Leigh Ann Vaughn, Associate Professor of Psychology, Abigail Dubovi ('11), and N. Paul Niño ('11) have published an article titled, " Processing fluency affects behavior more strongly among people higher in trait mindfulness," in Journal of Research in Personality. This two-study empirical paper is a culmination of work by Vaughn's Social Judgment Research Team.
Processing fluency is the ease of processing information about a stimulus, which people can attribute to the experience of enjoyment. Despite consistent findings that processing fluency can affect self-reported judgments, little research has examined whether processing fluency or its interactions with personality traits can affect behavior. The studies in our paper demonstrate that processing fluency is more likely to affect behavior among people higher in trait mindfulness. We manipulated processing fluency with rhyming versus nonrhyming maxims in Study 1 and with regulatory fit versus nonfit in Study 2. Participants higher in mindfulness showed a stronger positive effect for processing fluency on the dependent variable: the number of ideas they listed in a task they continued for as long as they enjoyed it.
The research on which this paper was based was funded, in part, by an Ithaca College School of Humanities and Sciences Educational Initiative Grant. In addition to H&S, we thank Katharine Childs (’10), Ashley Ellenberger (’12), Rachael Ellsworth (’11), Madeline Lormand (’10), Arielle Manganiello (’12), Claire Maschinski (’11), Ellen O’Malley (’11), Molly Saldo (’12), Gregory Spirer (’09), and Stephanie Swan (’09) for help with materials development, data collection, and posters about this research, and John Luginsland for feedback about earlier versions of the manuscript.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20130918103154862