Piotr Winkielman -- Home Page

http://psy.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/piotr_kyoto.jpgPermanent Address:

 

Occasional Addresses:

Piotr Winkielman
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, Mailcode 0109
La Jolla, CA 92093-0109
Phone: (858) 822-0682
Fax: (858) 534-7190
http://psy.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel
http://psy.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/email.GIF

Polska:
Department of Psychology
University of Warsaw
Stawki 5/7
00-183 Warszawa

UK:
Department of Psychology
University College London
26 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AP

My other pages:  Daily links; Research links; Media; page dedicated to Robert Zajonc.

How to pronounce my first name:  here   Another picture: here.  Directions: here  

Academic history

Professor of Psychology:
  2007:  Psychology, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California
Associate Professor:
  2003-2007: Psychology, UCSD
Assistant Professor:
  1998-2003: Social, Cognitive, and Neuroscience Programs, Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado.
Post-doctoral Fellow:
  1997 - 1998: Social Neuroscience Lab (now at University of Chicago), Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus.
Graduate Student:
  1991-1997 Ph.D: Social Psychology, Research Center for Group Dynamics, Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Undergraduate Student:
  1988-1991: Dipl.Psych. Psychology, Minor, Philosophy, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany.
  1985-1988: Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.

Research Interests

My research explores the interplay between emotion, cognition, embodiment and consciousness.  I am particularly interested in implications of this work for social cognition.  In my work, I draw on diverse methods of social and cognitive psychology, including techniques from social neuroscience.

1) Affect, motivation, and awareness.  Researchers typically make two assumptions about affective reactions.  First, affective reactions are intrinsically conscious (i.e., subjectively "felt").  Second, affective reactions influence behavior regardless of motivation.  Our studies question both assumptions.  First, we show that behavior can be influenced when a person is unaware of having an affective reaction (in addition to the person being unaware of the stimulus causing an affective reaction).  This suggests the possibility of a genuinely unconscious or "unfelt" emotion.  Second, we show that "unconscious" affective reactions primarily influence behaviors that are motivationally relevant.  For empirical papers, see: Winkielman, Zajonc, & Schwarz, 1997; Winkielman, Berridge, & Wilbarger, 2005.  For reviews, see Berridge & Winkielman, 2003; and Winkielman & Berridge, 2004.  For a comprehensive treatment of the relation between emotion and consciousness, see the book Emotion and Consciousness (eds. Feldman-Barrett, Niedenthal, & Winkielman, 2005). For my general views on consciousness, see Winkielman & Schooler, 2008.  Recently, my colleague and I began to investigate the role of affect and motivation in decisions, including the neural basis of this influence (Winkielman, Knutson, Paulus, & Trujillo, 2007; Knutson, Wimmer, Kuhnen, & Winkielman, 2008).

2) Processing dynamics.  Information processing can be characterized not only by its content (what we think about) but also by its dynamics (how easy, fast, coherent it is).  I explore the implications of the processing dynamics for affect and cognition.
     Affective Consequences.  I am exploring the idea that one source of affective reactions to objects is fluency (ease or difficulty) of perceptual and conceptual processing.  This is because fluency reflects the organism's cognitive resources and provides feedback about important qualities of incoming stimuli, such as familiarity. Consistent with these ideas, our studies show that facilitation of processing elicits positive affective reactions, as reflected in preference judgments and physiological markers (Reber, Winkielman, & Schwarz, 1998; Winkielman & Cacioppo, 2001; Winkielman, Halberstadt, Fazendeiro, & Catty, 2006).  To account for such findings, my colleagues and I have proposed the hedonic fluency hypothesis (Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003; Winkielman, Schwarz, & Nowak, 2002). This hypothesis integrates a variety of apparently unrelated preference phenomena under a common theoretical framework. Such phenomena include: (i) the mere-exposure effect (repetition increases liking for objects), (ii) beauty-in-averages effect (prototypical objects are liked more than unusual ones), (iii) preferences for objects presented with higher clarity or higher figure-ground contrast, (iv) preference for objects presented at longer durations, and (v) preference for objects when mental processing of their attributes has been facilitated with perceptual or semantic primes.  My colleagues and I have also applied these ideas to understanding of aesthetic experience (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004). This work is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (see award abstract).
     Inferential Consequences. I investigate the judgmental role of "cognitive experiences", such as recall difficulty, and the feeling of familiarity. Our studies show that the subjective retrieval experience or how you recall can override the implication of objectively available information or what you recall.  This process can lead to paradoxical effects, such as people judging their memory as worse when they recall more events (Winkielman, Schwarz, & Belli, 1998).  Further, we show that the impact of an experience, such as recall difficulty, on judgments is mediated by people's beliefs about the source and meaning of the experience (Winkielman & Schwarz, 2001).  Interestingly, even though recall difficulty is objectively hard (requires physiological mobilization), it enters judgment only to the extent it changes the subjective sense of difficulty (von Helversen, Gendolla, Winkielman, & Schmidt, 2008).  Finally, I am very interested in the origins and the use of the familiarity in recognition memory.  We show that familiarity can be driven by driven up and down by perceptual fluency and disfluency (Huber, Clark, Huber, & Winkielman, 2008) and that familiarity that derives from conceptual relatedness lead memory astray, but only if the subjective experience is misattributed (Fazendeiro, Winkielman, Luo, & Lorah, 2005).

