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Benefits of Negative Affect

Recent studies indicate that negative affect has important, beneficial impacts on cognition and behavior. These developments are a remarkable departure from past psychological research, which is characterized by a unilateral emphasis on the benefits of positive affect. Both states of affect influence mental processes and behavior.

These findings complement evolutionary psychology theories that affective states serve adaptive functions in promoting suitable cognitive strategies to deal with environmental challenges. Positive affect is associated with assimilative, top-down processing used in response to familiar, benign environments. Negative affect is connected with accommodative, bottom-up processing in response to unfamiliar, or problematic environments. Thus, positive affectivity promotes simplistic heuristic approaches that rely on preexisting knowledge and assumptions. Conversely, negative affectivity promotes controlled, analytic approaches that rely on externally drawn information.

Benefits of negative affect are present in areas of cognition including perception, judgment, and memory. Since negative affect relies more on cautious processing than preexisting knowledge, people with negative affect tend to perform better in instances involving deception, manipulation, impression formation, and stereotyping. People also exhibit less interfering responses to stimuli when given descriptions or performing any cognitive task. Furthermore, negative affectivity's analytical and detailed processing of information leads to fewer reconstructive-memory errors, whereas positive mood relies on broader schematic to thematic information that ignores the detail. Thus, information processing in negative moods reduces the misinformation effect and increasing overall accuracy of details.

Judgement

People are notoriously susceptible to forming inaccurate judgments based on biases and limited information. Evolutionary theories propose that negative affective states tend to increase skepticism and decrease reliance on preexisting knowledge. Consequently, judgmental accuracy is improved in areas such as impression formation, reducing fundamental attribution error, stereotyping, and gullibility.

Impression Formation

First impressions are one of the most basic forms of judgments people make on a daily basis; yet, it is a complex and fallible process. Negative affect is shown to decrease errors in forming impressions based on presuppositions. One common judgment error is the halo effect, or the tendency to form unfounded impressions of people based on known but irrelevant information. For instance, more attractive people are often attributed with more positive qualities. Research demonstrates that positive affect tends to increase halo effects whereas negative affect decreases halo effects.

A study involving undergraduate students demonstrated a halo effect in assessing a middle-aged man to be more likely to be a philosopher than an unconventional, young woman. These Halo effects were nearly eliminated when participants were in a negative affective state. In the study, researchers sorted participants into either happy or sad groups using an autobiographical mood induction task in which participants reminisced on sad or happy memories. Then, participants read a philosophical essay by a fake academic who was identified as either a middle-aged, bespectacled man or as a young, unorthodox-looking woman. The pretend writer was evaluated on intelligence and competence. The positive affect group exhibited a strong halo effect, rating the male writer significantly higher than the female writer in competence. The negative affect group exhibited almost no halo effects rating the two equally. Researchers concluded that impressions formation is improved by negative affect. Results support theories that negative affect results in more elaborate processing based upon external, available information.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The systematic, attentive approach caused by negative affect reduces fundamental attribution error, the tendency to inaccurately attribute behavior to a person’s internal character without taking external, situational factors into account. The fundamental attribution error (FAE) is connected with positive affect since it occurs when people use top-down cognitive processing based on inferences. Negative affect stimulates bottom-up, systematic analysis that reduces fundamental attribution error.

This effect is documented in FAE research in which students evaluated a fake debater on attitude and likability based on an essay the "debater" wrote. After being sorted into positive or negative affect groups, participants read one of two possible essays arguing for one side or another on a highly controversial topic. Participants were informed that the debater was assigned a stance to take in the essay which did not necessarily reflect his views. Still, the positive affect groups rated debaters arguing unpopular views as holding the same attitude expressed in the essay and as being unlikeable compared to debaters with popular stances, thus, demonstrating FAE. In contrast, the data for the negative affect group displayed no significant difference in ratings for debaters with popular stance and debaters with unpopular stances. These results indicate that positive affect assimilation styles promote fundamental attribution error, and negative affect accommodation styles minimize the error when judging people.

Stereotyping

Negative affect benefits judgment in diminishing the implicit use of stereotypes by promoting closer attention to stimuli. In one study, participants were less likely to discriminate against targets that appeared Muslim when in a negative affective state. After organizing participants into positive and negative affect groups, researchers had them play a computer game. Participants had to make rapid decisions to shot only at target carrying a gun. Some of the targets wore turbans making them appear Muslim. As expected, there was a significant bias against Muslim targets resulting in a tendency to shoot at them. However, this tendency decreased with subjects in negative affective states while positive affect groups developed more aggressive tendencies toward Muslims. Researchers concluded that negative affect leads to less reliance on internal stereotypes, thus, decreasing judgmental bias.

Gullibility

Multiple studies have shown that negative affectivity has a beneficial role in increasing skepticism and decreasing gullibility. Because negative affective states increase external analysis and attention to details, people in negative states are better able to detect deception.

Researchers have presented findings that students in negative affective states had improved lie detection compared to students in positive affective states. In a study, students watched video clips of everyday people either lying or telling the truth. First, music was used to induce positive, negative, or neutral affect in participants who were then divided into affect groups. Then, experimenters played 14 video messages that had to be identified by participants as true or false. As expected, the negative affect group performed better in veracity judgments than the positive affect group who performed no better than chance. Interestingly, participants who reported using verbal cues had much higher scores than those who reported using non-verbal cues. Researchers believe that the negative affect groups detected deception more successfully because they attended to stimulus details and systematically built inferences from those details.