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The death of Jon Snow at the end of the fifth season of the TV serial Game of Thrones prompted an intense reaction among the fans of the serial on social media. Thousands of viewers all over the world contributed to the discussion of the meaning and implications of this event, turning it into a global event in the participatory culture of contemporary seriality. In this article, we propose an explanation of this remarkable cultural phenomenon. Based on a theory of plot twists as surprise structures, we argue that the reactions of fans can be understood as concrete, contextually adapted realizations of the characteristic cognitive reactions evoked by the emotions of surprise and shock caused by unexpected negative events. Our analysis focuses in particular on the contributions of viewers to the establishment of the beliefs disconfirmed by the plot twist and on the cognitive activities that served to adapt their minds to the new reality revealed by the twist, which also included reflections on the aesthetic aspects of the plot twist and the narrative in which it was embedded. By providing a public platform for these reflections, the fan forums allowed the individual attempts to adapt to the plot twist to become a collective endeavor. The study illustrates how universal cognitive mechanisms interact with culturally produced contents to generate similar reactions to a fictional event across the globe.

Three main versions of cognition-arousal theory are distinguished depending on how they interpret the theory’s basic postulate, that an emotion is a function of cognition and arousal: objectivist causal theories, attributional theories, and fusion theories. The objectivist causal and attributional theories each comprise a causal-functional and a part-whole version, and the fusion theory subsumes in particular a categorization and a perceptual integration version. In addition, the attributional version of cognition-arousal theory can be reinterpreted as a theory of emotion self-ascription. Although arousal may in fact not be necessary for emotions, a modified cognition-feeling theory that replaces arousal with intrinsically affective feelings, seems still viable. Arguments are presented why the objectivist causal-functional version of this theory should be preferred.

In four experiments involving 565 German speakers we tested several hypotheses about possible determinants of the side-effect effect (see), which consists of judging foreseen bad, but not good, side-effects of actions as intentionally produced. Experiment 1 failed to find intentionality ascriptions for bad side-effects for the majority of the participants in two different scenarios and obtained no consistent support for two hypothesized social-cognitive determinants of the see, the agent’s attitude and the mode of effect description. Experiment 2 replicated the see in the original ceo scenario, but again found no evidence that the effect was influenced by the agent’s attitude towards the side-effect. The see was also not influenced by a manipulation of the moral quality of the agent’s primary goal. Experiment 3 investigated six additional scenarios used in previous studies and again obtained clear evidence for the see only in the ceo scenario. In addition, Experiment 3 demonstrated that judgments of both intent and intentionality strongly increased if the original side-effect was described as a means to the agent’s primary goal, or as an independently pursued goal. Taken together, the findings suggest that for German speakers, the see depends on the specifics of the scenario content and is difficult to obtain outside the original ceo scenario. Consistent with these conclusions, Experiment 4 documented parallel difficulties replicating the “means effect”, an analogue of the see on the level of means, but replicated the see in a scenario closely modeled after the original ceo scenario.

Although Pilati et al.'s (2014) findings question the strong quantitative universality of the attribution-affect model of helping, they are consistent with a weak form of quantitative universality, as well as with the qualitative universality of the theory. However, universality is put into question by previous studies revealing significant and sizeable between-study differences in the strength of the causal paths postulated by the theory. These differences may in part reflect differences in the type of helping situations studied.

Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. According to the affect program theory of facial displays, the evolutionary core of the human emotion system consists of a small set of discrete emotion mechanisms that comprise motor programs for emotion-specific facial displays. However, research on surprise has found that surprising events often fail to elicit the associated facial expression (widened eyes, raised eyebrows, mouth opening). The present study tested a refined Darwinian account of the facial expression of surprise, according to which surprising events cause widened eyes and raised eyebrows if they exceed the field of vision, as these facial changes increase the visual field and facilitate visual search. To test this hypothesis, we staged a surprising event that engulfed the field of vision: When the participants left the laboratory, they unexpectedly found themselves in a new room, a small chamber with bold green walls and a red office chair. In addition, to explore the role of social context for the expression of surprise, in two of three experimental conditions, a stranger or a friend they had brought to the experiment was sitting on the chair. The results provided no support for the Darwinian account of the facial expression of surprise. A complete expression of surprise was observed in 5% of the participants, and the individual components of the expression were shown only by a minority, regardless of social context. These findings reinforce doubts about the adequacy of affect program theory for the case of surprise.

