Affective Inﬂuences on Cognition - lp.wileypub.comlp.wileypub.com/HandbookPsychology/SampleChapters/Volume4.pdf · Affective Inﬂuences on Cognition: Mood Congruence, Mood Dependence,

CHAPTER 3

Affective Influences on Cognition

Mood Congruence, Mood Dependence,and Mood Effects on Processing Strategies

JOSEPH P. FORGAS AND ERIC EICH

INTRODUCTION 61HISTORY AND BACKGROUND 61MOOD CONGRUENCE 62MOOD DEPENDENCE 68

MOOD EFFECTS ON PROCESSING STRATEGIES 72CLOSING COMMENTS 78REFERENCES 78

INTRODUCTION

The interplay between feeling and thinking has been asubject of scholarly discussion and spirited debate sinceantiquity. The last few decades have witnessed a mountinginterest in the impact of affective or mood states on learn-ing, memory, decision making, and allied cognitive pro-cesses. Much of this interest has initially focused on twophenomena: mood-congruent cognition —the observationthat a given mood promotes the processing of informa-tion that possesses a similar affective tone or valence, andmood-dependent memory —the observation that informa-tion encoded in a particular mood is most retrievablein that mood, irrespective of the information’s affectivevalence. More recently, and especially since the publica-tion of the previous edition of this Handbook , numerousstudies have found that positive and negative moods canalso influence memory due to their effects on informationprocessing styles or strategies. This chapter examines the

This chapter was prepared with the support of awards to the firstauthor from the Australian Research Council and the Alexandervon Humboldt Foundation, and with the aid of grants to thesecond author from the National Institute of Mental Healthand the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council ofCanada. The chapter also profited from the expert advice andassistance provided by Joseph Ciarrochi, Joanne Elliott, DawnMacaulay, Stephanie Moylan, Patrick Vargas, and Joan Webb.

history and current status of research on mood congru-ence, mood dependence, and mood effects on processingstrategies, with a view to clarifying what is known abouteach of these phenomena, and why they are worth know-ing about.

HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

From Plato to Pascal, a long line of Western philosophershas recognized the capacity of affect to color the way peo-ple remember the past, experience the present, and forecastthe future. Psychologists, however, were relatively lateto acknowledge this reality, despite a number of promis-ing early leads (e.g., Rapaport, 1942/1961; Razran, 1940).Indeed, it is only within the past few decades that the inter-play of affect and cognition received growing empiricalattention (see LeDoux, 1996). One reason for the endur-ing neglect of research on affect may be the long-heldbelief that “passions” have a potentially dangerous, inva-sive influence on rational thinking. Fortunately, advancesin cognitive psychology and neuroscience support the rad-ically different view that affect is a useful and even essen-tial component of adaptive social thinking (Adolphs &Damasio, 2001; Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Forgas, 2006).

Psychology’s late start in exploring the affect/cognitioninterface also reflects the fact that neither behaviorismnor cognitivism—the two paradigms that dominated the

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62 Modulatory Processes

discipline throughout the 20th century—ascribed muchimportance to affect (for detailed discussion of affect-related concepts, see Russell & Lemay, 2000). For somebehaviorists, all unobservable mental events such asaffect were, by definition, beyond the bounds of scien-tific psychology (Watson, 1929). The emerging cognitiveparadigm initially also had little interest in affective phe-nomena (but see Antrobus, 1970). If considered at all,affect was seen as a disruptive influence on “proper”—read “emotionless” or “cold”—thought processes. In con-trast, current research shows that affect plays an essentialrole in how information about the world is processed andrepresented. Affect underlies the cognitive representationof most social experiences (Forgas, 1979), and emotionalresponses can serve as an organizing principle in cognitivecategorization (Niedenthal & Halberstadt, 2000).

Early Theories and Research Linking Affectand Cognition

Affect plays a central role in psychoanalytic theory. Freudsuggested that affect has a dynamic, invasive qualitythat can infuse thinking and judgments unless adequatelycontrolled. In a pioneering study, Feshbach and Singer(1957) induced fear in subjects through electric shocksand then instructed some of them to suppress their fear.Fearful subjects’ thoughts about another person showedgreater mood congruence, and ironically (Wegner, 1994),this effect was even greater when subjects were trying tosuppress their fear. Feshbach and Singer (1957) explainedthis in terms of psychodynamic projection and proposedthat “suppression of fear facilitates the tendency to projectfear onto another social object” (p. 286).

