Happy Believers and Sad Skeptics? Affective Influences on Gullibility

Belief bias during reasoning among religious believers and skeptics.

We provide evidence that religious skeptics, as compared to believers, are both more reflective and effective in logical reasoning tasks. While recent studies have reported a negative association between an analytic cognitive style and religiosity, they focused exclusively on accuracy, making it difficult to specify potential underlying cognitive mechanisms. The present study extends the previo...

Comparison between linguistic and affective perception of sad and happy – A cross-linguistic study

This paper is part of a larger study that examines crosslinguistic perception of sad and happy speech when the information is transmitted semantically (linguistic) or prosodically (affective). Here we examine American English and Japanese speakers’ ability to perceive emotions in Japanese utterances. It is expected that native subjects will be better at perceiving emotion expressed semantically...

On being sad and evasive: Affective influences on verbal communication strategies in conflict situations

Does mood influence people s tendency to engage in evasive, equivocal communication when facing conflict situations? Based on recent affect–cognition theories and research on verbal communication, this experiment predicted that negative mood should increase, and positive mood decrease the level of verbal evasiveness in conflict situations, and that high situational conflict should magnify these...

A functional MRI study of happy and sad affective states induced by classical music.

The present study investigated the functional neuroanatomy of transient mood changes in response to Western classical music. In a pilot experiment, 53 healthy volunteers (mean age: 32.0; SD = 9.6) evaluated their emotional responses to 60 classical musical pieces using a visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0 (sad) through 50 (neutral) to 100 (happy). Twenty pieces were found to accurately ...

AFFECT AND RELATIONSHIPS – FORGAS - 1 Running head: AFFECT AND RELATIONSHIPS Happy and close, but sad and effective? Affective influences on relationship judgments and behaviors