3) Embodiment of emotion.  How do individuals process emotional information? My colleagues and I are exploring the idea that emotion processing involves embodiment, or the activation of emotion-relevant sensory-motor and somatic states in the individual. In that framework, embodiment occurs both when an emotion-eliciting object is physically present to the perceiver, and also when the emotion object is referred to by internal symbols (thoughts) or external symbols (e.g., words). To understand the role of sensory-motor and somatic states in emotion processing, we are investigating the perception of and memory for facial expressions of emotion, the understanding of abstract emotion concepts, the role of imitation in cognition, and the influence of emotional states on perception and judgment (see Halberstadt, Winkielman, Niedenthal, & Dalle, in press; Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005; Niedenthal, Winkielman, Mondillon, & Vermeulen, 2009; Oberman, Winkielman, & Ramachandran, 2007; Winkielman, Niedenthal, & Oberman, 2008).  This work is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (see award abstract). 

4) Emotion and Autism.  What happens when basic mechanisms of emotion processing and embodiment go awry?  My colleagues and I examine possible consequences by studying individuals with atypical social functioning, as persons with autism? We have explored these issues in the domains of spontaneous mirroring, recognition of facial expression, and emotional startle modification (Clark, Winkielman, & McIntosh, 2008; McIntosh, Reichmann-Decker, Winkielman, & Wilbarger, 2006; Oberman, Winkielman, & Ramachandran, 2009; Wilbarger, McIntosh, & Winkielman, 2009; Winkielman, McIntosh, & Oberman, 2009). This work was sponsored by National Alliance for Autism Research.

5) Interaction of social and cognitive processes.  I am also interested in how social and cognitive processes interact in formation and expression of judgments, and in general cognitive functioning.  First, I’ve explored how semantic categorization determines the judgmental impact of contextual information on social judgments.  Our studies show that judgmental assimilation and contrast effects can be systematically produced with subliminal and supraliminal primes by manipulating categorical relation, similarity, and distinctiveness of available information (Winkielman & Schwarz, in preparation; Stapel & Winkielman, 1998).  Second, I’ve explored how people's judgments are determined by inferences about communicative intentions (what the speaker means).  Our studies show that such inferences lead to different reports about emotional episodes, different emotion frequency reports, and different self-evaluations of emotionality (Winkielman, Knauper, & Schwarz, 1998).  Finally, I am interested in the reciprocal influence of social and cognitive processing.  Our studies show that social interaction facilitates general cognitive functioning, as reflected on standard tests of mental capacity (Ybarra, Burnstein, Winkielman, Keller, Manis, Chan, & Rodriguez, 2008).

Some representative publications (email me for a full CV)

For reprints, check for PDF next to reference or e-mail me at the address above.  PDFs are for personal use only. Download free PDF reader here.

Books

·         Feldman-Barrett, L., Niedenthal, P., & Winkielman, P. (2005).  Emotion and Consciousness.  Guilford Press. New York.  Purchase at Guilford (code 5T for discount) or at Amazon.

·         Harmon-Jones, E. & Winkielman, P. (2007). Social Neuroscience. Integrating biological and psychological explanations of social behavior. Guilford Press. New York. Purchase at Guilford (code 5T for discount) or at Amazon.