Although radical behaviorism outlawed the study ofsubjective experiences, affect did receive some attention.Watson’s work with Little Albert was among the first toshow affect congruence in conditioned responses (Watson,1929; Watson & Rayner, 1920). Reactions toward a neu-tral stimulus, such as a furry rabbit, became more fearfulafter an association had been established between the rab-bit and fear-arousing stimuli, such as a loud noise. Watsonthought that most complex affective reactions acquiredthroughout life are established as a result of just suchcumulative patterns of incidental associations. In anotherclassic study, Razran (1940) showed that subjects eval-uated sociopolitical messages more favorably when in agood than in a bad mood. Far ahead of their time, Razran’sstudies, and those reported by other investigators (e.g.,Bousfield, 1950), provided early empirical demonstrationsof mood congruence.

The conditioning approach (see also Miller & Grace,this volume) was subsequently extended by Byrne andClore (1970; Clore & Byrne, 1974) to explore affec-tive influences on interpersonal attitudes. In these studies,aversive environments (as unconditioned stimuli) sponta-neously produced negative affective reactions (as uncon-ditioned responses), and a person encountered in thisaversive environment (the conditioned stimulus) subse-quently received more negative evaluations (a conditionedresponse) (e.g., Gouaux, 1971; Gouaux & Summers, 1973;Griffitt, 1970). Interestingly, Berkowitz and his colleagues(Berkowitz, Jaffee, Jo, & Troccoli, 2000) have suggestedthat these early associationist ideas retain a powerful influ-ence on current theorizing, as we shall see below.

MOOD CONGRUENCE

The research reviewed in this section shows that affectivestates often produce powerful assimilative or congruenteffects on the way people acquire, remember, and interpretinformation. However, we also show that these effectsare not universal, but depend on a variety of situationaland contextual variables that recruit different information-processing strategies. Accordingly, one of the main aimsof modern research, and of this review, is to clarify whymood-congruent effects on cognition emerge under certaincircumstances but not others. We begin by consideringtwo recent theories of mood congruence, affect primingand affect-as-information. We then outline an integrativetheory that is designed to explain the different ways inwhich affect can have an impact on cognition in generaland on social cognition in particular. Finally, empiricalevidence is examined, which reveals the essential role thatdifferent processing strategies play in the occurrence—ornonoccurrence—of mood congruence.

Theories of Mood Congruence

Two kinds of cognitive theories have been proposed toaccount for mood congruence: memory based theories(e.g., the affect priming model; see Bower & Forgas,2000), and inferential theories (e.g., the affect-as-infor-mation model; see Clore, Gasper, & Garvin, 2001: Clore& Storbeck, 2006).

The affect priming account , proposed by Bower (1981),argues that affect is integrally linked to an associative net-work of memory representations. An affective state maythus selectively and automatically prime associated rep-resentations previously linked to that affect, and these

Affective Influences on Cognition: Mood Congruence, Mood Dependence, and Mood Effects on Processing Strategies 63

concepts should be more likely to be used in subsequentconstructive cognitive tasks. Early studies provided strongsupport for the concept of affective priming . For example,people induced to feel good or bad tend to selectivelyremember more mood-congruent details from their child-hood, and recall more mood-congruent events they hadrecorded in diaries for the past few weeks (Bower, 1981).Mood congruence was also observed in subjects’ inter-pretations of social behaviors (Forgas, Bower, & Krantz,1984) and in their impressions of other people (Forgas &Bower, 1987).

However, subsequent research showed that moodcongruence is subject to several boundary conditions (seeBlaney, 1986; Bower, 1987; Singer & Salovey, 1988).Mood-congruent effects were most reliable when (a)moods were intense (Bower & Mayer, 1985), (b) therewas meaningful, causal connection between mood andthe cognitive task (Bower, 1991), and (c) the tasks wereself-referential (Blaney, 1986). It also seems that mood-congruent effects are most reliably obtained when tasksrequire a high degree of open and constructive processing,such as inferences, associations, impression formation,and interpersonal behaviors (e.g., Bower & Forgas, 2000;Mayer, Gaschke, Braverman, & Evans, 1992).

Such constructive tasks provide people with a richset of encoding and retrieval cues, and, thus, they allowaffect to more readily function as a differentiating context(Bower, 1992; Fiedler, 1990). When tasks require little orno constructive processing, such as recognition tasks orthe reflexive reproduction of preexisting attitudes, thereis little opportunity for affectively primed information toinfluence the outcome. The consequence of affect primingis affect infusion —the tendency for judgments, memories,thoughts, and behaviors to become more mood congruent(Forgas, 1995, 2002, 2006). Later, we will describe anintegrative theory that emphasizes the role of information-processing strategies in moderating mood congruence.

