A Study On The Differences Between Cognitive UTE And Emotional UTE

According to the theory(unconscious thought theory)proposed by Dijksterhuis,there is a close relationship between the quality of individual decision-making,thinking modes,and the complexity of target tasks.Conscious thinking and unconscious thinking can be distinguished by the criterion that whether attention is being paid to the relevant tasks.It is found the quality of decision-making using unconscious thinking is better than that of conscious thinking under complex situations,which is Unconscious Thought Effect(UTE).Previous studies have shown that many boundary conditions(moderators)exist for UTE,which in turn makes it a key research field.The classic Unconscious Thought theory is defined in both cognition and emotion,while current researches mainly focus on its cognitive side.This study explored the difference between two types(cognitive and emotional)of UTE by conducting separate investigations in order to verify a new boundary condition and promote the development of Unconscious Thought Theory.This study set the two dimensions in the definition of UTE,cognition and emotion,as start points,updated the research materials with reasoning and concept-forming tasks to investigate Cognitive UTE,and adopted emotional tasks to explore Emotional UTE with a goal to clarify a new boundary condition.The four experiments conducted in this study drew the following conclusions,First,Cognitive UTE is not shown when solving purely cognitive complex problems.That is,conscious thinking performed significantly better than unconscious thinking and immediate decision in solving pure cognitive complex problems.Second,Emotional UTE is shown when solving purely emotional complex problems.That is,unconscious thinking with high emotional appeal performed significantly better than conscious thinking and there is no significant difference between unconscious thinking with low emotional appeal and conscious thinking.Third,cognitive information contributed significantly more than emotional information when solving problems under specific situations(interaction of cognition and emotion is required).In other words,UTE is significant when experimenting with materials combined with picture and text instead of picture-only material.