Dr. Sascha Topolinski
Associated member: January 2007 - July 2009
Dissertation title: The role of affects and cognitive feelings in intuitive judgments.
Abstract: In semantic coherence judgments individuals are able to intuitively discriminate whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or not (incoherent) without retrieving the common associate. A processing-fluency account for these intuitions is proposed. It is assumed that a) coherent triads are processed more fluently than incoherent triads, b) this high fluency triggers a subtle positive affect, and c) this affect may be experienced as a cognitive feeling and used in any explicit judgment. Testing these stages, it was shown in 3 experiments that coherent triads a) are processed faster than incoherent triads, b) serve as positive affective primes, and c) are liked more than incoherent triads.
In Experiment 4 it was shown that the fluency-triggered affect is the internal cue used in coherence judgments: Provided with an irrelevant source of their affective reactions, participants lost the ability to intuitively discriminate between coherent and incoherent triads.
Principal investigator:
Prof. Dr. Fritz Strack
Dept. Psychology II, Röntgenring 2, 97070 Würzburg
Publications:
Current position:
Social Cognition Center Cologne
Faculty of Arts and Humanity
University of Cologne