Alternative, affect-as-information (AAI) models, ad-vanced by Schwarz and Clore (1983, 1988; Clore &Storbeck, 2006), suggest that “rather than computing ajudgment on the basis of recalled features of a target,individuals may . . . ask themselves: ‘how do I feel aboutit? [and] in doing so, they may mistake feelings due toa preexisting state as a reaction to the target” (Schwarz,1990, p. 529). According to this view, mood is due toan inferential error, as people misattribute a preexistingaffective state to a judgmental target. The predictions ofthe AAI model are often indistinguishable from earlierconditioning research by Clore and Byrne (1974). Whereasthe conditioning account emphasized blind temporal and

spatial contiguity as responsible for affect congruence, theAAI model, rather less parsimoniously, suggests a misdi-rected internal inferential process as producing the sameeffects (see Berkowitz et al., 2000). The AAI model alsodraws heavily on research on misattribution and judgmen-tal heuristics (see Diederich & Busemeyer, this volume),suggesting that affective states function as heuristic cuesin informing people’s judgments.

It seems, however, that people rely on affect as a heuris-tic cue only when “the task is of little personal relevance,when little other information is available, when problemsare too complex to be solved systematically, and whentime or attentional resources are limited” (Fiedler, 2001,p. 175). Perhaps the earliest and still most compellingexperiment supporting the AAI model involved telephon-ing respondents on pleasant (happy mood) or unpleasant(sad mood) days and asking them a variety of unexpectedand unfamiliar questions (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). In thissituation, subjects have little personal interest or involve-ment in responding to a stranger, and they have neitherthe motivation, time, nor cognitive resources to engagein extensive processing. Relying on prevailing affect as aheuristic cue to infer a response seems a reasonable strat-egy under such circumstances. In a conceptually similarstudy, Forgas and Moylan (1987) asked almost 1,000 peo-ple to complete an attitude survey on the sidewalk outsidea cinema in which they had just watched either a happyor a sad film. Happy theatergoers gave much more pos-itive responses than did their sad counterparts. As in thestudy by Schwarz and Clore (1983), respondents presum-ably had little time, interest, motivation, or capacity toengage in elaborate processing, and so relied on their affectas a heuristic shortcut to infer a reaction.

The AAI model also has some serious shortcomings.The model mainly applies to mood congruence in eval-uative judgments, but it has difficulty accounting for theinfusion of affect into other cognitive processes, includingattention, learning, and memory. Claims that the modelis uniquely supported by findings that only unattributedaffect produces mood congruence are dubious (Cloreet al., 2001; Schwarz & Clore, 1988), because researchshows that mood congruence, however caused, can beeliminated by instructing subjects to focus on their internalstates (Berkowitz et al., 2000).

Moreover, the informational value of affective statescannot be regarded as “given” and permanent, but, instead,it depends on the situational context (Martin, 2000). TheAAI model also has nothing to say about the process ofhow cues other than affect (such as memories, features ofthe stimulus, etc.) are constructively combined to produce


a response. In that sense, the AAI model is really a theoryof nonjudgment or aborted judgment, rather than a theoryof judgment. It now appears that, in most realistic cogni-tive tasks, affect priming rather than affect as informationis the main mechanism producing mood congruence.

Toward an Integrative Theory: The AffectInfusion Model

As this brief review shows, a comprehensive explanationof mood congruence also needs to specify the circum-stances that promote or prevent the effect, and should alsodefine the conditions likely to trigger either affect primingor affect-as-information mechanisms.

The affect infusion model or AIM (Forgas, 1995), fol-lowing Fiedler (1991), suggests that mood congruence ismost likely to occur when circumstances call for an open,constructive style of information processing, involving theactive elaboration of the available stimulus details andrequiring the use of memory-based information in thisprocess. According to the AIM, (a) the extent and natureof affect infusion should be dependent on the kind ofprocessing strategy that is used, and (b) all things beingequal, people should use the least effortful and simplestprocessing strategy capable of producing a response. Asthis model has been described in detail elsewhere (Forgas,1995, 2002), only a brief overview will be included here.

