Freud’s underlying model was that repression involved the splitting of instinctual energy from an unacceptable idea so that it could not reach consciousness. This objectless energy could still achieve expression, however, by attaching itself to an associated but harmless idea, which would then be propelled into consciousness. In the present chapter, this model are extrapolated from the domain of affective experience to the domain of cognitive experience more generally. The chapter shows that the mood-as-information model can serve as a more general model of judgment in which various kinds of cognitive experience act as information. It reviews the implications of an informational interpretation of the effects of mood on evaluative judgment, and they have extended the hypothesis to cover the role of what might be called “cognitive feelings” on judgments about knowing.

Over 35% of the world's population uses social media. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have radically influenced the way individuals interact and communicate. These platforms facilitate both public and private communication with strangers and friends alike, providing rich insight into an individual's personality, health, and wellbeing. To date, many researchers have employed a variety of methods for extracting mental health-centric features from digital text communication (DTC) data, including natural language processing, social network analysis, and extraction of temporal discourse patterns. However, none have explored a hierarchical framework for extracting features from private messages with the goal of unifying approaches across methodological domains. Furthermore, while analyses of large, public corpora abound in existing literature, limited work has been done to explore the relationship between of private textual communications, personality traits, and symptoms of mental illness. We present a framework for constructing rich feature spaces from digital text communications. We then demonstrate the efficacy of our framework by applying it to a dataset of private Facebook messages in a college student population (N=103). Our results reveal key individual differences in temporal and relational behaviors, as well as language usage in relation to validated measures of trait-level anxiety, loneliness, and personality. This work represents a critical step forward in linking features of private social media messages to validated measures of mental health, wellbeing, and personality.

Priests of the medieval Catholic Church understood something about the relationship between affect and attitude. To instill the proper attitude in parishioners, priests dramatized the power of liturgy to save them from Hell in a service in which the experience of darkness and fear gave way to light and familiar liturgy. These ceremonies were written and performed so as to first arouse and then allay anxieties and fears (Scott, 2003, p. 227):

Emotions are important to personality and social psychology and their relationship. This chapter poses five questions about emotion, contrasting traditional views with recent and emerging perspectives from social–personality psychology. It reaches five conclusions about the nature and origin of emotion and its role in perception, behavior, and cognition: (1) The components of emotion are not sufficiently correlated to implicate underlying affective programs. (2) An iterative reprocessing view of emotion elicitation can accommodate both subcortical, unconscious affect and cognitively rich, conscious emotion. (3) Emotional influences on perception implicate the role of emotion as information about resources. (4) Rather than triggering behavior directly, emotional experience appears to serve a self-teaching function. (5) Positive and negative emotions affect thinking styles by promoting or inhibiting the cognitive orientations that are dominant in particular situations. The chapter is thus both historical and modern, emphasizing new developments and their implications for social–personality psychology.

In their cognitive theory of emotion, Schachter and Singer proposed that feelings are separable from what they are about. As a test, they induced feelings of arousal by injecting epinephrine and then molded them into different emotions. They illuminated how feelings in one moment lead into the next to form a stream of conscious experience. We examine the construction of emotion in a similar spirit. We use the sensory integration process to understand how the brain combines disparate sources of information to construct both perceptual and emotional models of the world even as the world continues to change. We emphasize two processes: affect segmentation (isolating the felt component of an emotion) and affect integration (recombining this feeling with its object).

Affect and its object are separable, so that the same affective reaction can have different effects. Relevant principles from the affect-as-information approach include: (1) The impact of affect depends on implicit attributions -- what it appears to be about. (2) Affect is always taken to be about whatever is currently mentally accessible. Affective reactions can therefore serve as appraisals of objects of judgment or of initial thoughts and opinions about such objects, when they are more accessible. During problem solving, affect can serve as appraisals of thought style rather than thought content. Then, (3) positive and negative affect serve as go and stop signals for current inclinations. Affective influences on cognition are therefore not fixed, but malleable and context-dependent.

The article discusses research being done on the use of effect-size estimates in testing psychological theories. It references the study Small Telescopes: Detectability and the Evaluation of Replication Results, by U. Simonsohn published in the 2015 issue. The variables considered include the correlation between mood and weather, intensity of the mood, and the correlation between life satisfaction and marital satisfaction.

Consider Miranda, a first-year college student, whose parents informed her that they were separating. There had been tension at home, but the news was a shock. She was upset and found it hard to think about much else. Beyond being upset, what emotions might she feel, and what impact might they have? A theory of emotion I developed with colleagues addresses the emotion question, and research on emotion with other colleagues and students addresses the impact question.

Firestone & Scholl (F&S) assume that pure perception is unaffected by cognition. This assumption is untenable for definitional, anatomical, and empirical reasons. They discount research showing nonoptical influences on visual perception, pointing out possible methodological "pitfalls." Results generated in multiple labs are immune to these "pitfalls," suggesting that perceptions of physical layout do indeed reflect bioenergetic resources.

In this chapter we argue that the account of emotion we proposed in The Cognitive Structure of Emotions (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988) is quite compatible with the psychological constructionist approach to emotion that is the focus of this volume. And we believe this to be true even though our model (now widely referred to as the OCC model) is usually thought of as an appraisal theory. We begin with a brief overview of our model, and then present four sections whose contents relate to the four questions around which the chapters of this book are organized.