Positive mood can increase or decrease message scrutiny: the hedonic contingency view of mood and message processing

The role of mood in shaping reactions to smoking cessation messages among adults who smoke: a multimodal investigation

INTRODUCTION

Mood-tailored communications may help increase the effectiveness of smoking cessation messaging interventions. We used both self-report and psychophysiological measures to test the impact of mood on responses to cessation messages in adults who smoke.

METHODS

In a two-part (crowdsourcing and psychophysiological studies) study, the impact of 30 smoking cessation messages comprised of five themes (i.e., financial, health, quality-of-life, challenges in quitting, motivation to quit) were tested. In a crowdsourcing study, participants (N = 600) were randomly placed into one of three mood induction tasks (i.e., positive, negative, neutral), and then viewed the smoking cessation messages. After each message, they were asked to self-report their motivation to quit, message receptivity, and the perceived relevance of the messages. In an in-lab, psychophysiological study, participants (N = 42) completed the same tasks as the crowdsourcing participants but were monitored for heart rate, skin conductance, and eye-tracking while viewing the cessation messages. Using a multi-attribute decision-making model (MADM) using outcomes from both studies, messages were ranked for each mood state.

RESULTS

The top messages for participants in the positive mood condition included the challenges in quitting, financial costs/rewards, and motivations to quit themes. The top messages for participants assigned to the negative mood condition included the challenges in quitting, quality-of-life, and financial costs/rewards themes. For participants in the neutral mood condition, messages in the challenges in quitting and quality of life themes performed best.

CONCLUSIONS

Variations in the preferences of messages and themes by mood condition suggest that mood-tailored communication may increase the effectiveness of smoking cessation messages.

Is a diverse sample of college students motivated by compassionate, neutral, or fear-inducing language in COVID-19 crisis messages?

Objective: During public health emergencies such as the ongoing COVID-19 illness pandemic, it is essential to rapidly disseminate crisis messages which often contain embedded health directives. This study investigated which of three variants of the same messages (neutral tone, positive/compassionate tone, negative/fear-inducing tone) were most likely to motivate readers to engage in the health behavior proscribed in the message. Participants: Participants were 87 female and 41 male undergraduates at an urban university in the northeast U.S. Methods: A survey with three versions of eight different COVID messages containing health directives was administered. Results: Those who indicated stronger influence of positive/compassionate crisis messages (i.e., had higher Crisis Messages Survey scores) had higher adaptive health engagement scores, lower worry scores, and were likely to have had a past diagnosis of COVID-19. Moreover, a regression model including COVID-19 status and worry scores accounted for a significant proportion of variance in Crisis Messages Survey scores. Conclusions: Findings indicate that the use of neutral and compassionate language is optimal in motivating health behaviors embedded in university crisis messages.

An attention-based approach for assessing the effectiveness of emotion-evoking in immersive environment

Visual stimuli within an immersive virtual environment impact human perception and behavior in notably different ways compared to the real world. Previous studies have presented evidence indicating that individuals in various emotional states exhibit an unconscious attentional bias toward either positive or negative stimuli. However, whether these findings can be replicated within an immersive virtual environment remains uncertain. In this study, we devised an attention-based experiment to explore whether the correlation between participants' emotional states and the valence of visual stimuli influences their attentional bias. Participants (n=28) viewed 360-degree videos with varying valence levels (positive and negative) to evoke emotions. Subsequently, we utilized standard emotional human faces as stimuli to assess how the consistency in video valence and emotional faces affects reaction time (RT) in Go tasks and error rates in No-go tasks. We employed the Ex-Gaussian approach to analyze the RT data. The parameters-mu (μ), sigma (σ), and tau (τ)-were computed to denote response speed and attentional lapses, respectively. Our findings revealed a significant increase in tau (τ) when the valence of the video and emotional faces aligned. This suggests that the Go/No-go paradigm is effective in evaluating the impact of emotion-evoking stimuli within an immersive environment.