The AIM identifies four processing strategies that varyaccording to both the degree of openness or constructive-ness of the information-search strategy and the amount ofeffort exerted in seeking a solution. The first, direct-accessstrategy involves the retrieval of preexisting responsesand is most likely when the task is highly familiar andwhen no strong situational or motivational cues call formore elaborate processing. As people possess a rich storeof such preformed attitudes and judgments that requireno constructive processing, affect infusion should notoccur. The second, motivated-processing strategy involveshighly selective and targeted thinking that is dominated bya particular motivational objective. This strategy also pre-cludes open information search, and should be imperviousto affect infusion (Clark & Isen, 1982). Indeed, moti-vated processing may also produce a reversal of mood-congruent effects (Berkowitz et al., 2000; Forgas, 1991;Forgas & Fiedler, 1996; Sedikides, 1994).

The remaining two processing strategies require con-structive and open-ended information-search strategies,and, thus, they facilitate affect infusion. Heuristic pro-cessing is likely when the task is simple, familiar, of littlepersonal relevance, and cognitive capacity is limited and

there are no motivational or situational pressures for moredetailed processing. This may be the case when people areasked to respond to unexpected questions in a telephonesurvey (Schwarz & Clore, 1983) or are asked to respondto a street survey (Forgas & Moylan, 1987). Heuristic pro-cessing can produce affect infusion when people rely onaffect as a simple inferential cue, and employ the “howdo I feel about it” heuristic to produce a response (Cloreet al., 2001; Clore & Storbeck, 2006; Schwarz & Clore,1988).

When simpler strategies such as direct access, moti-vated, or heuristic processing prove inadequate, peopleneed to engage in substantive processing to satisfy thedemands of the task at hand. Substantive processingrequires individuals to select and interpret novel informa-tion and combine this information with their preexisting,memory-based knowledge structures in order to computeand produce a response. Substantive processing is aninherently open and constructive strategy, and affect mayselectively prime or enhance the accessibility of relatedthoughts, memories, and interpretations (Forgas, 1994,1999a, 1999b).

The AIM makes the interesting and counterintu-itive prediction that affect infusion—and, hence, moodcongruence—should be greater when more extensive andelaborate processing is required to deal with a more com-plex, demanding task. Several studies that we will soonreview support this prediction. The AIM also identifiesa range of contextual variables related to the task , theperson , and the situation that jointly influence processingchoices (Forgas, 2002; Rusting, 2001; Smith & Petty,1995). The AIM also recognizes that affect itself can influ-ence processing choices (Bless, 2000; Bless & Fiedler,2006). These effects will be discussed in more detail in asubsequent section. The key prediction of the AIM is theabsence of affect infusion when direct access or motivatedprocessing is used, and the presence of affect infusion dur-ing heuristic and substantive processing. The implicationsof this model have now been supported in a number of theexperiments considered below.

Evidence for Mood Congruence

This section reviews a number of empirical studies thatillustrate mood congruence in learning, memory, percep-tions, judgments, and inferences.

Mood Congruence in Attention and Learning

Affect may have a significant influence on what peoplewill pay attention to and learn (Niedenthal & Setterlund,


1994). Due to the selective activation of an affect-relatedassociative base, mood-congruent information may receivegreater attention and be processed more extensively thanaffectively neutral or incongruent information (Bower,1981). People spend longer reading mood-congruentmaterial, linking it into a richer network of primed asso-ciations, and, as a result, they are better able to remembersuch information (see Bower & Forgas, 2000). Theseeffects occur because “concepts, words, themes, and rulesof inference that are associated with that emotion willbecome primed and highly available for use . . . [in] . . .

top-down or expectation-driven processing . . . [acting]. . . as interpretive filters of reality” (Bower, 1983, p. 395).Consistent with this notion, depressed psychiatric patientstend to selectively pay greater attention to negative infor-mation (Koester, Raedt, Goeleven, Franck, & Crombez,2005), show better learning and memory for depressivewords (Watkins, Mathews, Williamson, & Fuller, 1992;Moritz & Glaescher, 2005), and show a selective mood-congruent bias in sensitivity to negative facial expressions,a bias that disappears once the depressive episode is over(Bradley & Mathews, 1983). There is some evidence thatnondepressed adults also show a selective bias in gazingmore at mood-congruent faces, but this effect tends todiminish in older adults (Isaacovitz, Toner, Goren, &Wilson, 2008). However, mood-congruent learning andattention is seldom seen in patients suffering from anxiety(Burke & Mathews, 1992; Watts & Dalgleish, 1991),perhaps because anxious people tend to use particularlyvigilant and motivated processing strategies to defendagainst anxiety arousing information (Ciarrochi & Forgas,1999; Mathews & MacLeod, 1994). Thus, as predictedby the AIM, different processing strategies appear to playa crucial role in mediating mood congruence in learningand attention.

