@phdthesis{Krishna2018, author = {Krishna, Anand}, title = {Regulatory Focus Theory and Information Processing - A Series of Exploratory Studies}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-163365}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2018}, abstract = {Regulatory focus (RF) theory (Higgins, 1997) states that individuals follow different strategic concerns when focusing on gains (promotion) rather than losses (prevention). Applying the Reflective-Impulsive Model (RIM, Strack \& Deutsch, 2004), this dissertation investigates RF's influence on basic information processing, specifically semantic processing (Study 1), semantic (Study 2) and affective (Study 3) associative priming, and basic reflective operations (Studies 4-7). Study 1 showed no effect of RF on pre-activation of RF-related semantic concepts in a lexical decision task (LDT). Study 2 indicated that primes fitting a promotion focus improve performance in a LDT for chronically promotion-focused individuals, but not chronically prevention-focused individuals. However, the latter performed better when targets fit their focus. Stronger affect and arousal after processing valent words fitting an RF may explain this pattern. Study 3 showed some evidence for stronger priming effects for negative primes in a bona-fide pipeline task (Fazio et al., 1995) for chronically prevention-focused participants, while also providing evidence that situational prevention focus insulates individuals from misattributing the valence of simple primes. Studies 4-7 showed that a strong chronic prevention focus leads to greater negation effects for valent primes in an Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne et al., 2005), especially when it fits the situation. Furthermore, Study 6 showed that these effects result from stronger weighting of negated valence rather than greater ease in negation. Study 7 showed that the increased negation effect is independent of time pressure. Broad implications are discussed, including how RF effects on basic processing may explain higher-order RF effects.}, subject = {Motivation}, language = {en} }