Misinformation is a serious concern for societies across the globe. To design effective interventions to combat the belief in and spread of misinformation, we must understand which psychological processes influence susceptibility to misinformation. This paper tests the widely assumed – but largely untested – claim that emotionally provocative headlines are associated with worse ability to identify true versus false headlines. Consistent with this proposal, we found correlational evidence that overall emotional response at the headline level is associated with diminished truth (...) discernment, except for experienced anger which was associated with increased truth discernment. The second set of studies tested a popular emotion regulation intervention where people were asked to apply either emotional suppression or emotion reappraisal techniques when considering the veracity of several headlines. In contrast to the correlation results, we found no evidence that emotion regulation helped people distinguish false from true news headlines. (shrink)

Emotion plays a significant role in our reasoning even without awareness, perhaps especially for individuals who have difficulties tolerating strong, negative emotions. Opportunity for reflection may help such individuals decide when emotions should influence reasoning. Two studies attempted to clarify the relationships among reasoning, emotions, and emotion tolerance (measured with the Affect Intolerance Scale). The first examined the effect of affect intolerance on a reasoning task. Participants were asked to determine whether conclusions logically followed from both emotional and neutral if–then (...) statements. Emotion had a small effect on performance on the reasoning task, unmoderated by affect intolerance. The second study examined whether reflection on emotional responses impacts performance on the same reasoning task. Participants asked to reflect on their emotions performed more poorly on the reasoning task than participants asked to reflect on the task’s cognitive aspects. People who endorse greater affect tolerance performed better in the cognitive reflection condition than the emotional reflection condition. People with less tolerance performed the same in both conditions. Overall, these studies support previous findings that emotion can negatively impact performance on reasoning tasks but suggest a more complex relationship for affect intolerance. (shrink)

Emotion and affect play a central role in persuasion, decision-making, and human behavior. Because of ongoing environmental crises, there is a strong need to better understand how emotions shape selection, attention, processing, and effects of environmental communication. Here, I highlight three main areas that contain challenges and opportunities for building a synergistic relationship between the affective sciences and research on strategic environmental communication: (a) identifying the causal effects of emotions in environmental communication; (b) the role of emotions in the durability (...) of environmental messaging effects; and (c) how closing the gap between the laboratory and the field can generate innovative research and more applicable inferences. (shrink)

In argumentation, metaphors are often considered as ambiguous or deceptive uses of language leading to fallacies of reasoning. However, they can also provide useful insights into creative argumentation, leading to genuinely new knowledge. Metaphors entail a framing effect that implicitly provides a specific perspective to interpret the world, guiding reasoning and evaluation of arguments. In the same vein, emotions could be in sharp contrast with proper reasoning, but they can also be cognitive processes of affective framing, influencing our reasoning and (...) behavior in different meaningful ways. Thus, a double (metaphorical and affective) framing effect might influence argumentation in the case of emotive metaphors, such as “Poverty is a disease” or “Your boss is a dictator,” where specific “emotive words” (disease, dictator) are used as vehicles. We present and discuss the results of two experimental studies designed to explore the role of emotive metaphors in argumentation. The studies investigated whether and to what extent the detection of a fallacious argument is influenced by the presence of a conventional vs. novel emotive metaphor. Participants evaluated a series of verbal arguments containing either “non-emotive” or “emotive” (positive or negative) metaphors as middle terms that “bridge” the premises of the argument. The results show that the affective coherence of the metaphor's vehicle and topic plays a crucial role in participants' reasoning style, leading to global heuristic vs. local analytical interpretive processes in the interplay of the metaphorical and the affective framing effects. (shrink)

Cleansing inductions reduce the impact of negative and positive reactions, whereas connection manipulations magnify them. We suggest that grounded procedures can produce these effects by affecting the perceived validity of thoughts. In accord with the self-validation theory, we also note the importance of considering how moderators, such as the meaning of the action and the timing of inductions, affect outcomes.