Mood Congruence in Memory

Several experiments found that people are better at remem-bering their childhood, as well as more recent autobio-graphical memories, that match their prevailing mood(Bower, 1981; Miranda & Kihlstrom, 2005; see also Marsh& Roediger, this volume). Depressed patients display asimilar pattern, preferentially remembering aversive child-hood experiences, and, in general, demonstrating bettermemory for negative information (Direnfeld & Roberts,2006), a memory bias that disappears once depression isbrought under control (Lewinsohn & Rosenbaum, 1987).Consistent with the AIM, these mood-congruent memoryeffects also emerge when people try to recall complexsocial stimuli (Fiedler, 2001; Forgas, 1993). For example,

depressed individuals have enhanced memory for neg-ative rather than positive facial expressions (Gilboa-Schechtman, Erhard-Weiss, & Jeczemien, 2002).

Research using implicit tests of memory, which donot require conscious recollection of past experience, alsoprovides evidence of mood congruence. For example,depressed people tend to complete more word stems (e.g.,can) with negative than with positive words they havestudied earlier (e.g., cancer versus candy ; Ruiz-Caballero,& Gonzalez, 1994). Similar results have been obtainedin other studies involving experimentally induced statesof happiness or sadness (Tobias, Kihlstrom, & Schacter,1992). Mood-congruence is also an important cue whenpeople encode music and film soundtracks (Boltz, 2004).

Mood Congruence in Associations and Inferences

Cognitive tasks often require us to “go beyond the infor-mation given,” using associations and inferences whendealing with complex and ambiguous social information(Heider, 1958). The greater availability of mood-consistentassociations can have a marked influence on how complexor ambiguous details are interpreted (Bower & Forgas,2000; Clark & Waddell, 1983). For example, when askedto freely associate to the cue life, happy subjects gener-ate more positive than negative associations (e.g., love andfreedom versus struggle and death), whereas sad subjectsdo the opposite (Bower, 1981). Mood-congruent associa-tions also emerge when emotional subjects daydream ormake up stories about fictional characters depicted in theThematic Apperception Test (Bower, 1981).

Such mood-congruent effects can have a markedimpact on many social judgments, including perceptionsof human faces (Gilboa-Schechtman et al., 2002; Schiff-enbauer, 1974), impressions of people (Forgas & Bower,1987), and self-perceptions (Sedikides, 1995). However,several studies have shown that this associative effect isdiminished as the targets to be judged become more clear-cut, and thus require less constructive processing (e.g.,Forgas, 1994, 1995), again confirming that open, construc-tive processing is crucial for mood congruence to occur.Mood-primed associations are also important in clinicalstates: Anxious people tend to interpret spoken homo-phones such as pane/pain or dye/die in the more anxious,negative direction (Eysenck, MacLeod, & Mathews,1987), consistent with the greater activation these mood-congruent concepts receive.

Mood Congruence in Self-Judgments

Affective states have a strong congruent influence onself-related judgments, and positive affect improves and


negative affect impairs the valence of self-conceptions(Sedikides, 1995). In one study (Forgas, Bower, & Moy-lan, 1990), happy students were more likely to claim creditfor success in a recent exam, and made more internal andstable attributions for their high test scores, but they wereless willing to assume personal responsibility for failure.In contrast, those in a negative mood blamed themselvesmore for failure and took less credit for success (seeFigure 3.1). These findings were also replicated in a studyby Detweiler-Bedell and Detweiler-Bedell (2006), whoconclude, consistent with the AIM, that “constructiveprocessing accompanying most self-judgments is criticalin producing mood-congruent perceptions of personalsuccess” (p. 196).

In another study supporting the AIM, Sedikides (1995)predicted and found that core or “central” conceptions ofthe self should be processed less constructively using thedirect-access strategy. In contrast, less salient, “periph-eral” self-conceptions that require more substantive pro-cessing showed stronger mood congruence. Affect alsohas a greater influence on self-judgments by subjects withlow rather than high levels of self-esteem, presumablybecause the former have a less stable and less clearlydefined self-concept (Brown & Mankowski, 1993). In asimilar vein, Smith and Petty (1995) observed strongermood congruence in the self-related memories reportedby low rather than high self-esteem individuals. It appearsthat current mood also affects how people evaluate theirpresent self against past selves, with sad people morelikely to perceive congruence between their present andpast negative selves (Gebauer, Broemer, Haddock, &Hecker, 2008). Consistent with the AIM, these studiessuggest that low self-esteem people need to engage inmore open and elaborate processing when thinking aboutthemselves, increasing the tendency for their current moodto influence the outcome.

