Jennifer L. Lerner - US grants

This is a request for a small grant (RO3). The overall objective of the proposed research is to examine the mechanisms through which affect influences perceptions of distressed individuals and willingness to provide support for such individuals. The first study develops an empirical foundation for understanding relations among affective elicitors, experience, expressions, and bodily changes. The second study examines how individual differences, a stress manipulation, and an accountability manipulation interactively influence impression, especially (a) empathic accuracy regarding a stressed target individual and (b) willingness to provide support for the target individual. The third study examines how individual differences and a specific mood induction (sadness, anger, serenity, happiness, and neutrality) interactively influence impression formation, especially (a) the depth of cognitive processing about a distressed target individual, (b) sympathy for the target individual, and (c) willingness to provide emotional support for the target individual. The results have implications for mental health research, revealing how different kinds of affect influence the cues people use when forming impressions of stressed individuals. The results also have implications for health and mental health, revealing the circumstances under which stressed individuals are more or less likely to receive meaningful support from others.

Abstract: Emotional and Cognitive Influences on Responses to the September 11 Attacks
PI: Jennier Lerner
Proposal: 0201525


Sadly, the events of September 11 provide a natural laboratory for advancing emotion and judgment research, as well as testing the generalizability of the results of previous research. Emotion and judgment research might inform public policy by identifying measures that address people's cognitive and emotional needs in relation to the September 11 attacks. This panel study traces the same set of 800 participants (600 adults and 200 adolescents). The goal is to examine the differential effects of fear, anger, and sadness on risk perceptions, attributions of causality, preferences among policy options, intentions to take risk-mitigating actions, and economic behavior in response to the September 11 attacks. A second goal is to examine developmental differences in emotional reactions between adolescents and adults.More specifically, the project will use samples purchased from a firm that recruits for internet surveys through random-digit-dialing selection methods. The dataset has measures of health behavior and consumer decision-making both before and after the attacks. Wave 1 of the proposed survey and experiment consists of dispositional emotion measures, emotion-priming manipulations, and outcome measures of risk perceptions, attributions of causality, expectations of future feelings, consumer decision-making, health behaviors, and policy preferences. Wave 2 (3 months after the first wave or immediately after another national event, whichever comes first) will examine how changes in emotion over time affect the same outcome measures.

Proposal Title: PECASE: Toward a Model of Emotion-Specific Influences on
Judgment and Choice
Institution: Carnegie-Mellon University

Once an exclusively cognitive enterprise, research on judgment and decision making increasingly addresses the powerful influence of emotion. Recent research has shown that even incidental emotion - emotion that is normatively unrelated to the judgment/decision at hand - can have a significant impact on judgment and choice. The majority of studies in this tradition have been motivated by a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative emotions on judgment and choice. But there is growing evidence that specific emotions of the same valence can trigger opposing perceptions and judgments. For example, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9-11, experimentally induced fear produced opposite effects from anger on both risk estimates and policy preferences among U.S. citizens in a nationwide field experiment (Lerner, Gonzalez, Small, & Fischhoff, in press). From a theoretical perspective, these findings demonstrate that dimensions of emotions other than valence are also important components to include in decision models. From an applied perspective, they demonstrate how and why citizens primed for anger will endorse rather different policies than will citizens primed for fear.
The purpose of the proposed research is to develop and test a parsimonious yet powerful theory that comprehensively predicts relations among specific emotions and judgment/choice outcomes. The proposed research will expand Lerner and Keltner's (2000; 2001) appraisal-tendency framework (ATF). The ATF predicts that each emotion activates an implicit cognitive predisposition - an "appraisal tendency" - to appraise future events in line with the central appraisal dimensions that triggered the emotion. Such appraisals, although tailored to help the individual respond to the event that evoked the emotion, persist beyond the eliciting situation - becoming an implicit perceptual lens for interpreting subsequent situations. The appraisal-tendency approach provides a flexible yet specific framework for developing a host of testable hypotheses concerning emotion, judgment, and decision making. The proposed research will test hypotheses concerning the effects of emotion on three fundamental cognitive processes: probability assessment, valuation, and attribution. Probability assessment, valuation, and attribution are chosen for study because they underlie countless judgments and decisions in daily life. Indeed, the first two processes also form the basis for the dominant theoretical model for decision making under uncertainty: the expected utility model. To the extent that incidental emotion influences subjective utility and/or probability estimates, it will have implications for classical decision theories and contemporary revisions. To the extent that incidental emotion influences attribution processes, it, too, will have manifold implications because attribution plays a central role in foundational theories of social cognition, mental health, physical health, and justice. The project also aims to disseminate knowledge about the effect of emotion on judgment and decision making, and about the larger field of behavioral decision research (BDR), to broader audiences of students, the public, and policymakers. Dissemination of the insights of BDR is especially important because it has clear practical implications for both public policy and private decisions. Knowledge of the field will be circulated to wider audiences through a new, interdisciplinary undergraduate major in Decision Science at Carnegie Mellon; through briefings for policymakers and interviews with the press; and through the development of a sustainable infrastructure for disseminating BDR research in concert with the National Academy of Science's Office for the Public Understand

Many of the most important public policy questions facing our nation concern human judgment and decision making. For example, answers to questions concerning how to best communicate risks of terrorism, how to best encourage retirement savings, and how to best discourage unhealthy eating choices all revolve to a greater or lesser extent on understanding human judgment and decision making. It is important, therefore, to bring multi-disciplinary sciences to bear on this topic. In particular, the policy questions outlined above should simultaneously draw on at least social psychology, personality psychology, cognitive psychology, decision science, and economics. In order to foster increased attention to research synergies at this multifaceted juncture, this project's main activity will be a preconference on judgment and decision making preceding the 2006 annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The preconference speakers, including Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, will represent some of the most important research advances in judgment and decision making. They will include not only psychologists, but also economists, decision scientists, and neuroscientists.

The requested funds will be used primarily for two purposes. First, funds will provide scholarships to graduate students to facilitate their participation in the preconference. Second, funds will pay for equipment rentals related to speakers' presentations. This will allow the preconference to keep registration fees low, especially for graduate students. In addition to the intellectual advances inherent in bringing this group of researchers together, the broader impact of this project will be to increase the participation of talented students in the interdisciplinary topic of judgment and decision making. Because many of the questions studied in judgment and decision making have direct policy application, as described above, increased research in this area will contribute to an important knowledge base for the public good.