Mood, source characteristics, and message processing: A mood-congruent expectancies approach

Based on two lines of research, a model is proposed to explain when individuals in a positive mood as well as individuals in a negative mood invest more or less effort in message processing. First, research has shown that moods affect likelihood estimates. That is, positive (negative) mood leads to a mood-congruent increase regarding the occurrence of positively (negatively) valenced events. Second, research has shown that mood-unrelated expectancies affect message processing. Combining both lines of research, I argue that mood-congruent expectancies also affect message scrutiny, that is, more effortful processing given expectancy disconfirmation rather than expectancy confirmation. This prediction was tested in two experiments involving initial information regarding source honesty and likability, respectively. As predicted, individuals in both positive and negative moods evinced more effortful message processing when initial information disconfirmed rather than confirmed expectancies. Thus, these results are consistent with a quite flexible view of individuals in both positive and negative moods regarding the effort invested in information processing.     

Happy people thrive on adversity: Pre-existing mood moderates the effect of emotion inductions on creative thinking

Past research on the relationship between affect and creativity has yielded contradictory results. Most of the evidence has tended to show that brief positive emotions as well as more enduring positive moods enhance creativity. No study to date, however, has attempted to determine whether the influence of momentary emotions on creativity depends on pre-existing moods. In the present study, 96 undergraduates completed one of two creative tasks (generating or evaluating captions for photographs) on three occasions, after watching videos designed to induce positive, neutral, or negative emotions. Participants also completed a questionnaire assessing depressed mood. Results confirmed that the effect of emotion inductions on creativity depended on pre-existing mood. Participants low in depression wrote more creative captions and rated captions more accurately with induced negative emotion than with induced positive emotion. In contrast, participants high in depression appeared impervious to the effect of emotion inductions.     

Mood impact on cardiovascular reactivity when task difficulty is unclear

Research in the context of the mood-behavior-model (Gendolla in Rev Gen Psychol 4:348–408, 2000) has shown that moods can have an impact on effort mobilization due to congruency effects on demand appraisals. However, the mood research literature suggests that mood may also influence effort mobilization by its impact on appraisals of the instrumentality of success. In a single factor (mood valence: negative vs. neutral vs. positive) between-persons design, participants performed a memory task under conditions of unclear task difficulty. By successfully performing the task, participants could earn the chance to win a monetary reward. As predicted for tasks with unclear difficulty, effort mobilization—assessed as cardiovascular reactivity—increased from negative to positive mood. This effect was mediated by the subjective probability of winning the monetary reward for successful performance. These results demonstrate for the first time that mood can influence effort mobilization via the estimated instrumentality of success.     

Motivated prediction of future feelings: effects of negative mood and mood orientation on affective forecasts

This article examines the role of motivational factors in affective forecasting. The primary hypothesis was that people predict positive emotional reactions to future events when they are motivated to enhance their current feelings. Three experiments manipulated participants' moods (negative vs. neutral) and orientation toward their moods (reflective vs. ruminative) and then assessed the positivity of their affective predictions for future events. As hypothesized, when participants adopted a reflective orientation, and thus should have been motivated to engage in mood-regulation processes, they predicted more positive feelings in the negative than in the neutral mood condition. This pattern of mood-incongruent affective prediction was not exhibited when participants adopted a ruminative orientation. Additionally, within the negative mood condition, generating affective forecasts had a more positive emotional impact on reflectors than on ruminators. The findings suggest that affective predictions are sometimes driven by mood-regulatory motives.     

Sad Kids,Sad Media? Applying Mood Management Theory to Depressed Adolescents' Use of Media

Mood management studies typically have found that adults will select media that enhance positive moods and reduce negative moods. In this study, adolescents diagnosed with major depressive disorder and control adolescents without psychiatric disorders were called on customized cell phones up to 4 times a day and asked about their current mood state and media use for five extended weekends across an 8-week period. Mood effects on subsequent media use, mood during media consumption, and media effects on subsequent mood were examined. Results indicated that adolescents who consumed fun media tended to do so in a way that sustained, rather than enhanced their prior positive mood levels during and after consumption-if they turned to media. Adolescents in more negative moods did not often use media to improve their moods. When they did, boys were more likely than girls to use media that ultimately reduced negative mood levels. Findings are discussed in light of the literature on mood management, adolescence, and depression.     

