Emotionally Directing Visual Sensations: I. Generating Images That Contextualize Emotion and Become “Symbolic”

Abstract

After being relaxed or aroused, 330 college students served as subjects in one of three imaging conditions. In the imaging condition with emotion induced first, subjects were instructed to generate an emotion, to envision an image, and to intensify the emotion while continuing to image. In the imaging condition with emotion induced later, other subjects were instructed to envision an image, to set it aside, to generate an emotion, to retrieve the image, and to intensify the emotion while continuing to image. In the imaging condition with no induced emotion, a third group of subjects envisioned an image without receiving any instruction to generate an emotion. Subjects' descriptions of their imagery were rated by two judges, initially, on scales of Symbolic Value and Bizarreness and, two months later, on scales of Obvious Contextualization and Emergent Contextualization. Symbolic Value ratings were positively correlated with Emergent Contextualization ratings and with Emergent/Obvious Contextualization ratios. Also, the imaging condition with "emotion induced later" yielded higher Symbolic Value ratings and higher Emergent/Obvious Contextualization ratios than the other two conditions. These quantitative findings, along with qualitative analyses of 269

Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

“…Operationally defining positional index advances beyond the mere fact of context effects and investigates the organization peculiar to the context itself, as in the tri-partite temporal context experiments (Jones and McAuley 2005) discussed above. Similar support for these rich context effects of positional index occur in a variety of experiments, for example, in aesthetic judgment (Russell 2000), judgment involving quantifiers (Newstead and Coventry 2000), body and imagery (Hanrahan and Vergeer 2001), emotion contextualization (Kunzendorf et al 2000), mortality salience (Arndt et al 2002), decision making (Sharps and Martin 2002), lexical processing (Kambe et al 2001;Rawson and Kintsch 2002), proprioception (Simons et al 2002), counterfactual thinking and emotions (Mandel 2003), mood maintenance (Watkins et al 2003), viewer frames of reference (Mou et al 2004;Waszak et al 2005), visual working memory (Olson and Marshuetz 2005), and object-background semantic consistency (Davenport and Potter 2004). "The gambler's fallacy is the tendency to see a given outcome as less likely if it has just repeatedly occurred, in this case, leading to the choice of tails following three heads.…”

Emotionally Directing Visual Sensations: II. Lowering the Threshold for Tinted Percepts

“…. with what appeared to be jagged teeth," but after he generated the feeling of extreme happiness, "the jagged teeth seemed to turn into a smiling mouth" [1]. Experiment 2 did test the hypothesis that anger lowers the threshold for angry facial features and for reddish features, but it revealed that anger affects only the latter features.…”

The Nature and Functions of Dreaming

“…My collaborators and I demonstrated that under the infl uence of emotion, daydreams can become extremely dreamlike (Kunzendorf, Hartmann, Thomas, andBerensen 1999-2000). A group of students was asked to write down a recent dream, a recent daydream, a daydream that developed over fi ve minutes (sitting in class, awake), and a daydream that developed (in class) while they experienced a strong emotion.…”