Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
The environment is filled with emotionally significant information. On a walk in a forest, an individual might encounter a friendly dog or a disgruntled bear. In nearly every social interaction, an individual might be confronted with facial, vocal, and postural signs of emotion. Thus, spouses smile, colleagues frown, children pout, babies gurgle, and students tremble with anxiety or giggle with joy. Even computers deliver “just joking” faces by e-mail whereas stores and snacks lure with smiley faces. The importance of such information is now well documented: Emotionally charged objects can capture attention, bias perception, modify memory, and guide judgments and decisions (for an overview, see Eich, Kihlstrom, Bower, Forgas, & Niedenthal, 2000; Winkielman, Knutson, Paulus, & Trujillo, 2007).
Even abstract symbols that refer to emotional events, such as language, can rapidly shape an individual's behavior and trigger physiological responses. For example, most children learn through language rather than direct emotional experience that they should not put their fingers in electrical outlets or stand under a tree in a storm. Such information retains its heat in thought and language, and can be generalized to novel events (Olsson & Phelps, 2004). In adults, simple words like “the next tone will be followed by a shock” elicit a fear reaction (Phelps, O'Connor, Gateby, Grillon, Gore, & Davis, 2001) whereas terms of endearment trigger positive arousal (Harris, Ayçiçegi, & Gleason, 2003).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.