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LIT-1854: Positive affect as informational feedback in goal pursuit

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Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1450), from the open-access published article (CC BY-NC) in PubMed Central, PMC3045658, fetched as XML through the Europe PMC REST API. Two laboratory experiments (n = 76, 78) in which students promised to do something for someone close to them, then saw positive or neutral pictures. With competing goals made salient, positive affect slowed recognition of the goal word and weakened stated intentions; with none, it sped recognition and strengthened intentions. The affect was incidental, induced by pictures and not by progress, and goal activation in Experiment 1 rests on one reaction time per person. For the record, positive affect lowers a goal's priority only when another goal competes for it, and raises it otherwise.
Tagsmotivation, emotion-and-affect
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-468 — Valence intensity need not be the strength of the prevailing ordering's potential: in Hesp et al.'s model negative valence is a weakening of the preference ordering's precision with a fall back to habit, and positive affect is reported to lower a goal's priority, so for either sign stronger valence can go with a weaker hold of the ordering
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1450 — Orehek, Bessarabova, Chen & Kruglanski — Positive affect as feedback

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Edward Orehek, Elena Bessarabova, Xiaoyan Chen and Arie W. Kruglanski (2011), Motivation and Emotion 35(1):44–51 — DOI-10.1007/s11031-010-9197-2, PMC3045658

Key takeaways

  • Induced positive affect lowered a promised goal’s activation when competing goals were salient, and raised it when they were not, in two experiments with a significant crossover interaction each time.
  • Without positive affect, competing goals made no difference, so the authors read affect as information whose meaning, progress or commitment, depends on whether another goal needs resources.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-30 for CLAIM-468, whose positive half rests on the reported view that positive affect lowers a goal’s priority. This paper finds that the direction depends on competing goals.

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