Describes the outlines of a computational explication of the belief-desire theory of emotion, a variant of cognitive emotion theory. According to the proposed explication, a core subset of emotions including surprise are nonconceptual products of hardwired mechanisms whose primary function is to subserve the monitoring and updating of the central representational system of humans, the belief-desire system. The posited emotion-producing mechanisms are analogous to sensory transducers; however, instead of sensing the world, they sense the state of the belief-desire system and signal important changes in this system, in particular the fulfillment and frustration of desires and the confirmation and disconfirmation of beliefs. Because emotions represent this information about the state of the representational system in a nonconceptual format, emotions are nonconceptual metarepresentations. It is argued that this theory of emotions provides for a deepened understanding of the role of emotions in cognitive systems and solves several problems of psychological emotion theory.

This special issue of Social Psychology commemorates the 50th anniversary of Fritz Heider’s 1958 book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. The contributions to the special issue address the history and current state of attribution research, or illustrate contemporary research in the field. The historical articles document that Heider’s analysis of causal attribution and of common-sense psychology was significantly influenced by his academic teachers Alexius Meinong and Ernst Cassirer. We distinguish between the mainstream reception of Heider’s book, which has given rise to an extensive empirical research program, and a minority reception by authors who emphasized aspects of Heider’s thinking not well represented in mainstream psychology. Currently, there are indications of a “back to Heider” movement in social psychology. This new phase of attribution research is inspired by a fresh reading of Heider’s book, and is marked by an interdisciplinary orientation. The articles illustrating current attribution research address both classic and novel topics: the causality implicit in language, the role of causal attribution in hindsight bias, the justification of actions, and the attribution of mistakes in organizational contexts.

Three studies examined the effects of experimentally manipulated surprise expressions on the experience of surprise. Surprise was induced by a sudden, unannounced change of the stimulus presentation during a computerized task. Facial expression was manipulated by leading participants to adopt an expression akin to surprise, or by forcing them to look up steeply to a monitor. The expression manipulations had no intensifying effect on the experience of surprise, whereas manipulations of unexpectedness and mental load had strong effects. In addition, mental load was found to affect beliefs about facial expression, suggesting that the participants used their feelings of surprise to infer their probable facial displays. Path analyses supported this reverse self-inference hypothesis.

Eight experiments examined facial expressions of surprise in adults. Surprise was induced by disconfirming a previously established schema or expectancy. Self-reports and behavioral measures indicated the presence of surprise in most participants, but surprise expressions were observed only in 4%-25%, and most displays consisted of eyebrow raising only; the full, 3-component display was never seen. Experimental variations of surprise intensity, sociality, and duration/complexity of the surprising event did not change these results. Electromyographic measurement failed to detect notably more brow raisings and, in one study, revealed a decrease of frontalis muscle activity in the majority of the participants. Nonetheless, most participants believed that they had shown a strong surprise expression.

A world-wide internet survey was conducted to test central assumptions of a recent theory of cultural transmission in minorities proposed by the authors. 844 1st to 2nd generation immigrants from a wide variety of countries recruited on a microjob platform completed a questionnaire designed to test eight hypotheses derived from the theory. Support was obtained for all hypotheses. In particular, evidence was obtained for the continued presence, in the immigrants, of the culture-transmission motive postulated by the theory: the desire to maintain the culture of origin and transmit it to the next generation. Support was also obtained for the hypothesized anchoring of the culture-transmission motive in more basic motives fulfilled by cultural groups, the relative intra- and intergenerational stability of the culture-transmission motive, and its motivating effects for action tendencies and desires that support cultural transmission under the difficult conditions of migration. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the assumption that people have a culture-transmission motive belongs to the folk psychology of sociocultural groups, and that immigrants regard the fulfillment of this desire as a moral right.

