emotion and cognition studies

• Ohman et al. (2001) –Participants to look for fear-relevant stimuli/emotional (snakesor spiders) amongst a pattern of fear irrelevant stimuli/non-emotional (flowers or mushrooms)
• Participants were quicker to detect fearful stimuli hidden in thenon-emotional display
• 9 images were shown in total (eg. 1 snake, 8 flowers)
• Emotions have a huge influence on memory
• Mood congruence is a psychological phenomenon that describes how a person's current mood influences how they process and remember information and in this study the fearful stimuli was the emotion that influenced 100% of the participants' recall
• Hills et al. (2011) – Participants were either induced into ahappy mood state or a sad mood state. They were thenshown photographs of happy and sad faces
• participants in a better mood had better recall to happy faces and in a sad more more likely to recall sad faces
• Mood congruence more likely when people are in a positivemood than a negative
• Pecher et al (2009) – In a driving simulator study, theywanted to look at the effects on music and driving attention. They were looking at how well drivers stayed within the laneand the speed they travelled.
• Participants listened to: Happy, Sad or Neutral music
• sad music had no effect on how well participants stayed in the lane but speed was reduced
• happy reduced the ability to stay in the lane and a reduction of speed was also seen
• optimism bias refers to our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing positive events and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing negative events
• optiism bias is the reason drivers with happy music may have not stayed in their lane as much due to the fact they make risker choices as the underestimate the likelehood of a negative event and overestimate the likelhood of a postive one
• individuals with mood disorders show a lower amount ofoptimum bias though. - Sad people are more pessimisticthan those of individuals in a positive mood state regardingrisks of health hazards
• Positive mood states are typically associated with a risk-averse approach to decision making
• cahir and thomas in 2010 found that pratciapnts in a postive mood state made less risky dictions in compariosn to neurtaral and sad partciapnts when placing bets on horses
• this is because People in a positive mood may be motivated to maintain their current emotional state. They avoid risky decisions that might lead to negative outcomes and disrupt their positive mood