Affective processing in overwhelmed individuals: Strategic and task considerations

Abstract

Previous research suggests that emotionally overwhelmed individuals (high affect intensity, intermediate attention to emotions, low clarity of emotions) attempt to counteract the influence of affective information. In five studies (ns=129, 177, 119, 339, 261), the current research found that task performance in overwhelmed individuals varied by current arousal and by whether affective influence occurred on evaluative versus non-evaluative tasks. Overwhelmed high current arousal participants exhibited decreased affective influence on evaluative tasks but increased affective influence on non-evaluative tasks. These results are consistent with the effects of active suppression of affective information, including ironic effects of monitoring for affective information. In contrast, overwhelmed low current arousal participants exhibited increased affective influence on evaluative tasks but decreased affective influence on non-evaluative tasks. These results are consistent with attentional avoidance of affective information. Overall, these results further suggest that overwhelmed individuals attempt to counteract the influence of affective information. Whether they are successful depends on their current arousal and how affect can influence performance.

Keywords:

• Emotionally overwhelmed
• Affective processing
• Attentional avoidance
• Suppression
• Affective priming

Acknowledgements

Work on this article was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grants MH012166 and MH072706, National Institute on Drug Abuse Grant DA022405, and a MU Research Board Grant.

Notes

¹In previous research, Gohm (2003) has also identified three other groups in addition to overwhelmed: (a) hot: high clarity, high attention, high intensity; (b) cerebral: high clarity, low attention, low intensity; and (c) cool: low clarity, low attention, low intensity. Therefore, an alternative data analysis strategy would be to present results separately for these three other groups. However, with one exception (performance on the affective Stroop task in Study 5), these three groups did not differ in their affective task performance, all other ps>.35. Therefore, given that our focus was on overwhelmed individuals and given the paucity of differences between the other three groups, we present results comparing overwhelmed individuals with non-overwhelmed individuals.

²Across all five studies it was not the case that overwhelmed and non-overwhelmed groups necessarily differed in mean arousal levels. Among high-arousal participants, the OHigh group had higher mean arousal than the NHigh group in Studies 1 and 4, lower mean arousal than the NHigh group in Study 2, and the two groups did not differ in mean arousal in Studies 3 and 5. Among low-arousal participants, mean arousal levels were comparable in all studies except for Study 1, in which the NLow group had lower mean arousal than the OLow group.

³One difference between overwhelmed participants and non-overwhelmed participants is in levels of neuroticism (with higher neuroticism for the overwhelmed group in all five of the current studies). However, within the overwhelmed group, it does not appear that neuroticism can account for the association between current arousal and affective task performance. In only one study, Study 1, was neuroticism significantly associated with current arousal within the overwhelmed group (r = .26, all other ps>.30). In addition, in no study was neuroticism within the overwhelmed group associated with affective influence on task performance. We also divided participants in each study into high- and low-neuroticism groups based on a median split; in no study was arousal associated with task performance in individuals in the high-neuroticism group (rs<.13). Therefore, although overwhelmed individuals have elevated neuroticism, it is does not appear that the current results can be accounted for by neuroticism.

⁴Note that, given our predictions, we did not expect the main effect of group to be significant since non-overwhelmed participants' scores were expected to be intermediate between the OLow and OHigh groups. In addition, given that we expected that arousal would only be associated with affect influence scores in the overwhelmed group, we expected that because of this association in the overwhelmed group there might be an overall trend for arousal to be associated with affect influence scores.