The warm glow heuristic: when liking leads to familiarity.

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...

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...

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

People often prefer familiar stimuli, presumably because familiarity signals safety. This preference can occur with merely repeated old stimuli, but it is most robust with new but highly familiar prototypes of a known category (beauty-in-averageness effect). However, is familiarity always warm? Tuning accounts of mood hold that positive mood signals a safe environment, whereas negative mood sig...

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...