Within-person relationships between mood and creativity

State mood has been proposed as a facilitator of creative behavior. Whereas positive mood compared to neutral mood generally facilitates creative performance, mood effects are weaker and less consistent when positive mood is compared to negative mood. These inconsistent results may be due to focusing only on mood valence, while neglecting or confounding mood activation. The current study is based on the dual-pathway model, which describes separate roles for mood valence and mood activation in facilitating creativity. We used experience sampling methodology to investigate the concurrent and lagged effects of mood valence and activation on creative process engagement (CPE) within-person over time among individuals working on a long-term project requiring creativity. We also investigated the moderating effects of individual differences in goal orientation and supervisory support on within-person mood-creativity relationships. As expected, we found that activating positive and activating negative moods were positively associated with concurrent CPE, whereas deactivating moods of both valences were negatively related to CPE. Activating negative mood had a significant lagged effect on CPE, whereas activating positive mood did not. We also found that activating positive mood was more strongly related to concurrent CPE among individuals with high rather than low learning goal orientation. Further, activating positive mood interacted with prove goal orientation and supervisory support for creativity, such that activating positive mood had the strongest association with CPE when both prove goal orientation and supervisory support were high.     

Dispositional and Situational Autonomy as Moderators of Mood and Creativity

Although previous research suggests that mood can influence creativity, the controversy about the effects of positive and negative moods has raged for years. This study investigated how the relationship between induced mood and creativity is moderated by dispositional and situational autonomy. It contrasted the different moderating effects of the 2 kinds of autonomy. In Experiment 1, 93 participants completed a questionnaire about dispositional autonomy and performed a creative task after watching 1 of 3 film clips, which were to induce positive, negative, or neutral moods. The results of experiment 1 indicated that positive moods prompted creativity and negative moods inhibited creativity when individuals were low in dispositional autonomy (low in autonomous orientation or high in impersonal orientation). In Experiment 2, 73 participants engaged in a game to manipulate levels of situational autonomy and induce positive or negative moods. The results of experiment 2 showed that positive moods fostered greater creativity than did negative moods when individuals were in full-autonomy condition. The different moderating effects of dispositional and situational autonomy are discussed.     

Hedonic tone and activation level in the mood-creativity link: toward a dual pathway to creativity model

To understand when and why mood states influence creativity, the authors developed and tested a dual pathway to creativity model; creative fluency (number of ideas or insights) and originality (novelty) are functions of cognitive flexibility, persistence, or some combination thereof. Invoking work on arousal, psychophysiological processes, and working memory capacity, the authors argue that activating moods (e.g., angry, fearful, happy, elated) lead to more creative fluency and originality than do deactivating moods (e.g., sad, depressed, relaxed, serene). Furthermore, activating moods influence creative fluency and originality because of enhanced cognitive flexibility when tone is positive and because of enhanced persistence when tone is negative. Four studies with different mood manipulations and operationalizations of creativity (e.g., brainstorming, category inclusion tasks, gestalt completion tests) support the model.     

Feeling activated and acting unethically: The influence of activated mood on unethical behavior to benefit a teammate

Research on the effects of mood in organizations tends to focus on the valence dimension of mood (positive vs. negative), overlooking the activation dimension (activated vs. deactivated). We suggest that activation level prompts unethical behavior. Based on the affective infusion model (AIM; Forgas, 1995), we predict that positive activated and negative activated moods facilitate unethical behavior to benefit a teammate, via the mediating mechanism of a creative mindset. We test our full model using an experience sampling method over 2 weeks, in which mood and creative mindset were assessed in the morning and unethical behavior conducted that day was assessed in the evening. We found that activated moods (both positive and negative) were positively related to unethical behavior to benefit a teammate. Further, creative mindset mediated the relationship between positive activated mood and unethical behavior to benefit a teammate. Consistent with AIM's claim that mood should influence decisions more when they are not personally relevant, we found that moral disengagement propensity moderated this indirect effect. In addition, we conducted two experiments to examine further the mood-creative mindset and creative mindset-unethical behavior to benefit a teammate relationship. Our findings affirm that activated versus deactivated moods facilitate a creative mindset, and that a creative mindset encourages unethical behavior to benefit a teammate. Our findings suggest that activation level of mood plays a critical role in unethical behavior.     

