Do You have to Pay Attention to Your Feelings to be Influenced by Them?

Abstract

Two experiments investigated how individual differences in attention to emotion influence the role of affect in judgments of risk. In Experiment 1, mood influenced the judgments of individuals high, but not low, in attention to emotion. When an attribution manipulation made a cause of their feelings salient, individuals high in emotional attention no longer perceived their feelings as relevant and were not influenced by them; whereas those low in emotional attention now paid attention to them and were influenced by them. This manipulation had these effects when it was presented prior to, but not in the middle of, a series of judgments. In Experiment 2, differences in response to the attribution manipulation disappeared when participants' perceptions of the relevance of their feelings were governed by instructions to use either feelings or facts as a basis for judgment. The results suggest that feelings influence judgment when they seem relevant.