Uncovering the trail of positive affect in the job attitudes literature: A systematic review

A review of the organisational psychology literature suggests that researchers have examined at least four job attitude constructs: job satisfaction, work/task satisfaction, job involvement, and organisational commitment. Less, however, is known about why the four different job attitudes vary in magnitude as predictors of vital organisational outcomes. In this systematic review, I propose that positive affect is central in explaining the differential effects of these job attitudes on organisational outcomes. The review then explicates patterns of results underlying prior studies on these job attitudes and presents an overarching proposition: Accurate conceptualisation and measurement of the affective component underlying each job attitude will help illustrate how, and to what extent, each job attitude leads to desirable organisational outcomes. Finally, four key suggestions for further job attitudes research are presented: (a) enhancing conceptualisation and measurement of positive affect in job attitudes, (b) developing an overarching theory of positive affect, (c) focusing on discrete positive emotions, and (d) looking beyond existing current job attitude constructs. This work complements the current affective epoch of job attitudes research, uncovering the trail of positive affect as it has informed the job attitudes literature historically and suggesting its theoretical and practical developments for the future.     

Opening the closed heart: affect-focused clinical work with the victims of early trauma

This paper begins with the understanding that early trauma leads to powerful dissociative defenses which injure the capacity to feel. It further explores ways to restore this capacity through body-centred attention to affect-in-the-moment in the psychoanalytic situation. Using the author’s personal experience while in analysis as well as a case of severe early trauma, he demonstrates the consciousness-killing effect of primitive defenses and shows how body-sensitive techniques hold the promise of restoring the patient’s sense of aliveness and hence, opening the unconscious to those affect-images that are the building blocks of the human imagination. A final section focuses on the neglect of feeling in Jungian psychology and suggests that the “creation of consciousness” which Jung described as his personal myth, is quintessentially a process of emotional transformation – of bringing unconscious suffering into consciousness – as feelings.     

Illusory trust: Kanizsa shapes incidentally increase trust and willingness to invest

Previous research has shown that the completion of basic perceptual processes is intrinsically pleasant. In the absence of diagnostic and objective cues to trustworthiness, nondiagnostic factors such as positive affect can incidentally lead to reported and behavioral trust. On the basis of these two premises, it was tested whether positive affect from the completion of perceptual processes has implications for the formation of trust in first-time business-consumer interactions. We tested this hypothesis in four experiments, using the famous Kanizsa illusion as an exemplary perceptual process that has been shown to trigger positive affect. We found that participants trusted companies who featured a Kanizsa shape as their logo more than companies with closely matched logos that did not allow for the completion of a basic perceptual process. This was evident on self-reported (Experiment 1) as well as behavioral (Experiments 2–4) measures of trust. This effect even persisted under incentivized conditions (Experiment 4) and was partially mediated by the intrinsic pleasantness of perception (Experiment 3). These findings for the first time demonstrate that positive affect is not the only consequence of perception, but rather has further trickle-down consequences for social judgments and economic decision making. Perceptual illusions seem to elicit illusory trust. Therefore, these novel findings bear important implications not only for both logo design and marketing but also for consumer decision making.     

Through rose-tinted glasses: How inducing and resolving curiosity makes consumers less skeptical and improves their product evaluations

Research indicates that in general, curiosity leads to more intense processing of an advertisement, which might result in a more skeptical response toward a persuasive message. However, we propose the opposite and argue that a process of evoking curiosity toward a stimulus in the first step (with the creation of an information gap) and resolving it in the second step creates a positive affective experience. Upon receiving curiosity-resolving information after becoming curious, consumers are less skeptical toward the advertised product, which leads to a more favorable attitude and a higher purchase intention. Based on four studies, we demonstrate curiosity's skepticism-reducing effect, its downstream consequences, and the underlying mechanism of positive affect. We show that this curiosity-stimulating way of information disclosure caused the effect instead of the information itself, which remained constant. The effects occur for integral curiosity, directed at the focal product, and for incidental curiosity, elicited by an unrelated stimulus. These results contribute to understanding consumer responses to curiosity-evoking advertisements, which are widespread, and provide implications for consumer psychologists, practitioners, and policy makers.     

