Desirable responding triggered by affect: Automatic egotism? (original) (raw)

1987, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Two experiments demonstrated an increase in socially desirable responding in the presence of affectladen stimuli. Subjects responded "me" or "not me" to trait adjectives presented on a microcomputer. Affect was manipulated by pairing each trait adjective with a distractor word presented nearby. Some distractors were affect-laden (e.g., sex, blood); others were innocuous (e.g., station, lake). In Study I, some trait adjectives were positive traits and others were neutral. Results showed that endorsements of positive traits were increased and speeded up by the affective distractors; denials of positive traits were reduced and slowed down by affective distractors. Both claims and denials of neutral traits were slowed by the affective distractors. In Study 2, positive, neutral, and negative traits were presented. The Study 1 results were replicated with parallel results for negative traits: Denials of negative traits were increased and speeded by the affective distractors, whereas claims of negative traits were reduced and slowed. This overall pattern of results was interpreted as a response-potentiation effect; that is, dominant responses were facilitated and subordinate responses were inhibited. Thus the net reaction to the presence of affective distractors was increased desirable responding. The high speed of this process suggests mediation by a fast-rising arousal or an attentional mechanism. The latter model suggests that self-perception automatically becomes more egotistical. This automatic egotism may underlie a variety of self-presentation phenomena, including certain defense mechanisms. Many social interactions involve the processing of social information (e.g., categorization, decision making) while under the influence of affective states (e.g., fear, love, anxiety, sexual arousal). Indeed, one might argue that all important social judgments involve some simultaneous processing of affect and cognition. Only recently, however, has much research been directed toward the interplay of affect and social cognition (for a review, seelsen, 1984). There is, of course, a classic literature on the effects of anxiety on task performance (Spence & Spence, 1966; Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). The anxiety effects appear to be a subset of the more general link between arousal and task performance (for a review, see Eysenck, 1982). The general finding is a response-potentiation effect; that is, arousal facilitates dominant responses and inhibits subordinate responses. For instance, Pallak, Pittman, Heller, and Munson (1975) found that when subjects were threatened with shock, a response-potentiation effect appeared on a subsequent Stroop task.