Happiness and high reliability develop affective trust in in-vehicle agents

The advancement of Conditionally Automated Vehicles (CAVs) requires research into critical factors to achieve an optimal interaction between drivers and vehicles. The present study investigated the impact of driver emotions and in-vehicle agent (IVA) reliability on drivers’ perceptions, trust, perceived workload, situation awareness (SA), and driving performance toward a Level 3 automated vehicle system. Two humanoid robots acted as the in-vehicle intelligent agents to guide and communicate with the drivers during the experiment. Forty-eight college students participated in the driving simulator study. The participants each experienced a 12-min writing task to induce their designated emotion (happy, angry, or neutral) prior to the driving task. Their affective states were measured before the induction, after the induction, and after the experiment by completing an emotion assessment questionnaire. During the driving scenarios, IVAs informed the participants about five upcoming driving events and three of them asked for the participants to take over control. Participants’ SA and takeover driving performance were measured during driving; in addition, participants reported their subjective judgment ratings, trust, and perceived workload (NASA-TLX) toward the Level 3 automated vehicle system after each driving scenario. The results suggested that there was an interaction between emotions and agent reliability contributing to the part of affective trust and the jerk rate in takeover performance. Participants in the happy and high reliability conditions were shown to have a higher affective trust and a lower jerk rate than other emotions in the low reliability condition; however, no significant difference was found in the cognitive trust and other driving performance measures. We suggested that affective trust can be achieved only when both conditions met, including drivers’ happy emotion and high reliability. Happy participants also perceived more physical demand than angry and neutral participants. Our results indicated that trust depends on driver emotional states interacting with reliability of the system, which suggested future research and design should consider the impact of driver emotions and system reliability on automated vehicles.

Effect of restaurant consumers' anticipated emotions on perceived value and behavioral intention in the COVID-19 context

While hospitality scholars have been conducting research on post-pandemic consumption recovery, the impact of the psychological consequences of COVID-19 on consumers' post-pandemic behavior remains insufficiently addressed. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the relationships among anticipated emotions, perceived value, perceived threat, and dining-out intention in the COVID-19 context. In this study, 621 restaurant consumers in China were surveyed and the data were analyzed with structural equation modeling. The results suggested that positive anticipated emotions affect perceived hedonic, utilitarian, and social values, whereas negative anticipated emotions affect hedonic value. Hedonic and utilitarian values then influence dining-out intention. Perceived threat in terms of perceived severity and susceptibility to COVID-19 was explored to moderate the impacts of hedonic and social values on the intention. This study contributes to the literature by identifying the positive, distinct roles of both anticipated emotions on consumer dining-out intention through perceived values and threats during the early recovery of COVID-19.

Is Purchase Behavior Different for Consumers with Long COVID?

COVID-19 has generated an uncertain environment, which has motivated changes in consumers' behavior globally. However, previous studies have not clarified if these effects are equally strong throughout the population. In this research, we want to analyze if there are behavioral differences between long-COVID consumers and others. For this purpose, we analyzed a sample of 522 consumers divided into three groups depending on their type of exposure to the disease: those with long COVID; ones that had recovered from COVID-19; and those that had never had COVID-19. The results show that the effect that COVID-19 has on purchase behavior differs depending on the type of exposure to the disease. In fact, those with long COVID experienced more pleasure when purchasing than other people, but they needed higher trust levels in the enterprises to purchase from them, since that reduces their perception of uncertainty. Furthermore, for long-COVID individuals, an organization's legitimacy level is even more important than for other consumer groups with less contact with the disease.

Emotion may predict susceptibility to fake news but emotion regulation does not seem to help

Misinformation is a serious concern for societies across the globe. To design effective interventions to combat the belief in and spread of misinformation, we must understand which psychological processes influence susceptibility to misinformation. This paper tests the widely assumed - but largely untested - claim that emotionally provocative headlines are associated with worse ability to identify true versus false headlines. Consistent with this proposal, we found correlational evidence that overall emotional response at the headline level is associated with diminished truth discernment, except for experienced anger which was associated with increased truth discernment. The second set of studies tested a popular emotion regulation intervention where people were asked to apply either emotional suppression or emotion reappraisal techniques when considering the veracity of several headlines. In contrast to the correlation results, we found no evidence that emotion regulation helped people distinguish false from true news headlines.

