John Cacioppo

Who they are

Cacioppo is a psychologist whose work appears on this site through two pieces of research. The first is the book Emotional Contagion, written with Hatfield and Rapson. The second is the 2001 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, written with Winkielman, on whether easy processing produces positive affect.

John T. Cacioppo (1951 to 2018) was a founder of social neuroscience, a term he and colleagues at Ohio State University coined in 1992. The field studies how neural, hormonal, cellular and genetic mechanisms relate to social structures and processes. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1999, held the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professorship in Psychology, directed the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and chaired the Social Psychology Program. His later research centred on loneliness, social fitness and resilience, and on how social isolation affects mental and physical health. His 2008 book on loneliness brought that work to general readers. A University of Chicago obituary notice reported that he died on 5 March 2018, aged 66.

In the cognitive ease literature his place is the 2001 paper with Winkielman. It links a physiological measure, activity in the smiling muscle of the cheek, to the ease with which a picture is processed. That link is one of the experimental supports for the idea that repeated items are liked because they are processed easily, and it connects the mere exposure findings of Robert Zajonc to the wider fluency research.

Key papers

Winkielman, P., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2001). Mind at ease puts a smile on the face: Psychophysiological evidence that processing facilitation elicits positive affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 989-1000. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.989. Across two studies, participants viewed neutral pictures whose ease of processing was varied subtly, while facial electromyography recorded activity over the cheek muscle used in smiling. Easier pictures produced more activity there, and participants' reports agreed. The authors suggested that the link between ease and positive feeling could help explain preference effects such as mere exposure.

Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L., Emotional Contagion.

Key ideas

Processing ease and positive affect: the 2001 study reported that easier-to-process pictures were accompanied by more smile-muscle activity, which connects the fluency literature to feeling.

Emotional contagion: the tendency, set out in the book with Hatfield and Rapson, for emotion to pass between people.

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