Already Filtered: Affective Immersion and Personality Differences in Accessing Present and Past

Abstract

Schemas contribute to adaptation, filtering novelty though knowledge-expectancy structures, the residue of past contingencies and their consequences. Adaptation requires a balance between flexible, dynamic context-sensitivity and the cognitive efficiency that schemas afford in promoting persistent goal pursuit despite distraction. Affects can form and disrupt schemas. Transient affective experiences systematically alter selectivity of attentiveness to the directly experienced present environment, the internal environment, and to the stored experiences of memory. Enduring personal stylistic predispositions, like implicit motives and affective schemas, influence how experience is perceived, responded to, and integrated; they shape memory and influence present experiential patterns, individually and intersubjectively. Such systematic influences are potential sources of error in the study of memory if not mapped; so far, individual personality differences have just been a source of complication in the literature on emotion-congruent perception and memory. I synthesize what findings there are about how personality differences, emotions, and affects contribute to the structuring and integration of perceptions and memories both directly and by way of hot, affectively-anchored schemas. Case studies from experimental and personality psychology highlight a conception of personality and affective experience relevant to memory research and cognitive science.

Keywords:

• Personality
• Schemas
• Affects
• Emotion
• Affective Immersion
• Autobiographical Memory
• Emotion-Congruent Memory

Notes

Notes

[1] In creating a robot “Yuppy” with colleagues Brooks, Kemp, and Yoshida, Velasquez (1999) identified six different types of affect programs: anger, fear, distress/sorrow, joy/happiness, disgust and surprise, drawing on the work of Ekman and Panksepp. Following Izard, he considered noncognitive releasers of emotion (i.e., neural, sensorimotor, motivational) as well as cognitive. This allows for the coassembly of basic affects to produce other emotions, while cognition creates the higher order or secondary emotions.

[2] Forgas explicitly notes that he is using ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ interchangeably.

[3] Positive affects include interest-excitement, surprise-startle, and enjoyment-joy (Tomkins, 1962).

[4] Negative affects include fear-terror, distress-anguish, and anger-rage (as well as the affect auxiliary shame-humiliation, and the drive auxiliary contempt-disgust); see also the wonderful formulation in Izard (1991).

[5] As any dog owner knows, this privilege is not restricted to other humans.

[6] A wonderful example of such an account: “She usually didn’t balk at my attempts to become independent … It was expected, it was part of her plan. So, I began to be more independent. I was an obedient person and did what she expected” (Charles et al., 2001, p. 713).

[7] The mother's accounts were not actually contemporary to the daughter's separation at adolescence but were in fact reconstructive accounts of that process, as the authors acknowledge. The coherence of these accounts may have come after the separation phase of adolescence.

[8] Subjects were so classified if they were above a certain cutoff on one motive and below a certain cutoff on the other motive. For example, in Woike and Polo (2001), and all other studies cited in this article by Woike and colleagues, it was individuals in the top third of one motive and the lower half of the other motive (p. 398). So they are selecting as “agentics” people who are high on agency and low on communion. This dichotomizes the variables, a procedure that some have criticized at a statistical level, but it is quite commonly used in some personality and cognitive scientific research.