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Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science pp 2242–2253Cite as

Dynamics and Evaluation: The Warm Glow of Processing Fluency

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A major goal of contemporary psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience is to understand the interactions ofcognition and emotion  – the mutualinfluences between thinking and feeling [11,41,101]. Sometimes such interactions are quite dramatic –as when emotions rob an individual of sound judgment (e. g., crimes of passions) or when emotions inspire an individual to transgressself‐interest (e. g., acts of compassion). But most cognition‐emotion interactions are more subtle. For example, seeinga well‐balanced piece of art or a symmetric design may invoke a sense of aesthetic pleasure. Simply recognizing a familiaracquaintance on a street may evoke a sense of warm glow. A difficult to hear cell phone conversation may evoke a subtle sense ofannoyance. And, in the first few days of being in a foreign country, people's faces just look “weird”. This contribution deals with thenature of cognition‐emotion interactions in these more subtle everyday evaluativeresponses...

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Abbreviations

Evaluative responses:

Reactions reflecting an implicit or explicit assessment of stimulus' goodness or badness. Such reactions can be captured with judgments (liking, preference, choice), behavior (approach, avoidance, desire to continue or terminate), and physiology (peripheral and central). Strong evaluative reactions can develop into full‐blown affective states, such as moods and emotion .

Fluency:

A general term used to describe efficiency of processing on perceptual and conceptual levels. Fluent processing is fast, error‐free, and easy – a quality reflected in several dynamical properties (see next). The level of processing fluency can be monitored and influence evaluative as well as cognitive processes.

Processing dynamics:

Processing dynamic refers to content non‐specific parameters characterizing a system's behavior at the level of individual units (e. g., neurons) or networks. Those dynamical parameters include (i) coherence of the signals within the system – the extent to which the signals arriving at a given unit from other units consistently dictate the same state, (ii) settling time – amount of time for the system to achieve a steady state, (iii) volatility – the number of units changing state, (iv) signal‐to‐noise ratio – overall strength of signals in the network, and (v) or differentiation – ratio of strongly activated to weakly activated units.

Mere‐exposure effect:

Empirical observation that simple repetition (mere‐exposure) of an initially neutral stimulus enhances people's liking for it. Because a typical result of simple repetition is enhancement of processing fluency (more efficient re‐processing), this classic empirical phenomenon inspired research into evaluative consequences of changes in processing dynamics, and led to investigation of other variables that change processing dynamics, such as priming, duration, clarity, contrast, prototypicality or symmetry.

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Books and Reviews

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, USA

    Piotr Winkielman & David E. Huber

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  1. Piotr Winkielman
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Winkielman, P., Huber, D.E. (2009). Dynamics and Evaluation: The Warm Glow of Processing Fluency. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_139

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