Negative Affect Leads to Low-Effort Cognition: Attributional Processing for Observed Social Behavior

The proposed theory states that affect influences cognition by determining the amount of effort that is expended in information processing. It was predicted that negative affect leads to low-effort attributional processing and that positive affect leads to high-effort attributional processing. Correspondent dispositional attributions were considered low-effort attributions, and other attributions were considered high-effort attributions. In Studies 1 and 2, negative, neutral, and positive affect were induced by asking subjects to describe either negative, neutral, or positive events, respectively. Subjects then made attributions for others' positive and negative behaviors. In Studies 1 and 2, subjects in the negative affect condition generated more correspondent dispositional attributions than subjects in the positive or neutral affect conditions for both positive and negative behaviors. These results were replicated in Study 3, in which subjects were assigned to affect condition (negative versus neutral) on the basis of their levels of chronic depression. Correlational analyses revealed that, across studies, increased negative affect in the negative affect conditions was associated with more low-effort attributional processing. Implications of the effort hypothesis for other areas of social cognition are discussed.