0

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Attr

ibut

ion

ratin

g

4

5

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7Happy mood

High/Internal High/Stable

Exam score/Attribution type

Low/Internal Low/Stable

Sad mood

Figure 3.1 Attribution ratings made by subjects in a positiveor negative mood for their performance in an earlier exam asa function of exam score (high vs. low) and attribution type(internal vs. stable).

Source: Forgas, Bower, and Moylan, 1990.

Affect intensity may be another moderator of moodcongruence, as mood congruence is greater among peoplewho score high on measures assessing openness tofeelings as a personality trait (Ciarrochi & Forgas, 2000).However, other work suggests that mood congruencein self-judgments can be spontaneously reversed asa result of motivated-processing strategies. Sedikides(1994) observed that after mood induction, peopleinitially generated self-statements in a mood-congruentmanner. However, with the passage of time, negative self-judgments spontaneously reversed, suggesting the oper-ation of an “automatic” process of mood management.Further research by Forgas and Ciarrochi (2002) rep-licated these results and indicated further that the sponta-neous reversal of negative self-judgments is particularlypronounced in people with high self-esteem.

Thus, moods have a strong congruent influence on self-related thoughts but only when open and constructive pro-cessing is employed, and judgments (a) relate to peripheralrather than central aspects of the self, (b) require exten-sive, time-consuming processing, and (c) reflect the self-conceptions of individuals with low rather than highself-esteem.

Mood Congruence in Person Perception

Paradoxically, several studies found that the more peo-ple need to think in order to compute a judgment, thegreater the likelihood that affectively primed ideas willinfluence the outcome. In one series of studies (For-gas, 1992), happy and sad subjects were asked to readand form impressions about fictional characters who weredescribed as being rather typical or ordinary or as havingan unusual or even odd combination of attributes (e.g., anavid surfer whose favorite music is Italian opera). It wasexpected and found that complex, ambiguous charactersindeed recruited more constructive processing and pro-duced greater mood congruence than simple, typical char-acters. Subsequent research, comparing ordinary versusodd couples rather than individuals, yielded similar results(e.g., Forgas, 1993).

In other work, the impact of mood on judgments andinferences about real-life interpersonal issues was inves-tigated (Forgas, 1994). Partners in long-term, intimaterelationships revealed clear evidence of mood congruencein their attributions for actual conflicts, especially com-plex and serious conflicts that demand more extensive andconstructive processing. These experiments provide directevidence for the process dependence of affect infusion intosocial judgments and inferences. Even judgments about


highly familiar people are more prone to affect infusionwhen a more substantive processing strategy is used.

It also appears that personality characteristics, such astrait anxiety, can influence processing styles (Ciarrochi& Forgas, 1999). Low trait-anxious whites in the UnitedStates reacted more negatively to a threatening Black out-group when experiencing negative affect, but high trait-anxious individuals showed the opposite pattern: Theywent out of their way to control their negative tendencieswhen feeling bad, and they produced more positive judg-ments. It seems that low trait-anxious people processedinformation about the out-group in a more open man-ner, allowing affect to influence their judgments, whereashigh trait-anxiety combined with aversive mood triggereda more controlled, motivated processing strategy designedto eliminate socially undesirable intergroup judgments.

Mood Congruence in Social Behaviors

To the extent that affect influences thinking and judgments,there could also be a corresponding mood-congruent influ-ence on subsequent social behaviors that require somedegree of substantive, generative processing (Heider,1958). Positive affect should prime positive informationand produce more confident, friendly, and cooperative“approach” behaviors, whereas negative affect shouldprime negative memories and produce “avoidant,” defen-sive, or unfriendly attitudes and behaviors.

