Influence of Positive Affect on Clinical Problem Solving

Isen, Alice M.; Rosenzweig, Andrew S.; Young, Mark

doi:10.1037/e616342011-025

Cited by 65 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Above and beyond avoiding conflict over status and employing more effective task processes, groups whose members express positive sentiments toward each other tend to perform better (Barsade 2002;Carnevale & Isen, 1986;Bramesfeld & Gasper, 2008;George & Zhou, 2007;Gibson, 2003). Positive interactions are seen to build trust and communication and motivate members to contribute more to the group (Cunningham, 1988;Isen, Rosenzweig & Young, 1991;Mason & Griffin, 2005). However, we believe groups of high power individuals are less likely to engage in positive interactions with each other.…”

Section: The Effects Of Power On Group Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Failure at the top: How power undermines collaborative performance.

Hildreth

Anderson

2016

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

All too commonly, we see groups of leaders fail to accomplish their stated goals when working together -legislators who cannot agree on a bill, heads of state who cannot draft meaningful environmental policy, or boards of trustees who make disastrous decisions for their school. The current research examines whether groups of leaders fail as often as they do in part because of the power each leader is accustomed to possessing. Multiple studies found high power individuals, when working in groups, performed worse than did other groups: individuals randomly assigned power in an initial task were less creative when they then worked together in groups on a subsequent task (Study 1A). Individuals with higher power who worked together in groups were also less likely to reach agreement on a difficult negotiation task, whether these groups comprised actual executives from an extant organization (Study 2) or students randomly assigned power in the laboratory (Study 3). Mediation analyses suggest that groups of high power individuals performed worse because they fought over their relative status in the group, were less focused on the task, and shared information with each other less effectively.Keywords: power, groups, status, conflict, performance, creativity, negotiation FAILURE AT THE TOP 3 Individuals in positions of leadership are given inordinate power. They have disproportionate control when they interact with those they lead and their ideas, decisions, and opinions hold more sway than those of others. But, what happens when leaders have to interact and work with other leaders? How does the power they are accustomed to possessing shape their effectiveness when working with others who also hold power? This question is critical because it is often the case that important decisions and problems are addressed not by individual leaders but by groups of leaders -in government legislatures, boards of directors, or meetings between heads of state, for example. If groups of leaders fail, the damage can be profound. Legislators who cannot agree on a fiscal budget risk severe economic costs, boards of trustees who set bad policies for their university can reduce the quality of their education, and leaders of disputing countries who cannot resolve their differences risk escalating their conflict into war.The research literature has been surprisingly quiet on this question. Although a substantial body of research has examined how the possession of power can shape myriad cognitive, affective, and motivational processes (for reviews, see Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003;Guinote & Vescio, 2010), this work has focused heavily on how the possession of power affects people in individual tasks or making individual decisions. Relatively little research has examined the effects of power in interactive or group contexts, let alone examined contexts in which powerholders interact and work with each other.The current research aimed to fill this lacuna.On the one hand, one might hypothesize that power would help groups of leaders...

show abstract

Section: The Effects Of Power On Group Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Failure at the top: How power undermines collaborative performance.

Hildreth

Anderson

2016

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Previous studies have already shown that changes in positive mood are related to changes in cognitive functions, including the use of a more open (Estrada et al, 1997), creative (Isen et al, 1987), integrative (Isen et al, 1991), or flexible (Isen & Daubman, 1984) thinking style. Taken together, these results point to a role of positive affective states in being able to trigger a broadening of the attentional scope (Derryberry & Reed, 1994).…”

Section: Positive Emotion Broadens Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positive emotion broadens attention focus through decreased position-specific spatial encoding in early visual cortex: Evidence from ERPs

Vanlessen

Rossi

Raedt

et al. 2012

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent evidence has suggested that not only stimulus-specific attributes or top-down expectations can modulate attention selection processes, but also the actual mood state of the participant. In this study, we tested the prediction that the induction of positive mood can dynamically influence attention allocation and, in turn, modulate early stimulus sensory processing in primary visual cortex (V1). High-density visual event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a demanding task at fixation and were presented with peripheral irrelevant visual textures, whose position was systematically varied in the upper visual field (close, medium, or far relative to fixation). Either a neutral or a positive mood was reliably induced and maintained throughout the experimental session. The ERP results showed that the earliest retinotopic component following stimulus onset (C1) strongly varied in topography as a function of the position of the peripheral distractor, in agreement with a near-far spatial gradient. However, this effect was altered for participants in a positive relative to a neutral mood. On the contrary, positive mood did not modulate attention allocation for the central (taskrelevant) stimuli, as reflected by the P300 component. We ran a control behavioral experiment confirming that positive emotion selectively impaired attention allocation to the peripheral distractors. These results suggest a mood-dependent tuning of position-specific encoding in V1 rapidly following stimulus onset. We discuss these results against the dominant broaden-and-build theory.

show abstract

“…They demonstrate that positive affect enables people to generate more unusual and diverse first associates to neutral words (Isen et al 1985;Kahn and Isen 1993), to categorize objects more flexibly (Isen and Daubman 1984;Murray, Sujan, and Hirt 1990), to form broader consideration sets (Kahn and Isen 1993), to understand metaphors (Roehm and Sternthal 2001), to process systematically (Bless et al 1996), and to be better able to solve a wide range of problems (Amabile, Bersade, and Mueller 2005;Aspinwall 1998;Carnevale and Isen 1986;Erez and Isen 2002;Estrada, Isen, and Young 1997;Fredrickson 2001;Isen, Daubman, and Nowicki 1987;Isen, Rosenzweig, and Young 1991;Staw and Barsade 1993). Isen (2001, 77) summarizes a sizable literature by noting, "What the literature in the field now shows is that increased thinking, cognitive elaboration, is characteristic of positive affect, and that it does not, in fact, lead to depletion in cognitive capacity or depletion in motivation to process systematically."…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%