Happiness cools the warm glow of familiarity: psychophysiological evidence that mood modulates the familiarity-affect link.

Is positivity a cue or a response option? Warm glow vs evaluative matching in the familiarity for attractive and not-so-attractive faces

Monin (2003) showed that the attractiveness of a face increases its perceived familiarity regardless of prior exposure, and suggested that this beautiful-is-familiar effect was due to the misattribution to familiarity of the positive affect (or ‘‘warm glow’’) elicited by attractive faces. This research tests the alternative interpretation that an evaluative match between a positive stimulus (an...

The warm glow heuristic: when liking leads to familiarity.

Five studies demonstrate that the positive valence of a stimulus increases its perceived familiarity, even in the absence of prior exposure. For example, beautiful faces feel familiar. Two explanations for this effect stand out: (a). Stimulus prototypicality leads both to positivity and familiarity, and (b). positive affect is used to infer familiarity in a heuristic fashion. Studies 1 and 2 sh...

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology The Ugliness-in-Averageness Effect: Tempering the Warm Glow of Familiarity

Hypochondriacal attitudes comprise heterogeneous non-illness-related cognitions

BACKGROUND Hypochondriacal attitudes were associated with cognitions not related to illness: Social fears, low self-esteem, and reduced warm glow effect, i.e. less positive appraisal of familiar stimuli. Only a single study had investigated the correlation of hypochondriacal attitudes with the warm glow effect so far and the present study aimed to corroborate this association. Particularly, the...

ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION The Ugliness-in-Averageness Effect: Tempering the Warm Glow of Familiarity

Mere exposure (i.e., stimulus repetition) and blending (i.e., stimulus averaging) are classic ways to increase social preferences, including facial attractiveness. In both effects, increases in preference involve enhanced familiarity. Prominent memory theories assume that familiarity depends on a match between the target and similar items in memory. These theories predict that when individual i...