Affect Infusion

Definition

Affect infusion occurs when feelings (moods, emotions) exert an invasive and subconscious influence on the way people think, form judgments, and behave in social [Page 17]situations. Affect can influence both the content of thinking and behavior (informational effect), and the process and style of thinking (processing effects). Some examples of affect infusion include (a) forming more negative judgments of a person when in a bad mood, (b) being more cooperative and friendly in a bargaining encounter due to a positive affective state, and (c) paying more systematic attention to the details of a judgmental task when in a negative rather than a positive affective state. Mild, subconscious moods can be an especially important source of affect infusion, and paradoxically, affect infusion is most likely when a person needs to deal with a more complex and demanding task that requires more open, constructive thinking.

History

The possibility that affective states can exert an invasive influence on thinking and behavior has long been recognized by writers and philosophers, but the reasons for these effects remained incompletely understood until very recently. Some classical conditioning theories suggest that unrelated affective states can influence thoughts and actions simply because they coincide in space and time. For example, in John B. Watson's wellknown Little Albert Studies, young children could be conditioned to respond with fear to a previously innocuous target, a furry rabbit, when encountering the rabbit coincided with loud noise. In other work, evaluations of a newly met person could be influenced by the irrelevant affective states elicited by being in a pleasant or an unpleasant room. Within psychodynamic (Freudian) work, attempts to repress affective states were thought to result in the infusion of affect into unrelated judgments and activities. For example, people who were instructed to suppress their fear of an expected electric shock were more likely to see others as fearful (project fear) compared to another group who were not trying to suppress their fear.

Mechanisms

Contemporary theories emphasize the cognitive (mental) processes that underlie affect infusion and link feelings to thoughts and behavior. Affect can influence the content of thinking due to two psychological processes: through memory processes (affect priming effects) and through misattribution processes (affect-as-information effects). According to affect priming theory, affective states make it easier for people to remember, think of, and use affect-related thoughts and ideas (mood congruence), as well as concepts that were experienced in a matching rather than a nonmatching affective state (mood–state dependence). Thus, a happy person will selectively remember and use concepts that are positive rather than negative, and so will make more positive judgments and interpretations about ongoing events than will a sad person. The greater availability in memory of affectively congruent ideas can also exert an affect-consistent influence on what people pay attention to, what they recall, the kind of inferences they make, as well as judgments and, ultimately, behaviors. According to the second process, people may sometimes mistakenly use their affective state as a shortcut (heuristic cue) to infer their evaluative reactions to a target (the “how-do-I-feel-about-it” heuristic). This latter process is most likely when the processing capacity and processing motivation are limited, and so a simple, easy-to-generate response is acceptable.

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