How Attitudes Impact the Continued Influence Effect of Misinformation: The Mediating Role of Discomfort

Past research suggests that people continue believing retracted misinformation more when it is consistent versus inconsistent with their attitudes. However, the psychological mechanism responsible for this phenomenon remains unclear. We predicted that retractions of attitude-consistent misinformation produce greater feelings of discomfort than retractions of attitude-inconsistent misinformation and that this discomfort predicts continued belief in and use of the misinformation. We report combined analyses across 10 studies testing these predictions. Seven studies (total N = 1,323) used a mediational framework and found that the more consistent misinformation was with participants' attitudes, the more discomfort was elicited by a retraction of the misinformation. Greater discomfort then predicted greater continued belief in the misinformation, which, in turn, predicted greater use of the misinformation when participants made relevant inferences. Three additional studies (total N = 574) utilized misattribution paradigms to demonstrate that the relation between discomfort and belief in misinformation is causal in nature.

The Role of Vocal Affect in Persuasion: The CIVA Model

Past research has largely focused on how emotional expressions provide information about the speaker’s emotional state, but has generally neglected vocal affect’s influence over communication effectiveness. This is surprising given that other nonverbal behaviors often influence communication between individuals. In the present theory paper, we develop a novel perspective called the Contextual Influences of Vocal Affect (CIVA) model to predict and explain the psychological processes by which vocal affect may influence communication through three broad categories of process: emotion origin/construal, changing emotions, and communication source inferences. We describe research that explores potential moderators (e.g., affective/cognitive message types, message intensity), and mechanisms (e.g., emotional assimilation, attributions, surprise) shaping the effects of vocally expressed emotions on communication. We discuss when and why emotions expressed through the voice can influence the effectiveness of communication. CIVA advances theoretical and applied psychology by providing a clear theoretical account of vocal affect’s diverse impacts on communication.

Emotional awareness, affective dysregulation, and bipolar spectrum psychopathology: A path analysis

Affective dysregulation is present in those with subsyndromal symptoms of hypomania and mania and prospectively predicts the development of bipolar spectrum disorders. A crucial, understudied area related to the experience and regulation of emotion in this population is emotional awareness - emotional clarity (Clarity) and attention to emotion (Attention). We examined whether scores on the Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS) were associated with deficits in emotional awareness and whether these deficits were associated with heightened intensity and instability of negative (NA) and positive affect (PA). Young adults (n=233), oversampled for high HPS scores completed self-reports and 14 days of experience sampling assessing high and low arousal NA and PA. HPS scores were associated with low Clarity and unassociated with Attention. High HPS scores were associated with greater high and low arousal NA intensity and instability only for those at low and mean levels of Attention. In contrast, there was a significant indirect association between HPS scores and intensity of high and low arousal NA and PA, as well as instability of high arousal NA, through low Clarity. Results highlighted that individual differences exist in the extent to which facets of emotional awareness differentially link scores on the HPS to emotional outcomes.

Consumer Response to Corporate Hypocrisy From the Perspective of Expectation Confirmation Theory

Based on the concept of hypocrisy perception, this paper studies and discusses consumers' response to corporate social responsibility (CSR) hypocrisy perception, discusses the formation of consumers' hypocrisy perception from the perspective of consumers' expectation of CSR, and originally reveals the psychological and behavioral mechanisms of the generation of negative emotions and their role in consumer response. The results are as follows: (1) consumers' CSR expectations and CSR perceived performance have a significant impact on their perception of hypocrisy; (2) consumers' perception of hypocrisy has a significant impact on their negative emotions; (3) consumers' negative emotions can have a significant impact on their attitudes and negative behaviors. The research results show that consumers' expectations of CSR activities can affect consumers' attitudes and behaviors, among which consumers' perceived CSR performance, perceived hypocrisy, and negative emotions play an important role. In the implementation of CSR activities, enterprises should avoid making consumers have excessive expectations and appease their negative emotions, so as to improve the implementation effect of CSR activities.

