Chapter 12

Glossary

Decision-making This involves making a selection from various options, often in the absence of full information.

Deductive reasoning An approach to reasoning in which conclusions can be judged valid or invalid given that certain statements or premises are assumed to be true.

Deontological judgements Decisions made based on moral rules or obligations (e.g. do not kill) predominantly involving the affective system.

Easterbrook’s hypothesis The notion that high levels of arousal or anxiety cause a narrowing of attention.

Ecological validity The extent to which findings in psychology (especially those obtained in the laboratory) generalise to the real world.

Flashbulb memory A subject’s recollection of details of what they were doing at the time of some major news event or dramatic incident.

Incidental emotions Emotions that are unrelated to the current task (judgement or decision-making). For example, the positive affect you experience having passed an important examination may influence your subsequent judgements and decisions on totally different issues.

Integral emotions Emotions that arise from the current judgement or choice. For example, someone deciding whether to gamble a considerable amount of money on a risky project may experience anxiety.

Judgement This involves an assessment of the likelihood of an event occurring on the basis of incomplete information; it often forms the initial process in decision-making.

Meta-analysis A form of statistical analysis based on combining all the findings in a specific area to obtain an overall picture.

Mood-congruent memory The finding that learning and retrieval are better when the learner’s (or rememberer’s) mood state is the same as (or congruent with) the affective value of the to-be-remembered material.

Mood-state-dependent memory The finding that memory performance is better when the individual’s mood state is the same at learning and retrieval than when it differs.

Optimistic bias An individual’s mistaken belief that he/she is more likely than most other people to experience positive events but less likely to experience negative events.

Schadenfreude The phenomenon whereby one experiences pleasure at the misfortune of disliked others.

Urbach–Wiethe disease A disease in which the amygdala and adjacent areas are destroyed; it leads to the impairment of emotional processing and memory for emotional material.

Utilitarian judgements Decisions that are made based on maximising the consequences (i.e. saving as many lives as possible) using the cognitive system.

Weapon focus The finding that eyewitnesses pay so much attention to some crucial aspect of the situation (e.g. a weapon) that they ignore other details.

Summary

Mood state typically influences cognitive processing and performance, but the impact of mood state is ignored in most research.
Anxiety and anger often lead to attentional narrowing whereas sadness or a positive mood often lead to attentional broadening. However, there is also evidence that moods involving low motivational intensity involve attentional broadening whereas those involving high motivational intensity involve attentional narrowing.
Mood-congruent memory is greater in positive than negative moods because individuals in a negative mood are more motivated to improve their mood state.
There is more evidence for mood-state-dependent memory when individuals have to generate their own retrieval cues.
The amygdala (which a hub connected to 90% of brain regions) is strongly involved in processing of (and memory for) emotional stimuli.
The three negative mood states of anxiety, anger and sadness all have idiosyncratic patterns of effects on judgement and decision- making. These differences reflect the different functions associated with each mood state.
There is some evidence that anger and positive moods are associated with heuristic or shallow processing whereas sadness is associated with analytic or deliberative processing.
According to the emotion-imbued choice model, decision-making is influenced by complex interactions among the following factors: current emotion; personality and preferences of the decision-maker; incidental influences (e.g., weather); expected outcomes.
According to Greene’s dual-process model, most individuals make deontological judgements (based on moral rules) with personal moral dilemmas but utilitarian judgements (based on maximising the consequences) with impersonal dilemmas. This model is oversimplified and provides an excessively flattering view of the advantages of utilitarianism.