Mood specific media use and emotion regulation: Patterns and individual differences

The present study examines moods in which individuals are most likely to utilize various forms of entertainment media and the emotion regulation tendencies that are associated with such preferences. Results of a questionnaire study (n = 229) show that mood specific media use may be captured by three factors: turning to media in a positive mood, in a negative mood or in a bored mood. Findings also show that various forms of difficulty regulating emotion (e.g., feeling out of control when upset) predict media use in negative or bored moods only. More specific analyses show that music use in negative moods is predicted by both positive indices (e.g., reflection tendencies) and negative indices of emotion regulation (e.g., rumination tendencies), while television use in negative moods is only predicted by negative indices of emotion regulation. Results are discussed in light of the psychological needs that selective media use may serve.     

Alternative reference points and outcome evaluation: the influence of affect

Two studies examined the effect of affective states on decision outcome evaluation under the presence or absence of salient alternative reference points. Alternative reference points exist when there are 2 possible referents from which an outcome can be evaluated, and the outcome is judged as good from the perspective of one referent and bad from the perspective of the other. The results support a motivational process of evaluating outcomes in which individuals select the reference point that allows them to maintain positive mood or improve negative mood. Mood measurements taken before and after the task revealed that those in positive moods maintained their mood whether or not they had alternative reference points in the evaluation of their outcomes. Those in negative affective states improved their mood only when there was an alternative reference point that allowed the outcome to be compared favorably; when there was no such alternative reference point, they maintained their negative mood.     

Affective influences on individual and group judgments

Do emotional states influence the social judgments made by groups and individuals? Based on affect-cognition theories and research on group judgmental shifts, we predicted that group discussion will enhance positive mood effects on judgments, but inhibit affectively-based distortions in dysphoric moods. Positive, neutral and negative moods were induced using audiovisual presentations. Individual and group consensus judgments of nine person categories on three judgmental dimensions (evaluation, competence and self-confidence) were obtained in two experimental sessions separated by a two-week interval. Results showed that individuals made more positive judgments when happy, and more negative judgments when sad than did controls. Group discussion resulted in a further polarization of positive judgments, and the attenuation of negative judgments. The findings are interpreted as evidence for the important role affect plays in mediating both individual cognitive processes and interactive social behaviours. The implications of the results for contemporary affect-cognition theories and models of group behaviour are considered.     

The informational impact of mood on effort mobilization: a study of cardiovascular and electrodermal responses

The impact of mood on effort quantified as autonomic adjustments was investigated in an experiment. The authors induced positive versus negative moods with either 1 of 2 mood induction procedures (music vs. autobiographical recollection) that differed in the extent of required effort. Then participants performed an achievement task after demand appraisals were made. Results were as predicted. During the mood inductions, autonomic reactivity (systolic blood pressure [SBP], diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance responses) was stronger in the relatively effortful recollection conditions than in the relatively effortless music conditions. Mood valence had no impact here. But in the context of task performance, the authors found (a) mood congruency effects on the demand appraisals that reflected subjectively higher demand in a negative than in a positive mood, and (b) stronger SBP reactivity in a negative mood compared with a positive mood. Furthermore, SBP reactivity during task performance was correlated with achievement.     

The differential effects of mood on age differences in the correspondence bias

The present study found that age-related differences in the correspondence bias were differentially influenced by induced mood. Young and older adults completed an attitude-attribution task after having been induced to experience a positive, neutral, or negative mood. Although negative moods intensified age-related differences in the correspondence bias, young and older adults were equally susceptible to the correspondence bias when in a positive mood. In addition, induced mood differentially influenced the attributional confidence of young and older adults. Whereas negatively induced young adults were less confident than positively induced young adults in their attributions, negatively induced older adults were more confident than positively induced older adults in their attributions. Findings are discussed in terms of how positive and negative moods operate differently in motivating young and older adults' attributional judgments.     