Influences of Position Justification on Perceived Bias: Immediate Effects and Carryover Across Persuasive Messages

The current research examined how people infer whether novel sources are biased based on their ability to justify their position. Across nine studies, when sources provided weak versus strong arguments, message recipients perceived the source as more biased. This effect held controlling for other possible inferences, such as lack of expertise or untrustworthiness. This research also examined whether perceived source bias on one message can carry over to ambiguously related future persuasive messages. Studies 6 to 8 demonstrated that perceivers use both the perceived bias from an initial message and the argument quality of the second message to determine a source's bias on the new topic. Finally, perceived bias carried over from an initial message can influence persuasion on a second topic (Study 9). Ultimately, the present work provides insight into factors that affect perceived bias and the dynamic consequences of those perceptions.

Effects of Regulatory Focus and Emotions on Information Preferences: The Affect-as-Information Perspective

This study explored the effects of regulatory focus and emotions on information preferences, specifically information selection preferences (experiment 1) and implicit information preferences (experiment 2). Our findings revealed that, in the promotion-focused condition, individuals preferred hedonic information (vs. functional information) when they were happy (vs. sad). However, emotions’ effects on information preferences were attenuated in the prevention-focused condition. In experiment 3, we tested whether regulatory focus and salient emotions influenced information preferences. The results suggested that regulatory focus and salient emotions had no significant interactive effect on information selection preferences, but had a significant interactive effect on implicit preferences. These results further our understanding of the psychological dynamic mechanism involved in information preferences, which augments the affect-as-information theory.

Are Positive Interventions Always Beneficial?

Can people improve their lives by smiling more, trying to have a better posture, and by thinking about good memories? Can individuals become more successful by deliberatively engaging in positive actions and thoughts? Do people feel better by following recommendations from naïve psychology? In the present article we discuss these questions, noting that although some popular interventions thought to be universally beneficial (e.g., inductions of happiness, self-affirmation, empowerment, self-distancing) can sometimes yield positive outcomes, at other times the outcomes can also be negative. Taking an empirical approach based on experimental evidence, we postulate that understanding the underlying processes discovered in the science of persuasion is the key for specifying why, when, and for whom these practical initiatives are more likely to work or to backfire.

The effects of gain- and loss-framed nutritional messages on children's healthy eating behaviour

OBJECTIVE

Despite extensive research on framing effects in public health communication, there is still a lack of knowledge on how gain frames v. loss frames can encourage healthy eating behaviour among children.

DESIGN

Drawing on the Prospect Theory as well as on the Reactivity of Embedded Food Cues in Advertising Model, an experiment exposed children to an audio-visual cartoon movie with gain-framed nutritional messages about eating fruit (gain condition), loss-framed nutritional messages about eating fruit (loss condition) or a message without any food (control group). Children's fruit intake was measured as the dependent variable. Children's awareness of gain- and loss-framed arguments was treated as mediators, while children's age and parents' self-reported food-related mediation styles were modelled as moderators.

SETTING

Vienna, Austria, in 2018.

PARTICIPANTS

Children aged 6-10 years (N 161).

RESULTS

Children in the gain frame group were more aware of gain-framed arguments, and children in the loss frame group were more aware of loss-framed arguments than those in the control group. However, only the mediator awareness of gain-framed arguments increased fruit intake. Additionally, there was a direct effect of the gain-framed message on fruit intake compared to the control group. The loss condition did not reveal such an effect. Neither parent's food-related mediation styles nor children's age moderated those results.

CONCLUSION

Gain-framing seems to be more effective in influencing children's healthy food choices compared to loss-framing. Implications for health communication strategies aimed at children are discussed.