Self-Report Differentiation of Anxiety and Depression in a Mood Disorders Sample

Several lines of research suggest there is considerable overlap between anxiety and depression and that it is difficult to distinguish between these two constructs. However, a few studies utilizing factor analytic procedures have provided evidence that anxiety and depression can be differentiated when measures of these constructs are considered at the item level. In addition, there is some evidence that differentiation can be accomplished in samples experiencing high levels of anxiety (i.e., a clinically anxious sample; B. J. Cox, R. P. Swinson, L. Kuch, & J. Reichman, 1993). In the present study, this research strategy was extended to a sample of patients with high levels of depressed mood (i.e., a mood disorders sample; N = 378). Their responses to widely used measures of depression (i.e., Beck Depression Inventory; A. T. Beck, C. H. Ward, M. Mendelson, J. Mock, & J. Erbaugh, 1961) and anxiety (i.e., Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory—State subscale; C. D. Spielberger, R. L. Gorsuch, & R. E. Lushene, 1970) were entered into a principal-components analysis with oblique rotation. A 4-factor solution was retained. This solution was comprised of factors representing anxiety, anxiety absent (a reverse scored factor), cognitive symptoms of depression, and somatic/vegetative symptoms of depression. These findings indicated that anxiety and depression, as emotional states, can be differentiated within a mood disorders sample, using existing popular self-report measures. The clinical and research implications of these findings are briefly discussed.     

青少年学校幸福感量表的编制

本研究提出了青少年学校幸福感的概念并进行了理论构建,以此为基础自行编制了青少年学校幸福感量表。对中学生进行问卷调查的结果进行了探索性因素分析和验证性因素分析,研究结果如下:(1)在中国青少年学生学校生活背景下,学校幸福感由学校满意度、在校积极情感和在校消极情感三种成分组成;(2)学校满意度是一个由成就感、学校管理、师生关系、同学关系、教学和课业学习组成的六维结构,在校积极和消极情感均为单维结构;(3)本研究所编制的青少年学校幸福感量表(Adolescents’ School Well-Being Scale)具有较好的信度与效度,可供同类研究使用。     

Party Identification in Emotional and Political Context: A Replication

While testing an affective measure of party identification Burden and Klofstad (2005 ) found that using the phrase, "feel that you are," in place of, "think of yourself as," significantly shifted PID in a Republican direction. I adopt the theoretical framework of Affective Intelligence ( Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000 ) to specify how the timing of their question-wording experiment may have influenced the results. I suggest that the outcome was a function of (a) anxiety present during the survey, which ran just after 9/11 of 2001, coupled with (b) a political environment that favored Republicans. In a 2005 survey I replicate the experiment and collect new measures with which to test expectations. I find no significant shift in PID, and provisional support for the Affective Intelligence explanation. The results validate Burden and Klofstad's measure, qualify their findings, and test the application of the theory of Affective Intelligence to party dispositions. Alternative explanations and directions for further research are discussed.     

The affect heuristic and the attractiveness of simple gambles

Prior studies have observed that the attractiveness of playing a simple gamble (7/36 to win $9; otherwise win nothing) is greatly enhanced by introducing a small loss (7/36 win $9; otherwise lose 5¢). The present studies tested and confirmed an explanation of this finding based on the concept of evaluability and the affect heuristic. Evaluators of the “no‐loss” gamble lack a precise feeling for how good $9 is, hence give it little weight in their judgment. In the second gamble, comparison with the small loss makes $9 “come alive with feeling” and become weighted in the judgment, thus increasing the attractiveness of the gamble. These results demonstrate the importance of contextual factors in determining affect and preference for simple risk‐taking opportunities. They show that the meaning, utility, and weighting of even a very familiar monetary outcome such as $9 is not fixed, but depends greatly on these contextual factors. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

社会人格取向的成人依恋研究

国外有关成人依恋的研究大致可以分为两大类：发展临床取向和社会人格取向,文章简要概述了两种取向的差异,并重点从社会人格取向的角度介绍了有关成人依恋的内部工作模型表征的社会认知研究和情绪调节策略的依恋类型差异的研究,以及成人依恋对亲密人际关系中目标信念、沟通和自我表露、归因和冲突解决、支持寻求和照顾行为等的影响研究。最后展望了该领域未来研究的趋势和方向。     

Theory/Analysis Mismatch: Comment on Fredrickson and Joiner’s (2002) Test of the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions

Fredrickson’s (1998, ‘What good are positive emotions?’, Review of General Psychology 2, pp. 300–319; 2001, ‘The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions’, American Psychologist 56, pp. 218–226) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions posits that positive emotions improve coping skills and that improved coping skills increase positive emotions, resulting in an upward spiral toward emotional well-being. Fredrickson and Joiner (2002, ‘Positive emotions trigger upward spirals toward emotional well-being’, Psychological Science 13, pp. 172–175) claimed that the results of their analyses supported the broaden-and-build theory but in fact their analyses did not test this theory. The broaden-and-build theory clearly describes a within-occasion across-persons psychological process; the analyses, however, tested a within-occasion across-persons theory.