Affect and job satisfaction: a study of their relationship at work and at home

The authors investigated 2 broad issues: (a) across- and within-individual relationships between mood and job satisfaction and (b) spillover in moods experienced at work and at home. Using an experience-sampling methodology, they collected multisource data from a sample of 74 working individuals. Multilevel results revealed that job satisfaction affected positive mood after work and that the spillover of job satisfaction onto positive and negative mood was stronger for employees high in trait-positive and trait-negative affectivity, respectively. Results also revealed that the effect of mood at work on job satisfaction weakened as the time interval between the measurements increased. Finally, positive (negative) moods at work affected positive (negative) moods experienced later at home.     

On bad mood and white bears: The effects of mood state on ability to suppress unwanted thoughts

Does temporary mood influence people's ability to engage in effective thought suppression? Based on past research on mental control and recent work on affective influences on social cognition, this experiment predicted and found that negative mood improved and positive mood impaired people's ability to suppress their thoughts when instructed not to think of a neutral concept, white bears. We also found clear evidence for ironic rebound effects: on a subsequent generative task, intrusions of the suppressed thought were greater in the negative than in the positive mood group. Participants received positive or negative feedback about performance on a supposed creativity task to induce positive or negative moods, and then engaged in two consecutive generative writing tasks, the first accompanied by instructions to suppress thoughts of white bears. Those in a negative group reported fewer “white bear” intrusions when attempting to suppress, but more “white bear” intrusions (an ironic rebound effect) in the subsequent task when the suppression instruction was lifted. The implications of these results for everyday tasks of mental control, and for recent affect–cognition theories are discussed.     

Mood Regulation and Memory: Repairing Sad Moods with Happy Memories

A total of 106 undergraduates participated in a study examining how individuals retrieve memories to repair negative moods. Participants first completed a measure of depression. Two weeks later, participants were assigned to either a sad or neutral mood induction. After mood induction, they recalled two memories, rated their affective responses to the memories, and indicated why they chose the valence and order of the memories. Consistent with mood-congruent recall, participants in the sad condition reported sadder memories than those in the neutral condition. However, participants with prior low depression scores tended to recall more positive second memories, whereas participants with higher prior depression scores recalled consecutive negative memories. Sixty-eight per cent of sad participants who retrieved a negative first and positive second memory mentioned mood repair as motivating the recruitment of the more positive second memory.     

Want information? How mood and performance perceptions alter the perceived value of information and influence information-seeking behaviors

Currently, it is not well understood when positive and negative moods would encourage and discourage the process of identifying and seeking out valuable information. Building upon the mood-as-a-resource hypothesis and the mood-behavior-model, this project reconciles mixed findings by investigating and finding support for the hypothesis that positive moods encourage seeking instrumental information when performance is perceived to be weak; whereas negative moods encourage it when performance is perceived to be strong. These effects are due to mood influencing the perceived value (i.e. instrumentality) of information and cannot be explained by arguing that mood altered the affective costs/benefits associated with the information. Overall, these results indicate that positive moods may help individuals acquire information to resolve an existing problem, whereas negative moods may help individuals acquire information when there is no apparent problem.     

DOING GOOD,FEELING GOOD: EXAMINING THE ROLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIORS IN CHANGING MOOD

This study investigates whether the altruism and courtesy dimensions of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) regulate mood at work. Social psychological theories of mood regulation suggest helping behaviors can improve individuals’ moods because helping others provides gratification and directs attention away from one's negative mood. We capture mood states prior to and following the enactment of OCBs using experience sampling methodology in a sample of managerial and professional employees over a 3‐week period. Results suggest altruism shows a pattern consistent with mood regulation; negative moods during the prior time period are associated with altruism and positive moods in the subsequent time period. The pattern of results for courtesy behaviors is only partially consistent with a mood regulation explanation. Consistent with theories of behavioral concordance, interaction results suggest individuals higher on Extroversion have more intense positive mood reactions after engaging in altruistic behaviors. Interactions with courtesy were not significant.     

Valence, arousal and word associations

This study aimed at testing the relative effects of valence and arousal on the generation of unusual first associates in response to non-emotional inducers. To examine this question, four specific moods varying along both the valence and the arousal dimensions were induced: happiness (positive mood, high arousal), serenity (positive mood, low arousal), anger (negative mood, high arousal) and sadness (negative mood, low arousal). The results indicate that the uniqueness of word-associations is influenced by arousal levels rather than by the valence of mood. No matter what the valence, high-arousing moods enhanced the production of unusual associates in contrast to low-arousing moods.