@phdthesis{Bahnik2016,
  author    = {Bahn{\´i}k, Štěp{\´a}n},
  title     = {Processing fluency and judgment},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-144656},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {To simplify a judgment, people often base it on easily accessible information. One cue that is usually readily available is processing fluency - a metacognitive feeling of ease of cognitive processing. Consequently, processing fluency is used as a cue for many different types of judgment, such as judgment of truth, confidence, and novelty. The present work describes results of three studies investigating various aspects of processing fluency effects on judgment. Processing fluency has been sometimes equated with speed of a cognitive process. Therefore, response times have been used for evaluation of processing fluency. However, response times in experimental tasks often do not encompass only the time needed for a given process, but also the time needed for a decision based on the resulting information. The study described in Chapter II uses a novel experimental method that enables separation of reading and decision times. The results show that people make a decision about liking of pseudowords faster when the pseudowords are hard-to-pronounce (i.e., disfluent) than when they are moderate in pronounceability. This suggests that response times cannot be used as a proxy for processing fluency when they include the time needed to make a decision. One of the studies of judgmental effects of processing fluency showed that food additives with easier pronounceable names are judged to be less harmful than those with hard-to-pronounce names. While people encounter food additives that are safe more often, this environmental association may be in the opposite direction for some categories of objects. For example, people are more likely to see names of especially dangerous criminals in the news. Chapter III describes a study which initially tested whether the fluency-safety association may be in the opposite direction for some categories of objects as a consequence of this selective exposure to especially dangerous exemplars. The results did not show support for this hypothesis. Furthermore, subsequent studies suggest that the previously found association between fluency and safety is replicable with the original stimuli used in the previous research, but not with newly constructed stimuli. Chapter IV describes a study which applied a finding from the processing fluency literature to a positive psychology exercise in order to increase its effectiveness. Namely, the experiment manipulated the number of good things that participants listed daily for two weeks as part of the exercise. While listing more things was considered harder, the number of things listed each day had no effect on effectiveness of the exercise.},
  subject      = {Urteilen},
  language  = {en}
}
@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}
}