CIEL

From the beginning of my sophomore year until I graduated from Santa Clara University I participated in Dr. Koopmann-Holm‘s Culture Impacts Emotion Lab (CIEL) researching how goal-oriented affective states influence effectiveness of donation requests.

Goal-Oriented Affective States

What do we mean by goal-oriented affective states?

“Affective state” is really just means “emotion,” so goal-oriented affective states are emotions that we either want to feel or want to avoid. Early research in this area focused on ideal affect (emotions people ideally want to feel) and how they are different to actual affective states (Tsai et al, 2006).

On the other hand, the research done in Dr. Koopmann’s lab centers around avoided affective states, specifically Avoided Negative Affect (ANA): the degree to which people want to avoid feeling negative emotions (Koopmann-Holm, 2014).

ANA and Donation Requests

After joining the lab in 2018, I started working on a series of studies examining the relationship between ANA and the effectiveness of positive and negative donation requests.

We measured participants' ANA using the Global Affect Valuation Index (AVI) (Koopmann-Holm, 2014), a modified version of the original AVI (Tsai & Knutson, 2001). Participants were asked how often over the course of the past week they typically actually felt, wanted to feel, and wanted to avoid feeling a variety of different emotional states.

Study 1

In our first study we examined the relationship between ANA and which donation requests participants would choose. Our two hypotheses were competing, meaning we could envision the relation existing in two different directions based on previous research.

Hypotheses

  1. Higher ANA would predict more positive choices. Past research found that people with higher ANA process others’ suffering less (Koopmann-Holm et al., 2020) so participants with higher ANA may be less impacted by the negative requests.

  2. Higher ANA would predict more negative choices. Past research found that people with higher ANA perceived others’ suffering as more negative (compared to people with lower ANA) so participants may donate to the negative requests to alleviate the greater perceived suffering.

In Study 1 our findings supported our second hypothesis, where participants with higher ANA were more likely to choose to donate to the negative donation requests.

Study 2

The purpose of this study was to examine a potential mechanism for why higher ANA might be associated with choosing to donate to more requests that focus on the suffering.

Hypotheses

  1. Participants with higher ANA would rate the negative donation requests as more negative compared to participants with lower ANA.

  2. Higher ANA would be associated with choosing to donate to more negative donation requests (replication of Study 1).

In Study 2 we had the following findings:

  • Consistent with our first hypothesis, we found that the more people wanted to avoid feeling negative, the more negatively (versus positively) they rated the negative donation requests.

  • We did not find evidence to support our second hypothesis and replicate Study 1. However, we theorized this might be because the inclusion of negativity ratings made participants aware of their affective response to the request.

Study 3

Due to the inconsistent findings between Studies 1 and 2 we wanted to further examine what might be going on between ANA and donation request effectiveness. Instead of asking them how positively (negatively) they felt when looking at the different donation requests using two separate items (as we did in Study 2), in Study 3 we asked participants how positive / negative the donation request is to them on a single scale ranging from positive to negative. This means we focused on the negativity / positivity contained in the requests rather than how much negativity / positivity the requests elicited in the participants.

Hypotheses

  1. The more positively participants rate any type of request, the more likely they are to choose that type of request.

  2. The more people wanted to avoid feeling negative (higher ANA), the more negative requests they would choose (replication of Study 1).

We found the following in Study 3:

  • In line with our first hypothesis, the negativity/positivity rating of the negative requests predicted the total of negative requests chosen.

  • Supporting our second hypothesis and replicating Study 1, the more people wanted to avoid feeling negative, the more negative donation requests they chose.

Dr. Koopmann-Holm and I are currently working on a written manuscript of the studies for publication.