How emotions inform judgment and regulate thought
Open accessAbstract
Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conveyed by affect is crucial. Tests of the hypothesis find that affective influences can be made to disappear by changing the source to which the affect is attributed. In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognitions, leading to relational processing and item-specific processing, respectively. Positive affect is found to promote, and negative affect to inhibit, many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology.
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Emotions can promote learning by capturing and holding attention as well as deepening encoding.
“For example, emotions can promote learning by capturing and holding attention as well as deepening encoding [1–3].”
From The neuroscience of emotion regulation development: Implications for education (2016) · cites this paper as [1]
Emotions can inhibit learning by blocking cognitive processes in the face of threat.
“But they can also inhibit learning by blocking these cognitive processes in the face of threat [1,4].”
From The neuroscience of emotion regulation development: Implications for education (2016) · cites this paper as [1]
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- Authors
- Clore, G. L., & Huntsinger, J. R.
- Affiliations
- University of Virginia (US)
- Corresponding author
- Clore, Gerald L.
- Venue
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2007-09
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 393-399
- ISSN
- 1364-6613 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC2483304
- OpenAlex
- W1984901331
- Semantic Scholar
- bd6ded049ca9a7f90c2fa149164693897dde07e7
- Cited by
- 881
- References
- 71
- Citations by year
- 2026: 47 · 2025: 41 · 2024: 55 · 2023: 42 · 2022: 51 · 2021: 56 · 2020: 59 · 2019: 62 · 2018: 64 · 2017: 42 · 2016: 49 · 2015: 49 · 2014: 55 · 2013: 41 · 2012: 58
- FWCI
- 1.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of Mental Health (MH-50074, R01MH050074)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Cognitive Science and Education Research
- Keywords
- emotion and cognition, positive affect, negative affect, emotional information, evaluative judgments, cognitive inhibition, relational processing, item-specific processing, emotion regulation
- MeSH terms
- Affect, Cognition, Decision Making, Humans, Judgment, Thinking
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