Social Brain and Behaviour Club seminar: Appraising the affective turn: Three illustrations of affective creep in psychology

Psychologists would presumably agree that emotion and affect have become increasingly pervasive in our discipline in the last few years, and most would likely acknowledge that affect can and has been successfully employed to powerfully enhance and update traditional theories of human behaviour and cognition. While there are countless examples of this affective creep to choose from, this presentation will feature three illustrations from my own work. While briefly describing a new study comparing emotion and relevance theory, greater attention will be given to two more mature lines of research. In the first, I will offer reinterpretations of two classic developmental social cognition studies, highlighting the unacknowledged importance of affective processes in those studies. In the second, and as the main focus of the presentation, I will introduce Affective Social Learning, a concept, we argue, that describes how values are socially transmitted and, ultimately, helps explain why what matters, matters.