Articles and chapters

  • Halberstadt, J., Winkielman, P., Niedenthal, P. & Dalle, N. (in press). Emotional conception: How embodied emotion concepts guide perception and facial action.  Psychological Science. Abstract.
  • Niedenthal, P. M., Winkielman, P.  Mondillon, L., & Vermeulen, N. (2009). Embodiment of Emotional Concepts: Evidence from EMG Measures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1120–1136. Abstract, PDF
  • Vul, E., Harris C., Winkielman, P., & Pashler, H. (2009).   Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4, 274-290.  Abstract, PDF. [The paper formerly known as “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience”].  Our reply to comments is here.
  • Oberman, L. M., Winkielman, P., & Ramachandran, V.S. (2009). Slow echo: Facial EMG evidence for the delay of spontaneous, but not voluntary emotional mimicry in children with autism spectrum disorders. Developmental Science.  Abstract.  Download link.
  • Wilbarger, J. L., McIntosh, D. N., & Winkielman, P. (2009). Startle modulation in autism: Positive affective stimuli enhance startle response. Neuropsychologia, 47, 1323–1331. Abstract. PDF
  • Winkielman, P., McIntosh, D. N., & Oberman, L. (2009).  Embodied and disembodied emotion processing: Learning from and about typical and autistic individuals.  Emotion Review, 2, 178-190. Abstract, PDF.
  • Clark, T. F., Winkielman, P. & McIntosh, D. N. (2008).  Autism and the extraction of emotion from briefly presented facial expressions: Stumbling at the first step of empathy.  Emotion, 8, 803-809.  Abstract,  PDF.
  • Winkielman, P. & Schooler, J. (2008). Unconscious, conscious, and metaconscious in social cognition. Strack, F. & Foerster, J. (Eds.), Social cognition: The basis of human interaction. (pp 49-69). Philadelphia: Psychology Press. PDF.
  • Huber, D. E., Clark, T., Curran, T., & Winkielman, P. (2008). Effects of repetition priming on recognition memory: Testing a perceptual fluency-disfluency model.  Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 1305–1324. Abstract, PDF.
  • Knutson, B., Wimmer, G. E., Kuhnen, C. M., & Winkielman, P. (2008). Nucleus accumbens activation mediates the influence of reward cues on financial risk taking. NeuroReport, 19, 509-513. Abstract, PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., Niedenthal, P., & Oberman, L. (2008). The embodied emotional mind. In Semin, G. R., & Smith, E. R. (Eds.) Embodied grounding: Social, cognitive, affective, and neuroscientific approaches. (pp. 263-288). New York: Cambridge University Press.  PDF,  (link to the book)
  • von Helversen, B., Gendolla, G. H. E, Winkielman, P., & Schmidt, R.E. (2008).  Exploring the hardship of ease: Subjective and objective effort in the ease-of-processing paradigm. Motivation and Emotion.  Abstract, PDF
  • Ybarra, O., Burnstein, E., Winkielman, P., Keller, M.C, Manis, M., Chan, E., & Rodriguez, J. (2008). Mental exercising through simple socializing: Social interaction promotes general cognitive functioning. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 248-259.  Abstract. PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., Knutson, B., Paulus, M.P. & Trujillo, J.T. (2007). Affective influence on decisions: Moving towards the core mechanisms.  Review of General Psychology, 11, 179-192. Abstract, PDF
  • Oberman, L., Winkielman, P., & Ramachandran, V. S. (2007). Face to face: Blocking facial mimicry can selectively impair recognition of emotional expressions. Social Neuroscience, 2, 167-178. Abstract, PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., Halberstadt, J., Fazendeiro, T. & Catty, S. (2006). Prototypes are attractive because they are easy on the mind. Psychological Science, 17. 799-806.  Abstract,  PDF
  • McIntosh, D. N., Reichmann-Decker, A., Winkielman, P., & Wilbarger, J. L. (2006). When the social mirror breaks: Deficits in automatic, but not voluntary mimicry of emotional facial expressions in autism. Developmental Science, 9, 295-302. Abstract, PDF.
  • Fazendeiro, T., Winkielman, P., Luo, C., & Lorah, C. (2005).  False recognition across meaning, language, and stimulus format: Conceptual relatedness and the feeling of familiarity. Memory and Cognition. 33, 249-260. Abstract, PDF.
  • Niedenthal, P. M., Barsalou, L., Winkielman, P., Krauth-Gruber, S., & Ric, F. (2005). Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9, 184-211. Abstract, PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., Berridge, K. C., & Wilbarger, J. L. (2005). Unconscious affective reactions to masked happy versus angry faces influence consumption behavior and judgments of value. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1, 121-135. Abstract, PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., Berridge, K. C., & Wilbarger, J. L. (2005). Emotion, behavior, and conscious experience: Once more without feeling. In Feldman-Barrett, L., Niedenthal, P., & Winkielman, P. (Eds). Emotion and Consciousness.  Guilford Press.  New York. PDF.
