The interpretation of cognitive feelings [Elektronische Ressource] / vorgelegt von Christian Unkelbach

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The interpretation of cognitive feelings [Elektronische Ressource] / vorgelegt von Christian Unkelbach

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The Interpretation of Cognitive Feelings Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Dr. phil. der Fakultät für Verhaltens- und Empirische Kulturwissenschaften der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität zu Heidelberg vorgelegt von Christian Unkelbach aus Bretten Heidelberg, November 2004 Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Klaus Fiedler (Betreuer) Prof. Dr. Herbert Bless ii Acknowledgements The present work was made possible by the help and support of many friends and colleagues, and I wish to express my sincere gratefulness: To my research assistants, Liesa Büche, Marina Kühne, Viola Schreiber, Martin Stegmüller, Martina Wilke and especially, Myriam Bayer, who provided feedback throughout the whole process, conducted the experiments and spotted the largest holes in my reasoning. To Peter Freytag, who meticulously read, corrected and improved an earlier draft of this thesis. To Arie Kruglanski, who sparked the initial idea for the second part of the present thesis. To Herbert Bless, who was my first contact to “the message within”. To Henning Plessner, who always beat me in our tennis matches, but in exchange, also gave me most valuable insights. To all the rest of the Crispies; for many fun lunches, coffee table discussions and shared experiences.

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Psychologie

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Publié par	ruprecht-karls-universitat_heidelberg
Publié le	01 janvier 2005
Nombre de lectures	8
Langue	English

Extrait



The Interpretation of Cognitive Feelings

Dissertation



der Fakultät für Verhaltens- und Empirische Kulturwissenschaften

der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität zu Heidelberg



zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Dr. phil.



Prof. Dr. Herbert Bless

Prof. Dr. Klaus Fiedler (Betreuer)

Gutachter:

Heidelberg, November 2004

aus Bretten

vorgelegt von

Christian Unkelbach

Acknowledgements

The present work was made possible by the help and support of many friends and

colleagues, and I wish to express my sincere gratefulness:



To my research assistants, Liesa Büche, Marina Kühne, Viola Schreiber, Martin

Stegmüller, Martina Wilke and especially, Myriam Bayer, who provided feedback throughout

the whole process, conducted the experiments and spotted the largest holes in my reasoning.

To Peter Freytag, who meticulously read, corrected and improved an earlier draft of

this thesis.

thesis.

To Arie Kruglanski, who sparked the initial idea for the second part of the present

To Herbert Bless, who was my first contact to the message within.

To Henning Plessner, who always beat me in our tennis matches, but in exchange, also

gave me most valuable insights.

To all the rest of the Crispies; for many fun lunches, coffee table discussions and

shared experiences.

To my advisor, Klaus Fiedler, who for over the last 3 years has been providing

guidance by stimulating discussions, by giving me the chance to present my work at many

conferences, and by being a grindstone to sharpen hypotheses and theories. Most importantly,

he provided the freedom to develop and sometimes to discard my own ideas. Thanks, Klaus!



The research was supported financially by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

(DFG) grant Fi 294/21, awarded to Klaus Fiedler, and the Deusch-Israelische

Projektkooperation (DIP) grant D4.2.

INTRODUCTION

iii

Table of Contents

2

STRUCTURING THE BACKGROUND: ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT COGNITIVE FEELINGS 3

TWO CLASSIC PARADIGMS FOR INVESTIGATING COGNITIVE FEELINGS EXPERIENCING,ATTRIBUTING AND INTERPRETING COGNITIVE FEELINGS EXPERIENCING COGNITIVE FEELINGSATTRIBUTING COGNITIVE FEELINGSINTERPRETING COGNITIVE FEELINGS

