On being happy but fearing failure: The effects of mood on self-handicapping strategies

Does temporary mood influence people’s tendency to engage in self-handicapping behaviors? Based on past research on self-handicapping and recent work on affect and social behaviors, this experiment predicted and found that positive mood significantly increased the tendency to engage in two kinds of self-handicapping strategies. Participants (N = 94) first received contingent or non-contingent positive feedback about performance on a task of ‘cognitive abilities’, and then underwent a positive, neutral, or negative mood induction using video films. Self-handicapping was assessed in terms of their subsequent preference for (a) drinking a performance-enhancing, or performance-inhibiting herbal tea, and (b) engaging or not engaging in performance-enhancing cognitive practice. As predicted, happy mood and non-contingent feedback significantly increased self-handicapping on both measures. The implications of these results for everyday performance tasks, and for recent affect-cognition theories, are discussed.