At the center of the social emotions are reactions to the positive and negative fate of others and to the perceived fulfillment and violation of social and moral norms. Using pity and guilt as representatives of these two groups of social emotions, I investigate their generation, nature and function from the perspective of CBDTE, a (sketch of a) Computational model of the Belief-Desire Theory emotion. The central assumption of CBDTE is that a core subset of human emotions are the products of hardwired mechanisms whose primary function is to subserve the monitoring and updating of the belief-desire system. The emotion mechanisms work like sensory transducers; however, instead of sensing the world, they monitor the belief-desire system and signal important changes in this system, in particular the fulfillment and frustration of desires and the confirmation and disconfirmation of beliefs. Social emotions are accommodated into CBDTE by assuming that the proximate beliefs and desires that cause them are derived from special kinds of desire. Specifically, pity is a form of displeasure that is experienced if an altruistic desire is frustrated by the negative fate of another person; whereas guilt is a form of displeasure that is experienced if a nonegoistic desire to comply with a norm is frustrated by an own action. The intra-system function of these emotions is to signal the frustration of altruistic desires (pity) and of nonegoistic desires to comply with a norm (guilt) to other cognitive subsystems, to globally prepare and motivate the agent to deal with them. The communication of social emotions serves to reveal the person’s social (nonegoistic) desires to others: Her altruistic concern for others, and her nonegoistic caring for the observance of social norms.

A new experimental paradigm involving a computerised quiz was used to examine, on an intra-individual level, the strength of association between four components of the surprise syndrome: cognitive (degree of prospectively estimated unexpectedness), experiential (the feeling of surprise), behavioural (degree of response delay on a parallel task), and expressive (the facial expression of surprise). It is argued that this paradigm, together with associated methods of data analysis, effectively controls for most method factors that could in previous studies have lowered the correlations among the components of emotion syndromes. It was found that (a) the components of the surprise syndrome were all positively correlated; (b) strong association existed only between the cognitive and the experiential component of surprise; (c) the coherence between syndrome components did not increase with increasing intensity of surprise; and (d) there was also only moderate coherence between the components of the facial expression of surprise (eyebrow raising, eye widening, mouth opening), although in this case, coherence tended to increase with intensity. Taken together, the findings support only a weakly probabilistic version of a behavioural syndrome view of surprise. However, the component correlations seem strong enough to support the existence of strong associations among a subset of the mental or central neurophysiological processes engaged in surprise.

Three studies investigated age-related differences in the surprise reaction. Study 1 revealed that children and seniors showed a more pronounced action delay in response to a simple, hedonically neutral surprising event than young adults that could not be attributed to a general slowing of information processing. Studies 2 and 3 provided evidence that these age-related differences in action delay between children and young adults were due to children’s greater difficulties to ”nd an explanation for the occurrence of the surprising event and to decide on its relevance for action. These results support the idea that the core mechanism of surprise is evolutionary-based and age-invariant, but its eliciting conditions and consequences depend on developmental changes of knowledge structures.

Based on an earlier model of the processes elicited by surprising events, the present studies provide evidence for one of these processes, the evaluation of the surprising event's relevance for ongoing activities (action-relevance check). The central prediction tested was that, if unexpected events elicit among other processes an action-relevance check, then response delay on a concurrent task will be more pronounced in a condition where this process is more elaborate and hence takes more time. In accord with this prediction, Experiment 1 found that an unexpected appearance change of the imperative stimulus in a choice reaction time (RT) task caused greater response delay than an equivalent appearance change of a distractor stimulus. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and tested several additional predictions that concerned the effects on response delay of a second appearance change of either the imperative or the distractor stimuli. These predictions, which were also mostly confirmed, were derived by combining the logic underlying the first study with the assumption that once made, appraisals of unexpected events are stored as part of the situational schema and are reused when the same or similar events reoccur leading to an abbreviation of appraisal processes. Experiment 3 once more replicated the basic finding of the previous studies and ruled out a possible alternative explanation. It is suggested that the proposed RT method of process verification may be of broader interest as a tool to study appraisal processes in emotion.

