Reading an Official Letter: The Impact of Emotions on Cognitive Processes and the Dynamics of Affective States

Abstract

Emotions accompany us in our daily lives and affect even processing stimuli such as official letters, which require the involvement of systematic processing (Kahneman, 2011). In people without legal training, they evoke high levels of automatic emotions that promote heuristic processing (Imbir, 2016a). The results of our study shed a new light on understanding the phenomenon of linking cognitive processes and emotions and have potential application. A quantitative study was carried out using original official letters from different institutions and with different resolutions. The subjects (N = 560) were shown the document in stages to capture the dynamics of emotional response. The intensity of automatic and reflective emotions, level of arousal, and valence of emotions (SAM scale) were measured six times. Variables such as reading time or mood were also controlled. At different reading stages, statistically significant differences were observed in emotion intensity, valence, origin, and arousal level. There were numerous intergroup differences in the level of comprehension, which can be explained, among other things, by the influence of experienced emotions on the cognitive processes accompanying reading. The results confirm that emotions experienced during reading affect the cognitive processes necessary for proper comprehension. Differences in the intensity of emotions and the level of arousal at different stages of reading the official letter also contributed to the identification of components that can lead to comprehension problems.