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Third-person Visual Imagery Perspective Facilitates the Experience of General Affect as Emotion

Hsing, Courtney Kelly
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524234813750027

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Psychology.
The experience of emotion (e.g., anxiety), as opposed to general affect (e.g., negative, high arousal), can facilitate distinct functions and individuals’ responses to the environment (Keltner & Gross, 1999). Past research suggests that people experience emotion when they use conceptual knowledge to integrate disparate information into a unified appraisal (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003), and that both general affect and conceptual knowledge are necessary to elicit emotion (Lindquist & Barrett, 2008). We propose that a top-down (versus bottom-up) processing style can cause individuals to rely on conceptual knowledge to experience general affect as emotion, and imagery perspective is one tool we can use to manipulate processing style. Visual images of actions necessarily have a perspective, and can be depicted from an actor’s first-person or observer’s third-person perspective. Images vary on this dimension whether they are internally or externally generated, or depict one’s own or others’ actions. The two perspectives differentially facilitate qualitatively distinct processing styles that a person applies to interpret and evaluate events (Libby & Eibach, 2011). The first-person perspective facilitates greater reliance on bottom-up processing, which sets the stage for understanding events based on the phenomenology and cognitive associations evoked by concrete features of the environment (Shaeffer, Libby & Eibach, 2015; Niese, Libby, Fazio, Eibach & Pietri, under review). The third-person perspective facilitates greater reliance on top-down processing, which sets the stage for understanding events in terms of abstractions that coherently integrate the event with broader frameworks of propositional beliefs and knowledge (Shaeffer, Libby & Eibach, 2015). ii In Studies 1 and 2, we implicitly measured (IPANAT; Quirin, Kaze'n, & Kuhl, 2009) participants’ general affect and displayed action photos shot from either the first- person or the third-person perspective (Shaeffer, Libby & Eibach, 2015). Lastly, participants self-reported their emotion experience (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988). We expected and found that the third-person (versus first-person) perspective predicted the tendency to experience negative general affect as emotion. In Studies 3 and 4, we drew on past research that highlights distinct downstream consequences of experiencing specific emotions (Lerner et al., 2015). Because the third-person (versus first-person) perspective caused people to experience general affect as emotion in Studies 1 and 2, we expected the third-person (versus first-person) perspective to predict greater downstream consequences of specific emotion in Studies 3 and 4. For both Studies 3 and 4, we expected and found that the third-person (versus first-person) perspective caused the distinct downstream effects of emotional experiences to be more evident in the third- person (versus first-person) perspective condition. Taken together, our findings support that a top-down (versus bottom-up) processing style can cause individuals to experience general affect as emotion, and imagery perspective is one tool we can use to manipulate processing style. Given that distinct emotions can help us behave more adaptively and improve performance in certain situations (e.g., Brooks 2014), imagery perspective may be an adaptive tool that people can leverage to channel their emotional experiences and optimize the way they respond to their environment.
Lisa Libby (Advisor)
Baldwin Way (Committee Member)
Brad Bushman (Committee Member)
87 p.
Psychology; Social Psychology

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hsing, C. K. (2018). Third-person Visual Imagery Perspective Facilitates the Experience of General Affect as Emotion [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524234813750027

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hsing, Courtney. Third-person Visual Imagery Perspective Facilitates the Experience of General Affect as Emotion. 2018. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524234813750027.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hsing, Courtney. "Third-person Visual Imagery Perspective Facilitates the Experience of General Affect as Emotion." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524234813750027

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1524234813750027
191
© 2018, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Third-person Visual Imagery Perspective Facilitates the Experience of General Affect as Emotion by Courtney Kelly Hsing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.