Overcoming Barriers to Physical Activity in People with Osteoarthritis: the Role of Empathic Accuracy in Couples' Planning Discussions

BACKGROUND

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common chronic joint disease with significant individual and public health consequences. Physical activity can reduce OA symptoms, but patients often fall below recommended levels. Social support from an intimate partner can help them become more active; however, some couples are better than others at enacting effective support. We examined the role of empathic accuracy (EA)-the ability to understand another person's thoughts and feelings-in couples' ability to identify strategies for overcoming barriers to increasing activity. We also examined whether EA was associated with changes in affect and with emotion regulation and communication skills.

METHOD

Forty-two insufficiently physically active participants with OA identified a barrier to becoming more active in a recorded discussion with their partner. Next, both rated self and partner thoughts and feelings during the discussion. Raters coded EA and whether discussions reached a solution. Affect and skills were assessed with validated questionnaires.

RESULTS

An actor-partner interdependence model found higher EA for participants in couples who reached a solution compared to those who did not reach a solution in the allotted time. Both partners' EA was associated with reduced negative affect in the other member of the couple. Unexpectedly, EA in people with OA was associated with reduced positive affect for their partners. EA was positively associated with one skill: emotional clarity.

CONCLUSION

Findings from this early-stage study suggest that EA can help couples manage health-related issues together. Emotional clarity emerged as a skill related to EA, suggesting avenues for additional research.

Exploring Parents' Message Receipt and Message Enactment of the World's First Integrated Movement Behaviour Guidelines for Children and Youth

The Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for Children and Youth are novel in how they integrate the guideline recommendations for the full continuum of movement behaviours, from sleep to vigorous physical activity. Research suggests that the integrated guidelines strategy is perceived favourably, and this study is the first to compare this strategy to traditional segregated guidelines on its effectiveness to disseminate health information. Specifically, this study explored (1) the influence of the integrated guidelines strategy on parents' message receipt and message enactment to support their child meet the guidelines, and (2) the relationship between message receipt and message enactment in a youth movement behaviour context. In this prospective randomized experiment, parents (n= 162) were randomized to read integrated, segregated, or control guidelines and complete pre, post, and 2-week follow-up surveys. Repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed significantly higher message enactment outcomes among participants in the integrated guidelines group (p< .05). Message receipt and enactment outcomes were significantly correlated (r> .171, p< .05). These findings highlight that parents' initial receipt of a message is important for subsequent behaviour change in a youth movement behaviour context. Furthermore, the integrated guidelines strategy may have an advantage in promoting guideline update and should continue to be explored.

Effect of Extraneous Affect on Health Message Reception

People often avoid paying attention to health messages. One reason is that health messages can evoke negative affect, which produces avoidance. Prior efforts to reduce disengagement focused on changing message content or buffering the self from threat, producing mixed effects. The present studies test whether inducing positively valenced, low-arousal affect independently of the message or the self, labeled extraneous affect, promotes health message receptivity. Across four studies (total N = 1,447), participants who briefly meditated (vs. a control listening task) paid more attention to messages (Study 1). Increased positive valence facilitated attention, which subsequently increased message comprehension (Studies 2-4), whereas reduced arousal directly increased message comprehension. These effects generalized across extraneous affect manipulations, settings, information domains, and levels of message threat. Taken together, extraneous affect can be leveraged to promote message receptivity. This contributes to a theoretical understanding of how affect impacts persuasion.

Strategic Storytelling: When Narratives Help Versus Hurt the Persuasive Power of Facts

Stories are known to be powerful persuasive devices. Stories can capture attention, evoke emotion, and entrance listeners in a manner that reduces resistance to a message. Given the powerful persuasive potential of stories, one might deduce that it is best to embed one's facts within a story. In contrast to this perspective, the present research suggests that coupling facts with stories can either enhance or undermine persuasion. Specifically, to understand when facts benefit from the use of stories, this work provides a deeper examination of how counterargument reduction-a common explanation for the unique persuasive capabilities of stories-operates. Across three experiments, evidence is found for when it is more effective to embed facts within a story versus to use facts alone.

