Journal of personality and social psychology
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Emotion concepts and emotional states in social judgment and categorization.
An objection to conclusions of research investigating effects of emotions on cognitive processes is that the effects are due to the activation of semantic concepts rather than to emotional feelings. A sentence unscrambling task was developed to prime concepts of happiness, sadness, or neutral ideas. Pilot studies demonstrated that unscrambling emotional sentences did not affect emotional state but did prime semantically related words. ⋯ Results of Experiment 2 showed that individuals in emotional states categorized according to emotional equivalence more often than participants in a neutral state. Sentence unscrambling had no effect on emotional response categorization. The influences of emotions and emotion knowledge in cognition and emotion are discussed.