State boredom results in optimistic perception of risk and increased risk-taking.

While models considering the relationship between emotion and risk differ, many agree that emotions should affect risk in accordance with the adaptive function of the emotion. The function of boredom has been proposed to motivate the pursuit of an alternative experience. Based on this, we predicted that a state of boredom would result in an optimistic perception of risk and increased risk-taking.

When and why people misestimate future feelings: Identifying strengths and weaknesses in affective forecasting.

People try to make decisions that will improve their lives and make them happy, and to do so, they rely on affective forecasts-predictions about how future outcomes will make them feel. Decades of research suggest that people are poor at predicting how they will feel and that they commonly overestimate the impact that future events will have on their emotions. Recent work reveals considerable variability in forecasting accuracy.

Boredom as a seeking state: Boredom prompts the pursuit of novel (even negative) experiences.

Building on functional models of emotion, we propose that boredom creates a seeking state that prompts people to explore new experiences, even if those experiences are hedonically negative. Specifically, as emotional responses fade, boredom motivates the pursuit of alternative experiences that differ from the experience that resulted in boredom. Participants who reported a higher degree of boredom after a neutral task were more likely to choose negative experiences (Study 1).

Building a house of sentiment on sand: Epistemological issues with contempt.

Contempt shares its features with other emotions, indicating that there is no justification for creating "sentiment" as a new category of feelings. Scientific categories must be created or updated on the basis of evidence. Building a new category on the currently limited contempt literature would be akin to building a house on sand - likely to fall at any moment.

Distraction from emotional information reduces biased judgements.

Biases arising from emotional processes are some of the most robust behavioural effects in the social sciences. The goal of this investigation was to examine the extent to which the emotion regulation strategy of distraction could reduce biases in judgement known to result from emotional information. Study 1 explored lay views regarding whether distraction is an effective strategy to improve decision-making and revealed that participants did not endorse this strategy.

Method of induction could affect emotional outcomes: comment on markey, chin, vanepps, and loewenstein (2014 ).

Markey, Chin, Vanepps, and Loewenstein (2014) demonstrated six methods for the induction of boredom. However, a clear and testable definition of boredom should be established prior to experimental manipulation of the construct. Defining boredom from a functional emotion perspective is one approach that affords a definition separable from the outcomes associated with boredom and insight into which manipulations may effectively target the construct.

Motivated perception of probabilistic information.

Desirability bias is the tendency to judge that, all else being equal, positive outcomes are more likely to occur than negative outcomes. The provision of probabilistic information about the likelihood that events will occur is typically viewed as a way to influence judgments by grounding them in objective information. Yet probabilistic information may be perceived differently when people are motivated to arrive at a particular conclusion, enabling the desirability bias.

Strength of affective reaction as a signal to think carefully.

Analytic processes reduce biases, but it is not known how or when these processes will be deployed. Based on an affective signal hypothesis, relatively strong affective reactions were expected to result in increased analytic processing and reduced bias in judgement. The valence and strength of affective reactions were manipulated through varying outcomes in a game or evaluative conditioning of a stimulus.

On the function of boredom.

Boredom is frequently considered inconsequential and has received relatively little research attention. We argue that boredom has important implications for human functioning, based on emotion theory and empirical evidence. Specifically, we argue that boredom motivates pursuit of new goals when the previous goal is no longer beneficial.

An alternative approach to analysis of mental states in experimental social cognition research.

Establishing the mental states that affect human behavior is a primary goal of experiments on social cognitive processes. Such mental states can be manipulated only indirectly; therefore, after delivering a manipulation, researchers attempt to verify that the mental state of interest, the representation of a mental state, was in fact changed by the manipulation and that this change caused the observed effect. The usual procedure is to examine mean differences in a measure of the mental state of interest (a manipulation check) among experimental conditions and to infer whether the manipulation was effective.

Searching for evidence, not a war: reply to Lindquist, Siegel, Quigley, and Barrett (2013).

Lindquist, Siegel, Quigley, and Barrett (2013) critiqued our recent meta-analysis that reported the effects of discrete emotions on outcomes, including cognition, judgment, physiology, behavior, and experience (Lench, Flores, & Bench, 2011). Lindquist et al. offered 2 major criticisms-we address both and consider the nature of emotion and scientific debate.

Discrete emotions predict changes in cognition, judgment, experience, behavior, and physiology: a meta-analysis of experimental emotion elicitations.

Our purpose in the present meta-analysis was to examine the extent to which discrete emotions elicit changes in cognition, judgment, experience, behavior, and physiology; whether these changes are correlated as would be expected if emotions organize responses across these systems; and which factors moderate the magnitude of these effects. Studies (687; 4,946 effects, 49,473 participants) were included that elicited the discrete emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety as independent variables with adults. Consistent with discrete emotion theory, there were (a) moderate differences among discrete emotions; (b) differences among discrete negative emotions; and (c) correlated changes in behavior, experience, and physiology (cognition and judgment were mostly not correlated with other changes).