Affect and Decision Making: Insights and Predictions from Computational Models

In recent years interest in integrating the affective and decision sciences has skyrocketed. Immense progress has been made, but the complexities of each field, which can multiply when combined, present a significant obstacle. A carefully defined framework for integration is needed. The shift towards computational modeling in decision science provides a powerful basis and a path forward, but one whose synergistic potential will only be fully realized by drawing on the theoretical richness of the affective sciences. Reviewing research using a popular computational model of choice (the drift diffusion model), we discuss how mapping concepts to parameters reduces conceptual ambiguity and reveals novel hypotheses.

Global Processing Makes People Happier Than Local Processing

Past research demonstrates that mood can influence level of perceptual processing (global vs. local). The present research shows that level of perceptual processing can influence mood as well. In four studies, we manipulated people's level of perceptual processing using a Navon letter task (Study 1), landscape scenery (Study 2), and Google Maps Street View images (Studies 3 and 4). Results from these studies and a meta-analysis support the conclusion that global processing results in higher happiness than local processing. In conjunction with previous findings that mood affects level of cognitive processing, these results suggest that the link between level of processing and mood may be reciprocal and bidirectional.

The influence of mood and information processing strategies on recall, persuasion, and intention to get a flu vaccine

This study investigates the interactions between mood (positive/negative) and information processing style (item-specific/relational/narrative processing) on responses to three types of advertising messages (ungrouped list/grouped list/narrative ads). A mood congruency effect was postulated and found to influence recall, persuasion and behavioral intention. Results supported the hypothesis that message effectiveness was moderated by mood in the direction of congruency. That is, participants in a positive mood recalled more information, were more persuaded, and were more likely to adopt the recommended behavior after exposure to advertisements with a grouped list format. Evidence regarding similarity of factors influencing relational and narrative processing is presented.

Emotion Decoding and Incidental Processing Fluency as Antecedents of Attitude Certainty

Previous research demonstrates that attitude certainty influences the degree to which an attitude changes in response to persuasive appeals. In the current research, decoding emotions from facial expressions and incidental processing fluency, during attitude formation, are examined as antecedents of both attitude certainty and attitude change. In Experiment 1, participants who decoded anger or happiness during attitude formation expressed their greater attitude certainty, and showed more resistance to persuasion than participants who decoded sadness. By manipulating the emotion decoded, the diagnosticity of processing fluency experienced during emotion decoding, and the gaze direction of the social targets, Experiment 2 suggests that the link between emotion decoding and attitude certainty results from incidental processing fluency. Experiment 3 demonstrated that fluency in processing irrelevant stimuli influences attitude certainty, which in turn influences resistance to persuasion. Implications for appraisal-based accounts of attitude formation and attitude change are discussed.

Computer Simulation as a Method of Further Developing a Theory: Simulating the Elaboration Likelihood Model

Implemented specifically as a method of theory development, computer simulation allows clarification of a theory and investigation of its implications. Using Petty and Cacioppo's (1986a, 1986b) Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), the use of simulation in formalizing a theory, testing the simulation model, and conducting simulation experiments is demonstrated. With formalization of the theory in the form of a block diagram, the entire pattern of causal effects in the ELM core statements becomes visible at a glance. The simulation model was tested through comparing simulated individuals' reactions to stimuli with the experimental and statistical observed reactions of real participants in experiments. The simulation experiments revealed a dynamic attitude shift in dependency on the development of processing intensity.

Positive Mood and the Perception of Variability Within and Between Groups

Three experiments investigated the effects of positive mood on perceptions of variability within and between groups. Participants formed impressions of two different and highly variable groups under a neutral or positive mood. When participants expected to learn about both groups, positive mood increased perceived intergroup similarity but did not affect perceived intragroup variability. In contrast, when participants expected to learn about only one group, judgments of intergroup and intragroup similarity were both affected by mood. Mood and the intergroup context influenced the nature and degree of information processing and resultant judgments of variability in social groups.

