Feeling good and feeling truth: The interactive effects of mood and processing fluency on truth judgments

Koch, Alex; Forgas, Joseph P.

doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2011.10.006

Cited by 53 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 40 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Accordingly, speakers and writers in a negative mood tend to display greater adherence to the conversational maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner. This effect is conceptually consistent with other evidence showing that people in a negative mood tend to use more concrete and specific mental categories, are less likely to apply stereotypes and scripts, are better at distinguishing between central and peripheral information, and are less subject to reconstructive memory biases (Bless, Clore, Schwarz, Golisano, Rabe, & Wölk, 1996;Bless, Schwarz, & Wieland, 1996;Bodenhausen, Kramer, & Süsser, 1994;Forgas, 1998Forgas, , 1999Forgas, , 2007Forgas, , 2011Forgas, Goldenberg, & Unkelbach, 2009;Forgas, Vargas, & Laham, 2005;Koch & Forgas, 2012;Storbeck & Clore, 2005;Unkelbach et al, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…Consistent with most past research showing that mood effects on cognition and communication are generally subconscious (Forgas, , , ; Forgas & Koch, ), we also found that self‐rated adherence to Grice's maxims was unaffected by self‐rated mood, suggesting an automatic, subconscious mechanism. Instead, speakers' ratings of their compliance with Grice's norms were more informed by their processing fluency experience, a subconscious meta‐cognitive cue that has been shown to influence several types of self‐related and other‐related judgments (Koch & Forgas, ; for a review, see Alter & Oppenheimer, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Grice's maxims was unaffected by self-rated mood, suggesting an automatic, subconscious mechanism. Instead, speakers' ratings of their compliance with Grice's norms were more informed by their processing fluency experience, a subconscious meta-cognitive cue that has been shown to influence several types of self-related and other-related judgments (Koch & Forgas, 2012; for a review, see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms

Koch

Forgas

Matovic

2013

Euro J Social Psych

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Can temporary mood influence people's communication strategies? According to Grice's cooperative principle, conversational utterances should ideally conform to the maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner. Three experiments predicted and found that participants in a negative mood complied significantly better with Grice's maxims than did participants in a positive mood when using natural language to describe a previously observed social event. Experiments 2 and 3 further confirmed that mood influenced communication strategies, and not merely the encoding (Exp. 2) and retrieval (Exp. 3) of the relevant information. These findings are consistent with affect–cognition theories predicting that positive affect promotes a more internally focused and assimilative thinking and communication style, and negative mood promotes more externally focused and accommodative thinking, resulting in the closer observance of communication norms. The relevance of these findings for recent affect/cognition theories is considered, and the practical implications of the results for everyday conversational strategies are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms

Koch

Forgas

Matovic

2013

Euro J Social Psych

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The Interactive Effects of Mood and Perceptual Fluency on Truth Judgements: Negative Mood Significantly Reduced the Tendency for People to Rely on Visual Fluency as a Truth Cue (after Koch & Forgas, ).…”

Section: Judgemental Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Sadness Be Good for You?

Forgas

2017

Australian Psychologist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The subtle relationship between feeling and thinking, affect and cognition has fascinated philosophers and writers since time immemorial, yet, empirical research on this topic was relatively neglected by psychologists until recently. There have been many claims emphasising the beneficial cognitive and behavioural consequences of positive affect. Many recent works suggest that negative affect may also facilitate optimal performance in many situations, consistent with evolutionary theories suggesting the adaptive signalling function of various affective states. This paper reviews traditional and current psychological theories linking affect to social thinking and behaviour. A variety of empirical studies from our laboratory will also be presented, demonstrating that in many situations, negative affect promotes optimal performance in cognitive and social tasks, including tasks such as memory, social judgements, motivation, and strategic interpersonal behaviours. These results will be interpreted in terms of a dual‐process theory that predicts that negative affect promotes a more accommodative, vigilant, and externally focused thinking strategy. The relevance of these findings for recent affect–cognition theories will be discussed, and the practical implications of negative affect promoting improved social thinking and performance in a number of applied fields will be considered.

show abstract

“…To the best of our knowledge, there are only two studies that directly investigate which variables moderate fluency effects on judgments of truth that are independent of repetition. Specifically, Koch and Forgas () showed that negative mood eliminated the truth effect compared with positive or neutral mood. Research by Hansen, Dechêne, and Wänke () reveals that perceptual fluency affects judgments of truth when the discrepancy between actual and expected fluency is high and not low (for an overview of moderators of other fluency effects, see Alter & Oppenheimer, ; Greifeneder, Bless, & Pham, ; see also Whittlesea & Williams, ).…”

Section: Moderators Of Fluency Effects In Judgments Of Truthmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Fluency Signals Truth: Prior Successful Reliance on Fluency Moderates the Impact of Fluency on Truth Judgments

Scholl

Greifeneder

Bless

2013

Behavioral Decision Making

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Repeated statements are more frequently judged to be true. One position relates this so-called "truth effect" to meta-cognitive experiences of fluency, suggesting that repeated statements are more frequently judged to be true because they are processed more fluently. While most prior research focused on why repetition influences truth judgments, considerably less is known about when fluency is used as information. The present research addresses this question and investigates whether reliance on fluency is moderated by learning experiences.Specifically, we focus on changes in the reliance on fluency over the course of time. A series of experiments reveals that fluency is more likely to be used in truth judgments when previous reliance on fluency has resulted in valid judgments, compared to when previous reliance on fluency was misleading. These findings suggest that reliance on fluency in judgments is a finely-tuned process that takes prior experiences with fluency-based judgments into account. Prior research has demonstrated that repeated statements are rated more frequently as true than new statements (e.g., Arkes, Hackett, & Boehm, 1989; Hasher, Goldstein, & Toppino, 1977; Hawkins & Hoch, 1992). This effect was denoted truth effect (see Hasher, et al., 1977, for a first description; Schwartz, 1982) and has been reliably replicated across research domains. One prominent explanation holds that repeated statements are rated more frequently as true because, compared to new statements, they can be processed more fluently (Reber & Schwarz, 1999). Specifically, it is assumed that the fluency experienced while encoding a statement is interpreted and used as a metacognitive cue with respect to the statement's truth. Corroborating this fluency-truth hypothesis, it has been demonstrated that increasing processing fluency independent of repetition, also produces truth effects. For instance, it has been shown that statements printed in high as compared to low color contrast are processed more fluently, and that this processing fluency translates into increased ratings of truth (e.g., Reber & Schwarz, 1999;Unkelbach, 2007). Moreover, statements are rated as more probably true when prior semantic activation (priming) facilitates processing (Kelley & Lindsay, 1993). Because fluency is manipulated independently of repetition, both of these findings suggest that repetition is not a necessary condition for truth effects. Rather, it appears that repetition-based truth effects are mediated via processing fluency (cf., Reber & Schwarz, 1999; see Unkelbach, Bayer, Alves, Koch, & Stahl, 2011; for a discussion of the independent effects of fluency and positivity). Subsequently, participants' naïve theories on whether positive or negative events are more difficult to retrieve were manipulated. The ease with which events from childhood could be retrieved influenced participants' evaluations of their childhood-however, this impact depended on whether participants believed that positive or negative childhood events come to min...

show abstract

Feeling good and feeling truth: The interactive effects of mood and processing fluency on truth judgments

Cited by 53 publications

References 40 publications

Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms

Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms

Can Sadness Be Good for You?

When Fluency Signals Truth: Prior Successful Reliance on Fluency Moderates the Impact of Fluency on Truth Judgments

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About