PART I EXPLICITLY PROVIDED INTERPRETATIONS

THE GENERAL PARADIGM OFPARTI

EXPERIMENT 1

METHOD RESULTS DISCUSSION

EXPERIMENT 2

METHOD RESULTS DISCUSSION

SUMMARY OF EXPERIMENT 1 AND 2

PART II: INTERPRETATIONS LEARNED VIA ECOLOGICAL FEEDBACK

THEGENERALPARADIGM OFPARTII

EXPERIMENT 3

METHOD RESULTS MENTALROTATIONTASKRECOGNITION TESTRESPONSE LATENCIESRECOGNITION TESTSDT-ANALYSISDISCUSSION

5 6 677

10

14

16 18 22

24

25 26 29

30

32

38

38 42 42444549



REFERENCES

SUMMARY

GENERAL DISCUSSION

84

CONCLUSION

ASINGLE DIMENSION? IS THE DISTINCTION OF ATTRIBUTION AND INTERPRETATION NECESSARY? UNCONSCIOUS VS.CONSCIOUSPROCESSESLATENCY AS AN INDEX FOR FLUENCYTHE POSSIBLE INHERENT MEANING OF COGNITIVE FEELINGSFORTHCOMING RESEARCH QUESTIONS

626365676970

61

74

72

METHOD RESULTS MENTALROTATIONTASKRECOGNITION TEST-RESPONSE LATENCIESRECOGNITION TEST-SDT-ANALYSISDISCUSSION

EXPERIMENT 4

52 53 53555659

51

The Interpretation of Cognitive Feelings



Introduction

We are better prepared to study the content of thought than the experience of thinking. (Clore, 1992; p. 133)

Imagine you were asked to judge the difficulty of a mathematical problem, for

example, the equation 2 + 2 = x. Your immediate reaction might be that this is a very easy

task, probably not even worth the label problem. But on what evidence do you base your

judgment? A justification why this is considered to be an easy task is not complicated: The

mathematical equation consists only of two single digit natural numbers on which the

operation of summation is performed to reach the conclusion that x = 4. This, however, may

not be the reason why you came up with the judgment that this is an easy task. Rather, you

might have used the experience that it is easy to solve the equation, that you instantly knew

the solution. This experience-based route to judgments, decision making and inferences will

be the theme of the present dissertation. It is about the experience of thinking rather than

about the content of thought.

The analytic approach to judgments, decisions and inferences (here, two single digits

involving only summation) has been the dominant model in cognition research for quite some

time, explicitly or implicitly relying on a computer metaphor. One constraint in this tradition

has been that the computer metaphor does not account for the role of affect in judgments (e.g.,

Mellers, Schwartz, & Ritov. 1999). Human beings are not cold information processing units;

emotions, moods, and feelings have a profound influence. Yet, the computer metaphor can

incorporate such affective states by assuming that they enter judgments as information (e.g.,

Schwarz & Clore, 1983; Zajonc, 1980), by assuming that they have a systematic influence on

what information is considered (Bower, 1981; Forgas, 1995), or by assuming that they have a

systematic influence on how information is integrated (Fiedler, 2000; Forgas, 2000).

Besides this obvious constraint, there is another conceptual shortcoming in the

computer metaphor. A computer has no monitoring system for its processes. For instance, a

computer will work through implemented algorithms without realizing a difference between a

simple and a complex operation. It will solve the most complex iterations as well as the

simple task of 2 + 2 = x. A computer cannot use the information how long a calculation takes,

how fast something is accessed on its hard drive, or how long it takes to download

information from a distant source on the internet. Human beings do. The simple task of

judging the difficulty of 2 + 2 = x should serve as an illustration; as said, you probably did not

think about the quality of the problem analytically. Instead, you used the experience resulting

from your own cognitive processes. Following the terminology of Clore et al. (2001), such

experiences will be calledcognitive feelingsrationale is that the term feeling. The underlying

is a generic designation for all kinds of internal signals that provide consciously available

feedback from non-conscious affective, bodily, or cognitive processes (Clore et al., 2001, p.

30).

The impact of such cognitive feelings on judgments is for example demonstrated by

Tversky and Kahnemans well-known availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).

