[2] Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis.
[3] An example of his viewpoint is his work with cockroaches that demonstrated social facilitation, evidence that this phenomenon is displayed regardless of species.
[3] A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Zajonc as the 35th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
[5][6] After the end of World War II, he immigrated to the United States, where he applied for undergraduate admission at the University of Michigan.
[2] He spent the rest of his life with his second wife, his own doctoral student that was 26 years younger, Hazel Rose Markus, a social psychologist at Stanford, known for her contributions to cultural psychology.
[9] In another experiment on social facilitation, Robert Zajonc gave participants associations to 184 words alone and in the presence of an audience.
[10] In 1980, a speculative and widely debated paper entitled "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences," invited in honor of his receipt of the 1979 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, made the argument that affective and cognitive systems are largely independent, and that affect is more powerful and comes first.
[11] His proposals were presented to be contrary to the widely considered belief in most contemporary psychology theories that affective judgment is post-cognitive.
[11] However, it was described that these systems are not entirely independent of each other either and do affect one another in several ways, and simultaneously, contribute separate conserves of effects to the processing of information.
[11] Convergence in spouses appearance Zajonc was interested in studying whether after staying together for a long time, couples display similarities in their physical features.
Zajonc and his colleagues found that participants assigned more positive evaluations of stimuli This finding was also replicated in rats who had their hypothalamus experimentally cooled or warmed via a small probe.
There were 17 male rats with hypothalamic thermodes implanted at the anterior border of the medial hypothalamus as well as two chronic oral cannulae in order to permit taste reactivity testing.
Zajonc also found that feeding was elicited during hypothalamic cooling but not heating or when the rat was left at its normal temperature.
Rats were infused with pure sucrose, a sucrose/quinine mixture, or distilled water, in random order through a 1-minute period, once per day.
[16] Zajonc argued that this perceived conclusion as based on them incorrectly treating birth-order effects to parallel a linear relationship, in addition to shortcomings in the methods they progressed such as implementing the use of unfocused tests causing significantly significant trends to remain unrecognized.
[16] A study by Bjerkedal et al. (in press) offers support to the with-in family nature of the phenomena through its own findings showing that increasing birth rank paralleled a decline in IQ in a sample of 127,902 Norwegian same-family siblings.
Zajonc found that the sensory interaction hypothesis does hold true, the pigeons not only used the intensity of the tone but also used the presentation of light while making a response.
[18] Zajonc won the award for the Distinguished Scientific Contribution on September 2, 1979 at the meeting of the American Psychological Association.
His Award address, published in American Psychologist as work on "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences," was highly influential in re-focusing interest on affective processes in psychology.