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What types of thoughts do you have in between the first appraisal process and the second one? What occurres with your levels of feelingduring this process? - i.e., what happens to you emotionally after a strong appraisal or a strong thought? Does that influence yoursubsequent thoughts and appraisals? How is your attention to external stimuli fluctuating during this process? What sequence does yoursignificant thoughts/appraisals/emotions occur in, and how does that impact your attention? Do you focus on your emotions or your ownthoughts when you pause to consider what happened after you had a significant thought or a significant stimulus input (experience).

It appears that anxiety is only positively associated with on-task effort under rather special circumstances, where there is a strong andimmediate perceived threat, or, perhaps, where task performance is appriased as instrumental in effecting avoidance or escape (seeEysenck, 1982) Eysenck, M.W. (1982). Attention and arousal: Cognition and performance. New York: Springer. That probably means that the decreased performance from anxiety in most othercircumstances is a result of people being distracted by the anxiety i.e., scanning their environment for threats or just being distractedby the pain.

Negative mood, which indicates that the environment poses a problem and might be a source of potential dangers, motivates people to changetheir situation. Negative mood is then thought to be associated with a systematic elaboration of information and greater attention todetails. Bodenhausen and colleagues (1994) Bodenhausen, G,V., Shappard, L. A., + Kramer, G. P. (1994). Negative affect and social judgment: The differential impactof anger and sadness. European Journal of Social Psychology , 24, 45-62. , investigating the impact of negative affect of social judgment, showed that inducedsadness promotes the use of an analytic, detail-oriented mode of processing, whereas anger induction leads participants to processinformation on a shallow or automatic mode. If sadness (negative valence, lower arousal) triggered a type of processing identical tothat fostered by the negative mood usually induced, anger (negative valence, higher arousal) fostered the hueristic or global mode ofprocessing commonly associated with positive mood states (e.g., happiness or joy). This last result suggests that mood states ofopposite valence may have similar effects as they share the same level of arousal (like happiness and anger). Likewise, it has beensuggested that motivational-related approach and avoidance behaviors are independent of valence, leading to evidence that both happinessand anger moods are approach oriented, whereas serenity and sadness are avoidance oriented (when someone is depressed they avoid).

A sad mood experienced at our own wedding or birthday party may result in attempts to improve the mood, thus triggering systematicprocessessing in order to understand why we are sad in a situation that should normally make us happy. The same motivations are lesslikely to be aroused when the sad mood is experienced in situations where sadness is socially expected (e.g., at a funeral). According toMartin's model (2001) Martin, L.L.(2001). Mood as input: A configural view of mood effect. In J. P. Forgast(Ed.) Feeling and thinking: The role of affect in social cognition (pp.135-157). New York: Cambridge University Press. people not ask merely: "How do I feel about it?" They ask "What does it mean that I am feeling thisway in this context?" In other words, people evaluate the targets by taking into consideration both their mood and some features ofsituation and doing this configurally. Moods are processed in parallel with contextual information in such a way that the meaning of the moodinfluences and is influenced by the meaning of other information. The meaning of a mood experience can change in different context, andtherefore the evaluative and motivational implications of mood are mutable.

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Source:  OpenStax, Emotion, cognition, and social interaction - information from psychology and new ideas topics self help. OpenStax CNX. Jul 11, 2016 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col10403/1.71
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