Mood Congruence in Responding to Requests

A field experiment by Forgas (1998) investigated affectiveinfluences on responses to an impromptu request. Fold-ers marked “please open and consider this” were left onempty library desks containing materials (pictures as wellas text) designed to induce positive or negative mood.Students who (eventually) took these desks were surrep-titiously observed to ensure that they did indeed open thefolders and examine their contents carefully. Soon after-wards, they were approached by another student (in fact,a confederate) and received an unexpected polite or impo-lite request for several sheets of paper needed to completean essay. Their responses were noted, and later they wereasked to complete a brief questionnaire assessing theirattitudes toward the request and the requester. Resultsrevealed a clear mood-congruent pattern: Induced nega-tive mood resulted in a more critical, negative evaluationof the request and the requester, as well as less compli-ance, than did positive mood. These effects were strongerwhen the request was impolite rather than polite, becauseimpolite, unconventional requests required more elaborate

and substantive processing, confirmed by better long-termrecall for these messages. These results confirm that affectinfusion can have a significant effect on determining atti-tudes and behavioral responses to people encountered inrealistic everyday situations.

Mood Congruence in Self-Disclosure

Self-disclosure is one of the most important communica-tive tasks people undertake in everyday life, influencingthe development and maintenance of intimate relation-ships. Self-disclosure is also critical to mental health andsocial adjustment. In a series of recent studies (Forgas, inpress), subjects first watched a videotape that was intendedto put them into either a happy or a sad mood. Next,they exchanged e-mails with a “partner” (in fact, a com-puter that had been preprogrammed to generate messagesthat conveyed consistently high or low levels of self-disclosure). Happy persons disclosed more intimate infor-mation than did sad subjects, and did so most when thecorrespondent reciprocated with a high degree of disclo-sure, confirming that mood congruence is likely to occurin unscripted and unpredictable social encounters.

Synopsis

Evidence from many sources suggests that people tend toperceive themselves, and the world around them, in a man-ner that is congruent with their current mood. Over thepast few decades, explanations of mood congruence havegradually evolved from earlier psychodynamic and con-ditioning approaches to more recent cognitive accounts,such as the affect priming model (Bower, 1981; Bower &Cohen, 1982) that was first formalized in his well-knownnetwork theory of emotion. With accumulating empiricalevidence, however, it has also become clear that althoughmood congruence is a robust and reliable phenomenon, it isnot universal. In fact, in many circumstances mood eitherhas no effect or even has an incongruent effect on cogni-tion. How are such divergent results to be understood?

The affect-infusion model offers an answer supportedby the empirical evidence suggesting that mood congru-ence is unlikely to occur whenever a cognitive task canbe performed via a simple, well-rehearsed direct accessstrategy or a highly motivated strategy. In these condi-tions, there is little need or opportunity for cognition tobe influenced or “infused” by affect. In contrast, heuristicprocessing may sometimes produce affect congruence injudgments, in circumstances when cognitive resources arelimited and there are no situational or motivational pres-sures for more detailed analysis (Forgas, 2002, 2006).


According to the AIM, it is most common for moodcongruence to occur when individuals engage in substan-tive, constructive processing to integrate the availableinformation with preexisting and affectively primedknowledge structures. The research reviewed here showsthat mood-congruent effects are magnified when peopleengage in constructive processing to compute judgmentsabout peripheral rather than central conceptions of theself, atypical rather than typical characters, and complexrather than simple personal conflicts. As we will see inthe next section, the concept of affect infusion in general,and the idea of constructive processing in particular, maybe keys to understanding not only mood congruence, butmood dependence as well.

MOOD DEPENDENCE

The phenomenon of mood-dependent memory (MDM)—the observation that what has been learned in a certainstate of affect or mood is best remembered in that state—has been an issue of recurring research interest for over 30years. Much of this interest has reflected the belief, sharedby many clinical researchers, that mood dependence is acausal factor in the memory deficits displayed by patientswith alcoholic blackout, chronic depression, dissocia-tive identity (formerly, multiple personality), traumaticamnesia, and other psychiatric disorders (Goodwin, 1974;Ludwig, 1984; Reus, Weingartner, & Post, 1979; Schacter& Kihlstrom, 1989).

However, interest in mood dependence has also beendriven by darker considerations and serious doubts aboutwhether the phenomenon even exists. Though the firstgeneration of MDM research, from 1975 to 1985, pro-duced mostly positive results, few of the studies reportedin the late 1980s succeeded in showing mood dependence(Bower & Mayer, 1989; Kihlstrom, 1989; Leight & Ellis,1981). Consequently, researchers in the 1990s were left toquestion not only the clinical relevance of MDM, but alsoits status as a bona fide phenomenon of memory.

Today the outlook is more optimistic, as later researchindicated that MDM can be demonstrated in a robust andreliable manner, provided that several critical factors aretaken into account. These factors are of two types: oneconcerned with characteristics of the subjects’ encodingand retrieval tasks; the other with attributes of the moodsthey experience while performing these tasks. The fol-lowing sections review evidence bearing on both types offactors.

