Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 127, Issue 1, April 2013, Pages 93-98
Cognition

Brief article
Happiness by association: Breadth of free association influences affective states

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.11.015Get rights and content

Abstract

Several studies have demonstrated that affective states influence the number of associations formed between remotely related concepts. Someone in a neutral or negative affective state might draw the association between cold and hot, whereas someone in a positive affective state might spontaneously form the more distant association between cold and sneeze. Could the reverse be true, that generating increasingly broad or narrow associations will put someone in a more or less positive affective state? We test this possibility by using verbal free association tasks, and asking whether the breadth of semantic associativity between cue words and generated responses might predict resulting affective states. Two experiments show that generating broader associations, regardless of their valence, changes affect; specifically, broader associations lowered negative affect and marginally increased positive affect over time. These findings carry implications for theories positing interactions between brain areas mediating associative processing and affect, and may hold promise for enhancing affect in clinical contexts.

Introduction

Our emotional states can wield a powerful influence over our mental processes. Several studies have demonstrated a relationship between affective state and the nature and scope of connections we draw between concepts in memory. Specifically, increases in positive affect lead to broad, associative processing, whereas decreases in positive affect lead to more constrained thought. For instance, inducing positive affect in laboratory settings promotes relational processing (Storbeck & Clore, 2005), creativity (Mednick, Mednick, & Jung, 1964), and the production of broadly related words in free association tasks (Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robinson, 1985). Conversely, inducing sadness leads to item-specific processing (Storbeck & Clore, 2005), and depressed individuals show restricted contextual processing and narrow ruminative thinking (Msetfi, Murphy, Simpson, & Kornbrot, 2005). Various evolutionary and functional perspectives have been proposed to account for such effects; it is generally thought that negative affect narrows the scope of mental processing in an attempt to evaluate potential threats, and positive affect broadens its scope and iteratively builds upon positive affective states (Baddeley, 1972, Fredrickson, 2004).

Bar (2009) proposed that the opposite relationship may also exist, namely that broad, progressive associative processing might encourage positive affect. Notably, this hypothesis highlights the overlapping brain networks implicated in both associative processing and affective experience (Shenhav, Barrett, & Bar, in press), and suggests that dysregulation in these networks might underlie some symptoms accompanying mood disorders like depression. For instance, the ability to draw associations between items (or between items and contexts) relies upon neural structures in the medial temporal lobes (MTL), including the hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex (Eichenbaum, 2000, Rolls, 1996). These associative MTL brain regions have been implicated in mood disorders such as depression; putative reductions in hippocampal grey-matter volume have been observed in major depression (e.g., Bremner et al., 2000), whereas successful antidepressant treatments have been shown to increase neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus (DG) of the hippocampus (Malberg, Eisch, Nestler, & Duman, 2000). Further, induced genetic DG neurogenesis in mouse models can improve contextual learning and promote anti-depressant-like behaviors (Sahay et al., 2011). However, the precise link between affect and associations remains unclear, and direct evidence for a bi-directional relationship remains largely unexplored.

Some indirect behavioral evidence supports the view that associative processing might influence affect; specifically, a narrowing of conceptual scope is related to increased negative affect. For instance, healthy individuals tasked to ruminate on restricted topics and events tend to develop negative affective states (Segerstrom, Tsao, Alden, & Craske, 2000), and the degree of rumination predicts the depressive symptoms accompanying several clinical disorders (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000). Though this work provides some indirect evidence for narrowed processing increasing negative affect, truly reciprocal relationships between affective states and associative processing would also predict affective enhancement as a result of promoting broad associative processing.

To examine this possibility, we conducted two experiments. In the first, participants completed a free association task and we measured the semantic breadth of their generated word relative to each cue. We predicted that participants who produced increasingly broad associations over the course of the experimental session would report higher levels of positive affect at the end of the session. We likewise predicted that participants who produced narrower associations would report a decrease in positive affect at the end of the session. Critically, we predicted that this relationship would not be accounted for by variation in baseline affective state or the valence of the generated words. The second experiment replicated these effects in a paradigm designed to experimentally promote either broad or narrow associations in response to cue words.

Section snippets

Method

Forty-eight Tufts University undergraduates (28 female; Mage = 20) participated for monetary compensation. In order to help equate baseline affective state across participants prior to beginning the free association task, participants first viewed one of two 5-min neutrally-valenced (as determined via pilot ratings; N = 12) films. Each participant then completed a brief practice phase, and then completed the experimental phase.

The practice phase presented five example trials, and the experimental

Experiment 2: Introduction

In this experiment, cue words were selected from the set used in Experiment 1 based on their tendency to elicit (a) a greater number of unique responses, and responses that were generally remotely associated with the cue word (i.e., broad), or (b) fewer unique responses, and responses that were generally closely related to the cue word (i.e., narrow). If generating broad associations supports positive affect, then participants should show increased positive affective states following the

Discussion

Decades of research have demonstrated a unidirectional link between induced positive affective states and increased processing breadth in tasks eliciting global/relational processing, creativity, and distal semantic associations (Gasper and Clore, 2002, Isen et al., 1985, Mednick et al., 1964, Storbeck and Clore, 2005). We tested the reverse prediction, namely that associative processing could influence affective state. Experiment 1 showed that individuals who tended to generate increasingly

Acknowledgements

We thank Moshe Bar for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript, and Eiran Vadim Harel for helpful comments regarding this research.

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    These authors contributed equally to this work.

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