"Mood and context-dependence: Positive mood increases and negative mood decreases the effect of context on perception": Retraction of Avramova, Stapel, and Lerouge (2010)

Reports the retraction of "Mood and context-dependence: Positive mood increases and negative mood decreases the effects of context on perception" by Yana R. Avramova, Diederik A. Stapel and Davy Lerouge (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010[Aug], Vol 99[2], 203-214). This retraction follows the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel (further information on the investigation can be found here: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/). The Levelt Committee has determined data supplied by Diederik A. Stapel to be fraudulent. The other co-authors were unaware of his actions and were not involved in the collection of the fraudulent data. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2010-14719-001.) Five studies show that mood affects context-dependence, such that negative mood promotes attention to a salient target, whereas positive mood enhances attention to both target and context. Judgments of temperature (Study 1), weight (Study 2), and size (Studies 3 and 4) were more strongly affected by the context in a positive than in a negative mood. Moreover, these effects extend to the social domain: When perceiving a target person's emotions, happy people were more influenced by the context than were sad people (Study 5). Thus, positive mood enhanced, and negative mood reduced, the magnitude of perceptual context effects. The results suggest that this pattern is not easily explained in terms of effort or depth of processing differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).