expect that the use of higher-level cognitive strategies should enhance con-
ceptual change.
In terms of negative affect, Bless (2000) suggested that a negative mood fo-
cuses the person on the details of the situation and does not activate a general
schema making it unlikely that the new information would be related to prior
schemas. Thus, while a person in a negative mood may be more likely to
process the new information because they are focused on the details of the sit-
uation, it is not clear whether this would relate to conceptual change in that
prior knowledge structures are not activated and may therefore be less likely
to be altered based on the new information. Nevertheless, the empirical find-
ings from our laboratory suggest that negative affect may be detrimental for
conceptual change. Furthermore, we found that negative affect was not re-
lated to strategy use. This questions the assumption that a negative mood
leads to higher levels of processing. However, given the mixed nature of our
findings, these results must be replicated before drawing strong conclusions
regarding the relation of affect to conceptual change in science.
Our findings can also be interpreted using Fiedler’s (2000) model, which
stresses accommodation and assimilation processes and parallels the research
on these processes for conceptual change. Fiedler (2000) suggested that as-
similation, which is associated with positive affect, involves the application of
internal knowledge structures to the external environment. In this sense, a
person in a positive mood should use prior knowledge (including prior mis-
conceptions) to interpret new information, which may lead to the incorpora-
tion of new information into existing knowledge structures rather than the al-
tering of knowledge structures. In this sense, one would not expect positive
affect to be beneficial for conceptual change and it might be detrimental. This
interpretation is somewhat consistent with our finding that positive affect
was unrelated to conceptual change in physics understanding, although we
might have expected a negative relation.
In contrast, accommodation processes are associated with negative moods
and could lead to more conceptual change or revision of internal knowledge
structures. In fact, one of the key instructional strategies suggested for foster-
ing conceptual change in much of the conceptual change literature is the induc-
tion of cognitive dissonance, which generates at least some modicum of nega-
tive affect, as students are shown that their prior knowledge cannot help them
understand the phenomena. However, the two studies conducted in our labo-
ratory suggested that negative affect was either unrelated or negatively related
to conceptual change. This discrepancy between theory and empirical data
needs to be further considered in future research in order to better understand
the role that negative affect plays in the conceptual change process.
Finally, the results for positive affect can be interpreted based on the
broaden-and-build perspective (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001). If positive affect
- AFFECT AND COGNITIVE PROCESSING 71