As it became clearer in the self-perception research that all feelings consist of information about our ongoing behavior, and as interesting and creative students have led me off in these directions, our research has expanded to look at what might be called "cognitive feelings". This is a new area, and one that is already very active so we have had a lot of catching up to do, so our papers are very early stage efforts. One project involves individual differences in susceptibility to heuristic-driven errors. People who have more experience with judgements under uncertainty are somewhat less prone to such errors, (although the prevalence of error among financial professionals is striking.) Povalaitis, A. & Laird, J. D. (1998) Heuristic driven judgments by experts and novices in the financial markets. Presented at the 24th International Congress of Applied Psychology, San Francisco, August. A more complete version of this project has just been submitted.
A second project concerns Feeling of Knowing. Traci Higgins has been examining the attributional processes which underly judgements about whether one knows or will be able to recognize an item from memory. Higgins, T. & Laird, J. D. (1998) Metamemory and the accessibility heuristic. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, August. A paper reporting this research and an additional study has recently been submitted.
The next direction in this line of research will be to explore the parallels with other self-perception processes more closely.