Affect and the regulation of cognitive processes Seminar

When confronted with social situations individuals usually have a broad array of possible cognitive processing strategies to deal with the situation at hand. Given that individuals may apply different approaches to interpret the current situation or to make a decision, the question arises what regulates the use of different processing options. How do individuals decide whether to engage in more effortful or in more heuristic processing, whether to construct a more abstract or a more specific representation, whether to attend particularly to new stimuli or to rely on older, stored information? It is argued that individuals’ affective states play a crucial role in these regulation processes. The presentation will provide an overview on empirical findings that support this claim. The empirical findings will be embedded in a conceptual framework that emphasizes the informative function of affective states. It will further be discussed how other variables may serve similar functions in regulating cognitive processes.