Effects of the Activation of Affective Information on Stereotyping: When Sadness Increases Stereotype Use

Two studies explored the impact of mere activation of affective information on the use of stereotypes in social judgment. These studies provided consistent results showing that the activation of information related to sadness increases reliance on stereotypes, whereas the activation of information related to happiness decreases it. These results were obtained in the absence of affective state changes among the participants and with the use of two different priming procedures (Study 1: scrambled sentences, Study 2: subliminal priming) and two different judgment tasks (Study 1: impression formation, Study 2: guilt judgment). Complementing the informational view of affective states, it is suggested that affective information of which people are not conscious activates behavioral tendencies of approach or of avoidance associated with the related emotion.

One Person’s Enjoyment is Another Person’s Boredom: Mood Effects on Responsiveness to Framing

This study examined the effects of induced mood on susceptibility to question-framing effects. Participants were placed in either a happy, sad, or neutral mood and performed an impression-formation task under different phrasings of Martin, Ward, Achee, and Wyer’s (1993) stop rule instructions. For the enjoy rule, participants were told to stop reading behaviors either when they no longer enjoyed the task or when they became bored with the task. For the performance-based rule, participants were told to stop either when they had enough information to form an impression of the target or when they did not need to collect additional information. Results indicated that neutral mood participants were strongly influenced by the framing of the stop rule. Participants in valenced moods, however, were unaffected by framing, suggesting that they based their decisions about when to stop solely on the informational value of their moods. The implications of these results are discussed.

Positivity Can Cue Familiarity

Given that familiarity is closely associated with positivity, the authors sought evidence for the idea that positivity would increase perceived familiarity. In Experiment 1, smiling and thus positively perceived novel faces were significantly more likely to be incorrectly judged as familiar than novel faces with neutral expressions. In Experiment 2, subliminal association with positive affect (a positively valenced prime) led to false recognition of novel words as familiar. In Experiment 3, validity judgments, known to be influenced by familiarity, were more likely to occur if participants were in happy mood states than neutral mood states. Despite their different paradigms and approaches, the results of these three studies converge on the idea that, at least under certain circumstances, the experience of positivity itself can signal familiarity, perhaps because the experience of familiarity is typically positive.

Contingent Effects of Anxiety on Message Elaboration and Persuasion

This research examined the effects of anxiety on subsequent message processing. Experiment 1, conducted just before the hand-over of Hong Kong to China in 1997, manipulated anxiety by presenting Hong Kong participants with negative or positive potential consequences of the handover. Consistent with research documenting the cognitive deficits produced by anxiety, lower levels of message elaboration were obtained under high (vs. low) anxiety for an anxiety-unrelated message. However, for an anxiety-related message (e.g., a message about the upcoming hand-over ceremony), anxiety did not lower message elaboration, presumably because increased processing motivation compensated for cognitive deficits. Experiment 2 then revealed that, even for a motivating anxiety-related message (regarding job prospects), high anxiety results in a different type of processing compared to low anxiety. Specifically, capacity pressures caused heuristic cues in the message to bias the nature of systematic processing under high-anxiety conditions.

Individual Differences in Emotional Experience: Mapping Available Scales to Processes

Increasing interest in individual differences related to emotion is evident in the recent appearance of a large number of self-report instruments designed to assess aspects of the feeling experience. In this article, the authors review a sample of 18 of these scales and report technical information on each (e.g., length, format, reliability, construct validity, and correlates). They propose that this domain of individual differences can be usefully structured into five conceptual categories, including measures of absorption, attention, clarity, intensity, and expression. The measures were administered to a sample of individuals, and the coherence of the proposed categories was examined through hierarchical cluster analyses. The results confirmed the proposed structure of this domain of individual difference measures. The authors argue for the usefulness of an individual differences approach to theory testing and specify some of the information-processing roles that might be played by the categories of individual differences found in the data.