They stated that frequency or probability estimates are based on the ease with which instances

of the event come to mind. For example, if asked to judge the frequency of words starting

with the letter r compared to words with r as the third letter, participants largely

overestimate the first frequency and underestimate the latter (Tversky & Kahneman 1973,

Exp. 3). This is supposedly the case because participants use their subjective experience, their

feeling, that it is easier to come up with words starting with r compared to words with r as

the third letter. Words starting with an r are more available. But what is the underlying

process? The use of the subjective experience of ease in judgments of easiness or difficulty is

reasonable (e.g., in judging the difficulty of 2 +2 x), but why does ease influence frequency =

estimates? There is a silent assumption of an inferential process of the kind that if instances

come easy to mind, they must be frequent. The ease is interpreted in terms of frequency. So,

within the area of research on the experience of thinking, the interpretation of cognitive

feelings will be the main subject of the present thesis.

However, before a model for this interpretation process is presented, a discussion of

the underlying assumptions, a distinction of cognitive and affective feelings and a general

stake out of the presented research seems is called for.

Structuring the background: Assumptions about cognitive feelings

The influence of feelings on judgments in general has been studied mostly in the area

of affective feelings, and there, mostly on a positive  negative valence dimension. The

equivalent in the domain of cognitive feelings is an easy  difficult or a fluent  non-fluent

dimension. Although there are a number of cognitive feelings like revelation (Watkins &

Peynircioglu, 1990), surprise (Reisenzein, 2000; Whittlesea & Williams, 2001), tip-of-the-

tongue (Hart, 1965; for a review, see Schwartz, 2002), they are all derivable from this

dimension. For example, the revelation effect (Bornstein & Neely, 2001; Bernstein,

Whittlesea, & Loftus, 2002) is easy to describe as the experienced difficulty of a cognitive

process followed by sudden unexpected ease, which is termed revelation. The following

discussion will therefore concern the ease or fluency of cognitive processes.

Subjective experiences of fluency or ease can result from conceptual processes (e.g.

memory retrieval, information integration, memory storage) or perceptual processes, but the

distinction is blurred. For instance, on a biological level, the first integration of information

takes place on a sub-retinal level. From a definitional point, it is difficult to tell where a

perceptual process ends and a conceptual process starts. As an illustration, it is a daily life

phenomenon that people are able to react when they hear their own name, even if they listen

intensively to something else, for example, when they are engaged in a conversation on a

cocktail party (Cherry, 1953). This phenomenon is hard to explain if a sharp distinction of

conceptual and perceptual, bottom-up and top-down processes, is assumed. And logically, it is

difficult to construe conceptual processes that are devoid of perception and vice versa.

Therefore, conceptual and perceptual processes will be treated as interchangeable. On an

operational level, fluency and ease will be indexed by the speed of responses. It is hard to test

the functional similarity of speed and fluency, but it makes sense intuitively (Reber, Wurtz, &

Zimmermann, 2004): Any process that is fluent or easy should be faster than a non-fluent or

difficult process, be it conceptual or perceptual.

Furthermore, the assumption is made that judgments are based on available

information at the time of judgment (Fiedler, 2000); thus, judgments and decisions based on

existing or preformed opinions are not in the focus of the following. To relate again to the

example from the beginning: If you already have an opinion available whether 2 + 2 = x is

easy, you need not use your experience that it is easy to solve the equation; you can just use

your existing opinion. A similar assumption is found in research on the influence of affect in

judgments and decisions. If opinions and judgments already exist, there is less room for

systematic influences of affective feelings (Forgas, 1995).

Yet, if the judgment is constructed, feelings might influence what information is used,

how it is used or feelings might enter the judgments as direct input. For example, Schwarz

and Clore (1983) showed that people use their mood as input for judgments of how satisfied

they are with their lives. This offers the analogy for the impact of cognitive feelings on

judgments: If an object evokes positive affect, the evaluation of this object will be positive. In

general, evaluative judgments depend on evaluative information, and affective feelings offer a

direct source of such evaluative information. The same is true for the presented math

problem; the cognitive feeling of ease offers a direct source of information for a judgment

about the easiness of a task: Judgments of ease depend on, well, easiness information.

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