This chapter proposes an integration of family research and the sociology of migration using a theory of cultural transmission in minorities recently developed by the authors. A central assumption of this theory is that sociocultural groups have a culture-transmission motive-the desire to preserve their culture and transmit it to the next generation-that is typically activated in migration situations, and then motivates activities designed to counter the perceived threat to cultural transmission. To show how this theory can help to understand social phenomena at the intersection of family research and the sociology of migration, we summarize five key findings of research on the role of the culture of origin in immigrant families and describe how they can be explained the theory: (1) cultural transmission in immigrant families typically succeeds as well as in non-immigrant families; (2) even second and third-generation immigrants typically have a strong identification with their culture of origin, which (3) manifests itself, apart from self-identification, primarily in the preservation of the language of origin, the importance placed on religious education, and intra-ethnic marriage preferences; (4) of crucial importance for the maintenance of ethnic identity in migrants is ethnic socialization in the family; and (5) abandonment of the native culture and assimilation to the majority society are neither necessary for, nor typical of, successful integration. We argue that these findings can be consistently explained by the theory of cultural transmission in minorities.

Central assumptions of a theory of cultural transmission in minorities proposed by the authors were tested in an online survey of adolescents and young adults with Russian and Turkish immigrant background in Germany (N=55). The results support most hypotheses. In particular, evidence was obtained for the existence of the culture-transmission motive postulated by the theory: the appreciation of the culture of origin and the desire to maintain it and pass it on to the next generation. In addition, evidence was obtained for the anchoring of the culture-transmission motive in more basic motives, its relative stability, and its motivating function for pedagogical activities and wishes regarding cultural transmission, including the wish for culture-specific education in public schools.

Evidence on the coherence between emotion and facial expression in adults from laboratory experiments is reviewed. High coherence has been found in several studies between amusement and smiling; low to moderate coherence between other positive emotions and smiling. The available evidence for surprise and disgust suggests that these emotions are accompanied by their “traditional” facial expressions, and even components of these expressions, only in a minority of cases. Evidence concerning sadness, anger, and fear is very limited. For sadness, one study suggests that high emotion–expression coherence may exist in specific situations, whereas for anger and fear, the evidence points to low coherence. Insufficient emotion intensity and inhibition of facial expressions seem unable to account for the observed dissociations between emotion and facial expression.

It is argued that P. Ellsworth's (1994) interpretation of William James's theory of emotions is not supported by his writings. On the basis of textual evidence and systematic considerations, the authors try to show that, in line with the traditional view, James's theory holds that emotions are identical with feelings of bodily changes, of which autonomic changes are by far the most important ones (i.e., the only ones necessary and sufficient for emotions). Furthermore, the authors argue that James's question of the temporal priority of emotions versus bodily feelings makes good sense even if one acknowledges that these events usually show temporal overlap.

Two studies examining dimensions of cognitive appraisals in emotion are reported. In study 1, a simplified version of the repertory grid technique was used to empirically determine dimensions of appraisal perceived as salient by individuals. Subjects were presented with a subset of the possible pairings of appraisal-characterized situation descriptions for each of 23 common emotions, and were asked to indicate attributes on which the compared situations differed. Evidence for at least 10 potential dimensions of cognitive appraisal was obtained, with those related to valence, causality/agency, social relationship aspects, and temporal aspects being mentioned most frequently. Although all dimensions were at least roughly comparable to appraisal dimensions postulated by previous investigators, some of them have only been given marginal attention so far, and several proposed dimensions could not be recovered. Study 2 was performed to validate and further clarify the appraisal dimensions suggested by the first investigation, using a grid with columns prelabeled by items designed to assess these dimensions. Most of the dimensions could be validated; together, they permitted the correct statistical classification of 64% of the individual emotion ratings. The results attest to the usefulness of the repertory grid technique in investigations of dimensions of emotional appraisal. The article concludes with a number of suggestions for further research using this method.

Ratings of affect words are the most commonly used method to assess pleasant affect (PA) and unpleasant affect (UA). The reliance on self-reports would be problematic if affect ratings were heavily influenced by response styles. Several recent publications have indeed suggested (a) that the influence of response styles on affect ratings is pervasive, (b) that this influence can be controlled by variations of the response format using multitrait-multimethod models, and (c) the discriminant validity of PA and UA is spurious. In this article, we examined the evidence for these claims. We demonstrate that (a) response styles have a negligible effect on affect ratings, (b) multiple response formats produce the same results as a single response format, and (c) the discriminant validity of PA and UA is not a method artifact. Rather, evidence against discriminant validity is due to the use of inappropriate response formats that respondents interpreted as bipolar scales.