The Impact of Attitude Accessibility on Elaboration of Persuasive Messages

Two experiments were conducted to examine the impact of attitude accessibility on elaboration of persuasive appeals. In Experiment 1, the accessibility of attitudes toward nuclear power was measured using response latencies. Participants were then presented with a persuasive message that contained either strong or weak arguments against the use of nuclear power. Argument quality had a greater impact on persuasion when attitudes were high in accessibility than when they were low in accessibility. In Experiment 2, the accessibility of attitudes toward vegetarianism was experimentally manipulated by varying the number of times participants expressed their attitudes toward vegetarianism. Participants then read a pro-vegetarianism persuasive message that contained either strong or weak arguments. Again, argument quality had a greater impact on persuasion when accessibility was high than when it was low. Taken together, both experiments suggest that increased message topic attitude accessibility leads to enhanced elaboration of persuasive messages on those topics.

Affect and Stereotypic Thinking: A Test of the Mood-and-General-Knowledge Model

Happy, sad, or neutral participants evaluated the likelihood of a suspect’s guilt. The suspect’s membership was or was not stereotypically associated with the misconduct of which he was accused. Participants also were provided with specific case information that varied in its implications (ambiguous implying either the suspect’s guilt or innocence). The results show that when stereotypes clearly contradict specific information, happy people rely on the latter and no longer use stereotypes. The general assumption of a greater reliance on stereotypes under happiness was found to be restricted to “slight inconsistency.” Overall, this study supports the mood-and-general-knowledge (MAGK) model. In contrast, even though sadness decreases reliance on stereotypes, it does not increase careful processing of incoming information, as is generally assumed in the literature.

Negative Affect Can Increase or Decrease Message Scrutiny: The Affect Interpretation Hypothesis

Applying insights from the mood-as-information and mood-as-input models to persuasion, it was hypothesized that negative (vs. neutral) affect would increase or decrease message processing depending on how recipients interpret their affect. Recipients who are (vs. are not) likely to question the legitimacy of the message were predicted to process to a low (vs. high) extent when experiencing negative affect. High salience of a judgment-irrelevant cause for negative affect was predicted to render affect uninformative and hence discount its effects on processing. These hypotheses were supported in two experiments with 388 university students, in which the likelihood of questioning message legitimacy was operationalized as high versus low vested interest (smokers vs. nonsmokers reading an antismoking appeal; Experiment 1) or by providing versus not providing a cue to the communicator being propagandist (Experiment 2).

The Impact of Affect on Out-Group Judgments Depends on Dominant Information-Processing Styles: Evidence From Incidental and Integral Affect Paradigms

Two studies tested the affect-as-cognitive-feedback model, in which positive and negative affective states are not uniquely associated with particular processing styles, but rather serve as feedback about currently accessible processing styles. The studies extend existing work by investigating (a) both incidental and integral affect, (b) out-group judgments, and (c) downstream consequences. We manipulated processing styles and either incidental (Study 1) or integral (Study 2) affect and measured perceptions of out-group homogeneity. Positive (relative to negative) affect increased out-group homogeneity judgments when global processing was primed, but under local priming, the effect reversed (Studies 1 and 2). A similar interactive effect emerged on attributions, which had downstream consequences for behavioral intentions (Study 2). These results demonstrate that both incidental and integral affect do not directly produce specific processing styles, but rather influence thinking by providing feedback about currently accessible processing styles.

The Arithmetic of Emotion: Integration of Incidental and Integral Affect in Judgments and Decisions

Research has demonstrated that two types of affect have an influence on judgment and decision making: incidental affect (affect unrelated to a judgment or decision such as a mood) and integral affect (affect that is part of the perceiver’s internal representation of the option or target under consideration). So far, these two lines of research have seldom crossed so that knowledge concerning their combined effects is largely missing. To fill this gap, the present review highlights differences and similarities between integral and incidental affect. Further, common and unique mechanisms that enable these two types of affect to influence judgment and choices are identified. Finally, some basic principles for affect integration when the two sources co-occur are outlined. These mechanisms are discussed in relation to existing work that has focused on incidental or integral affect but not both.