crisis

“…Moreover, the meta-analysis conducted by Fodor and Pintea (2017) indicates that unlike positive emotions, negative emotions do not have a significant impact on business performance. Hence, we argue that a top manager’s reliance on negative emotions when forming responses can be dependent on their intrinsic motivation (Marroquín et al, 2016), where regulatory focus has shown to significantly influence how individuals respond to emotional information (Brockner and Higgins, 2001; Wang et al, 2020).…”

Promoting Water Conservation Based on the Matching Effect of Regulatory Focus and Emotion

“…Furthermore, the current research extends the literature on regulatory focus and emotion. Prior studies have found that individuals in a promotion-focused condition are more affected by emotion than are those in a prevention-focused condition [ 35 ]. A happy mood has a greater influence on individuals with a promoting orientation than on those who are in a sad mood [ 36 ]; however, in the current research, we used information related to water saving as the experimental materials, and we found that the sadness emotion had a greater impact on individuals with a prevention focus than on those with a promotion focus.…”

Information Matching: How Regulatory Focus Affects Information Preference and Information Choice

“…Specifically, the first task was a recall task. Participants in the promotion-focused group were asked to write down their ideals and aspirations, and those in the prevention-focused group were requested to write down their oughts and obligations (Freitas and Higgins, 2002;Wang et al, 2020). After this, all participants were asked to complete a paper-pencil maze task to further understand their promotion or prevention focuses (Friedman and Förster, 2001).…”

“…Please choose between options A and B based on your current thoughts: (A) economic information; (B) entertainment information." Participants chose one of these two options to represent their information choice preferences (Wang et al, 2020). After that, participants completed a questionnaire that assessed explicit information preference.…”

“…The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was conducted to measure implicit preferences for hedonic information and functional information. The test contains 7 blocks with 20 or 40 trials (stimuli associated with positive or negative attributes and stimuli associated with hedonic or functional information) (Wang et al, 2020). For example, in one of the blocks, participants categorized positive words and hedonic information as quickly as possible by pressing the "E" key; similarly, they categorized negative words and functional information by pressing the "I" key.…”