Schwarz and Clore (1983) proposed that the effects of mood on evaluative judgements are due to people's use of a “feeling heuristic”. Results of the present study suggest that this heuristic is particularly likely to be used under conditions of reduced processing capacity, induced by time pressure and competing task demands, as both factors intensified the effects of mood on evaluative judgements. In addition, previous findings that increasing the salience of a judgement-irrelevant cause disrupts the effects of mood on evaluative judgements were replicated. All of these effects were, however, obtained only when mood was salient to the participants, suggesting that to be effective, mood must exceed a threshold of salience. Taken together, the findings further support the hypothesis that at least in some situations, the effects of moods on evaluative judgements are based on a controlled inference strategy, rather than on automatic priming effects.

We report five studies which compared two theories linking surprise to causal attribution. According to the attributional model, surprise is frequently caused by luck attributions, whereas according to the expectancydisconfirmation model, surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation and stimulates causal thinking. Studies 1 to 3 focused on the question of whether surprise is caused by luck attributions or by unexpectedness. In Studies 1 and 2, subjects had to recall success or failure experiences characterised by a particular attribution (Study 1) or by low versus high surprisingness (Study 2), whereas in Study 3, unexpectedness and luck versus skill attributions were independently manipulated within a realistic setting. The main dependent variables were unexpectedness (Studies 1 and 2), degree of surprise (Studies 1 and 3), and causal attributions (Study 2). The results strongly suggest that surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation, whereas luck attributions are neither sufficient nor necessary for surprise. Studies 4 and 5 addressed the question of whether surprise stimulates attributional thinking, again using a remembered-incidents technique. The findings of the previous studies were replicated, and it was confirmed that surprising outcomes elicit more attributional search than unsurprising ones. Additional results from Study 5 suggest that causal thinking is also stimulated by outcomes that are both negative and important.

Cognitive emotion theorists assume that the quality of emotions is determined by the appraisal of the eliciting states of affairs. Accordingly, a central criterion for the evaluation of structural models of cognitive appraisal is their capacity to discriminate between emotions on the basis of the proposed appraisal dimensions. It is suggested that a good model should approximate subjects' “natural” ability to distinguish emotions on the basis of appraisal-relevant situational information. Corresponding data for 23 common emotions, which can serve as a baseline for the evaluation of cognitive appraisal theories, are reported, and various factors that may have deflated the discrimination rates obtained so far in empirical studies are discussed.

In this study. Weiner's (1980a. I980b) altributional model of helping behavior, which holds that the effect of causal attributions of another's need on helping is mediated by the affective reactions of sympathy and anger, was analyzed via latent-variable structural modeling techniques. Weiner's model was initially tested in the context of a hypothetical subway emergency situation, and several controversial aspects of the model were clarified through a series of hierarchical model comparisons. The refined model resulting from these analyses was subsequently cross-validated with data from a different helping situation, which involved a student's request to borrow class notes. The findings are interpreted as being supportive of the attributional model of helping behavior proposed by Weiner and. more generally, as documenting the range of convenience of an attributional approach to social motivation. In addition, they attest to the potential power of latent-variab le structural modeling as applied to experimental data.

Four main views of emotion intensity and quality within the pleasure-arousal theory of emotions are described, and it is argued that only 1 of them is conceptually and empirically tenable. This view assumes that the quality of emotions, or at least the quality of their "affective core," is determined by the proportion of, and their intensity by the absolute degrees of, experienced pleasure of displeasure (P) and activation or deactivation (A). Results from 2 unidimensional scaling studies, in which a total of 69 affects were rated for the degree of P and A experienced at low, typical, and high intensities, were by and large in accord with this position. To overcome a remaining problem of the theory, namely, that it does not allow one to distinguish among more than a few basic groups of emotions, a "hybrid" cognitive-P-A theory of emotion is proposed, according to which emotions are appraisal-caused patterns of P and A.