Awe and Memory for Narrative Detail 1 Going Off Script: Effects of Awe on Memory for Script-Typical and –Irrelevant Narrative Detail Alexander F. Danvers & Michelle N. Shiota Arizona State University Date of Revision Submission: December 28, 2016 Corresponding Author: Michelle N. Shiota Department of Psychology Arizona State University P.O. Box 871104 Tempe, AZ 85287-1104 Tel: (480) 727-8628 Fax: (480) 965-8544 Email: [email protected] Awe and Memory for Narrative Detail 2 Abstract People often filter their experience of new events through knowledge they already have, e.g., encoding new events by relying on prototypical event “scripts” at the expense of actual details. Previous research suggests that positive affect often increases this tendency. Three studies assessed whether awe—an emotion elicited by perceived vastness, and thought to promote cognitive accommodation—has the opposite effect, reducing rather than increasing reliance on event scripts. True/false questions on details of a short story about a romantic dinner were used to determine whether awe (1) reduces the tendency to impute script-consistent but false details into memory, and/or (2) promotes memory of unexpected details. Across studies we consistently found support for the first effect; evidence for the second was less consistent. Effects were partially mediated by subjective awe, and independent of other aspects of subjective affect. Results suggest that awe reduces reliance on internal knowledge in processing new events. Keywords: Awe, Positive Emotion, Cognition, Memory Awe and Memory for Narrative Detail 3 There are moments in life where one is struck anew by the vastness, beauty, and complexity of the surrounding world. Standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, or sitting on the roof of a friend’s house looking up at the stars, one seems to shed the perspective and expectations bounded by mundane, day-to-day experience. At these times, people may feel that they see the world in a new light, considering deeper questions and opening their minds to what the universe has to offer. But do moments of awe change the way people process information at a concrete level? The three studies presented here build on previous research on the effects of awe on cognitive processing, asking whether awe helps suppress people’s tendency to see what they expect to see, and whether awe facilitates taking in new information from the environment. Positive Affect and Cognitive Processing A rich research tradition demonstrates that emotions influence perception, interpretation, and memory of information from one’s surroundings, sometimes in subtle ways. While much of this research has emphasized implications of emotional stress or distress for cognitive processing, many studies have focused on characterizing differences between positive- and negative-valence affect. Much research has suggested that positive and negative mood states each tend to facilitate a particular processing style: global, heuristic-driven, and top-down processing for positive mood versus local, systematic, detail-oriented, and bottom-up processing for negative mood (Schwarz & Bless, 1991; Schwarz & Clore, 2007; Storbeck & Clore, 2005). In a happy mood people attend more strongly to global than to local aspects of complex figures (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005) and, in a “rose-colored glasses effect,” find consumer products more appealing (Pham 2007). Positive affect has also been found to increase individuals’ reliance on stereotypes (e.g., Bodenhausen, Kramer, & Susser, 1994; Huntsinger, Sinclair, & Clore, 2009), judgment heuristics (Ruder & Bless, 2003), and number rather than quality of Awe and Memory for Narrative Detail 4 persuasive arguments (Bless, Mackie, & Schwarz, 1992; Mackie & Worth, 1989) in processing information about new people or making decisions. Although these cognitive shortcuts are efficient and adaptive in certain situations, helping people to get the gist of new information quickly, they tend to impair accurate encoding of detail. For example, studies have found that people in a positive mood are more likely to rely on event scripts in encoding details of a novel story about a commonplace kind of event (Bless, Schwarz, Clore, Golisano, & Rabe, 1996). In studies documenting this effect, participants complete an experimental mood manipulation, then listen to a lengthy story about a kind of event for which people in the mainstream United States are expected to have a rich mental prototype, such as a couple going out to a romantic dinner. When later completing true/false questions about whether certain details were present in the story, participants in a positive mood show a heightened tendency toward contamination of their memory by the event script—they identify as true details that you might expect in a romantic dinner, but that were not in fact present in the story (Bless et al., 1996). Research documenting these effects typically uses cognitive tasks whose content is unrelated to the preceding affect induction. For example, Bless and colleagues (1996) induced positive mood by asking participants to write about a happy time in their lives, or to watch clips from the films Dead Poets Society or Flashdance—affective stimuli unrelated to the “romantic dinner” story or to the subsequent memory task. This enhances the internal validity of such studies, controlling cognitive task details and reducing the likelihood that cognitive effects are driven solely by properties of the affect-changing stimulus, as distinct from the affect evoked by that stimulus. This approach also has important implications for theory, demonstrating “carryover effects” – activation of cognitive processing styles that are maintained beyond Awe and Memory for Narrative Detail 5 exposure to emotion-eliciting or mood-changing stimuli. In this way, researchers can document cognitive effects of short-lived emotions that can linger beyond the emotions themselves, as well as effects of moods that are thought to be inherently longer-lasting and less stimulus bound (for more on the distinction between emotion and mood, see Beedie, Terry, & Lane, 2005). Taken together, the research reviewed above suggests that positive moods commonly encourage activation of and reliance on internal knowledge structures (heuristics, cognitive schemas and scripts) relevant to one’s current situation, at the expense of close attention to details of the actual situation (Fiedler, 2001). Various theories have been proposed regarding the mechanisms and boundary conditions of this effect. According to affect-as-information (AAI) theory, for example, affect valence is used to guide the investment of effort in information processing (Clore, 1992; Schwarz & Clore, 2007). Positive mood signals that the environment is safe and predictable, so it is okay to rely on heuristics and internalized knowledge, whereas negative mood signals a problem requiring more careful attention and systematic processing. The affect as cognitive feedback (ACF) model, an updating of AAI theory, holds that instead of preferentially activating a particular processing style, affect valence acts as a meta- cognitive signal in which positive affect increases confidence and promotes continued use of one’s current or default style, whereas negative affect prompts a switch to a different style (Bless, 2001; Huntsinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2012; Huntsinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2014; Isbell, Lair, & Rovenpor, 2013). For example, in contrast to theorizing that positive affect always increases global attentional focus (Isbell, 2004; Isbell, Burns, & Haar, 2005), positive mood has been found to increase local focus in subsequent tasks, provided that local focus was primed prior to mood manipulation (Huntsinger, Clore, & Bar-Anan, 2010). The typical effects of positive mood highlighted by AAI theory are presumably observed because, in the absence of a reason to Awe and Memory for Narrative Detail 6 expend effort on systematic, bottom-up information processing, reliance on heuristics and stored, internal knowledge is the default cognitive style (Schwarz, 2001). Hedonic contingency theory (Wegener & Petty, 1994) offers a different account of the findings above. According to this model, the core impact of positive affect is to increase motivation to maintain one’s pleasant mood. While this decreases one’s motivation to carefully, systematically process content that is unpleasant, serious, or counter-attitudinal (common among studies examining mood effects on processing of persuasive messages), it may increase systematic attention to inherently pleasant stimuli. This moderating effect was supported by multiple studies (Wegener, Petty, & Smith, 1995). While differing in regard to the theorized mechanism of affect valence effects, the AAI, ACF, and hedonic contingency models have a few things in common. First, they assume that the effects of positive affect/mood are consistent – they do not postulate or test differences among varieties of positive emotion. Assuming that the default cognitive style and information- processing task are held constant, therefore, different positive-valence emotions should show similar effects. Second, all three theories assume that changing one’s default information processing style is effortful, and thus requires some form of motivation. Third, in each theory, motivation to change one’s processing style is altered by the subjective experience of positive affect, which either warns that the current style may be problematic (AAI and ACF), or sensitizes the individual