  • Reber, R., Schwarz, N. & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 364-382. Abstract, PDF.
  • Winkielman, P. & Berridge, K. C. (2004). Unconscious emotion.  Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 120-123. Abstract, PDF.
  • Winkielman, P. & Berridge, K. C. (2003). Irrational wanting and sub-rational liking: How rudimentary motivational and affective processes shape preferences and choices. Political Psychology, 24, 657-680. Abstract, PDF.
  • Berridge, K. C., & Winkielman, P. (2003). What is an unconscious emotion? The case for unconscious 'liking'. Cognition and Emotion, 17, 181-211.  Abstract, PDF
  • Winkielman, P., Schwarz, N., Fazendeiro, T., & Reber, R. (2003). The hedonic marking of processing fluency: Implications for evaluative judgment. In J. Musch & K. C. Klauer (Eds.), The Psychology of Evaluation: Affective Processes in Cognition and Emotion. (pp. 189-217). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (publisher's book webpage here). PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., Schwarz, N., & Nowak, A. (2002). Affect and processing dynamics: Perceptual fluency enhances evaluations. In S. Moore & M. Oaksford (Eds.), Emotional Cognition: From brain to behaviour. (pp. 111-136). Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins.  See book website here. Read the chapter (#5) on the web here, or in PDF.
  • Winkielman P., Berntson G. G., & Cacioppo J. T. (2001). The psychophysiological perspective on the social mind. In A. Tesser & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Intraindividual Processes. (pp. 89-108). Oxford: Blackwell. (publisher's book webpage here). PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2001). Mind at ease puts a smile on the face: Psychophysiological evidence that processing facilitation increases positive affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 989-1000. Abstract, PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., & Schwarz, N. (2001). How pleasant was your childhood? Beliefs about memory shape inferences from experienced difficulty of recall. Psychological Science, 12, 176-179. Abstract, PDF
  • Skurnik, I., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2000). Drawing inferences from feelings: The role of naive beliefs. In H. Bless & J. P. Forgas (Eds.), The message within: The role of subjective experience in social cognition and behavior. (pp. 162-175). Philadelphia: Psychology Press. PDF.
  • Belli, R. F., Winkielman, P., Read, D. J., Schwarz, N., & Lynn, S. J. (1998). Recalling more childhood events leads to judgments of poorer memory: Implications for the recovered/false memory debate. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 318-323. Abstract,  PDF
  • Reber, R., Winkielman, P. & Schwarz, N. (1998). Effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments. Psychological Science, 9, 45-48. Abstract, PDF
  • Stapel, D. A. & Winkielman, P. (1998). Assimilation and contrast as a function of context-target similarity, distinctness, and dimensional relevance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 634-646. Abstract. PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., Knauper, B. & Schwarz, N. (1998). Looking back at anger: Reference periods change the interpretation of emotion frequency questions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 719-728. Abstract, PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., Schwarz, N. & Belli, R. F. (1998). The role of ease of retrieval and attribution in memory judgments: Judging your memory as worse despite recalling more events. Psychological Science, 9, 124-126. Abstract, PDF.
  • Winkielman, P., Zajonc, R. B., & Schwarz, N. (1997). Subliminal affective priming resists attributional interventions. Cognition and Emotion, 11, 433-465. Abstract, PDF.

Po Polsku (in Polish):

·         Winkielman, P. (2008).  Psychologia społeczna a neuronauki: Dominacja, separacja, czy satysfakcjonujący związek? [in Polish] Social psychology and neuroscience: Domination, separation, or a fulfilling relationship?  Psychologia Społeczna, 1, 11–22. Abstract, PDF.

 

Bardziej przystepna wersja (Popular article in Polish on the relation between psychology and neurosciences)

 

·         Winkielman, P. (2006). Nierozłączne nauki dwie. (Inseparable sciences).  Charaktery, 10, 8-12.  PDF

 

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