Task Factors

Regarding task factors, one key consideration is the man-ner in which retrieval of the target events is tested. By sev-eral accounts (e.g., Bower, 1992; Eich, 1995a; Kenealy,1997), MDM is more apt to arise when retrieval is medi-ated by “invisible” cues produced by the subject than by“observable” cues provided by the experimenter. Thus,free recall is a much more sensitive measure of mooddependence than are either cued recall or old/new recog-nition memory.

A second critical task factor is, in effect, the comple-ment of the first. Just as the odds of demonstrating MDMare improved by requiring participants to generate theirown cues for retrieving the target events, so, too, are theseprospects enhanced by requiring subjects to generate theevents themselves. In support of this proposition, Eich andMetcalfe (1989) observed a significantly greater mood-dependent effect in the free recall of verbal items that sub-jects had actively generated (e.g., guitar , elicited by therequest: Name a musical instrument that begins with g)in contrast to items that the subjects had simply read (e.g.,gold , embedded in the phrase Gold is a precious metalthat begins with g). This result, which was replicated byBeck and McBee (1995), occurs regardless of whether theoverall level of generate-item recall is higher than that ofread items—the prototypic “generation effect” (Slamecka& Graf, 1978)—or whether it is lower (as happens whensubjects read some target items three times but generateothers only once). Moreover, and in line with remarksmade in the preceding paragraph, the results of a testof old/new recognition memory, which was administeredshortly after free recall, showed no sign of mood depen-dence for either type of target. Thus, it seems that themore one must rely on internal resources, rather than onexternal aids, to generate both the cues required to effectretrieval of the target events and the events themselves, themore likely is one’s memory for these events to be mooddependent.

This reasoning provided the impetus for a series of stud-ies by Eich, Macaulay, and Ryan (1994). During the encod-ing session of one study (viz. Experiment 2), universitystudents were asked to recollect or generate as many as16 specific episodes or events, from any time in the per-sonal past, that were called to mind by ship, street , andother neutral-noun probes. After recounting the particularsof a given event, students rated its original emotionality,or how pleasant or unpleasant the event seemed when itoccurred.

Half the students completed this task of autobiograph-ical event generation while they were feeling happy


(H) and half did so while sad (S)—affects that had beeninduced by having subjects ponder mood-appropriate ideasand images while mood-appropriate music played softly inthe background. During the retrieval session, held 2 daysafter encoding, participants were asked to freely recall(i.e., recall in any order, without benefit of any observablereminders or cues) the gist of as many of their previouslygenerated events as possible, preferably by recalling theirprecise corresponding probes. Students undertook thistest of autobiographical event recall either in the samemood in which they had generated the events or in thealternative affective state, thus creating two conditions inwhich encoding and retrieval moods matched (H/H andS/S) and two in which they mismatched (H/S and S/H).

Results of the encoding session are depicted inFigure 3.2. On average, participants generated more pos-itive events, fewer negative events, and about the same,small number of neutral events (1.2 versus 2.0) when theywere happy rather than sad. This pattern replicates priorwork (e.g., Clark & Teasdale, 1982; Snyder & White,1982), and it provides evidence of mood-congruentmemory—the “enhanced encoding and/or retrieval ofmaterial the affective valence of which is congruent withongoing mood” (Blaney 1986, p. 229).

Results of the retrieval session, shown in Figure 3.3,provided evidence of mood-dependent memory. Relativeto subjects whose encoding and retrieval moods matched(conditions H/H and S/S), those whose moods mismatched(H/S and S/H) recalled a smaller percentage of their pre-viously generated positive events (means of 26% versus37%), neutral events (17% versus 32%), and nega-tive events (27% versus 37%). Collapsing across eventtypes, total-event recall averaged 35% in the happy/happy

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Figure 3.2 Mean number of positive, neutral, and negativeevents generated as a function of encoding mood (H = happy,S = sad).

Source: Eich, Macaulay, and Ryan, 1994, Experiment 2.

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Figure 3.3 Mean percentage of positive, neutral, and negativeevents recalled as a function of encoding and retrieval moods(H = happy, S = sad).

Source: Eich, Macaulay, and Ryan, 1994, Experiment 2.

condition, 23% in the happy/sad condition, 27% in thesad/happy condition, and 34% in the sad/sad condition.

This effect appears to be reliable: The same advan-tage was seen in two other studies in which happy andsad moods were induced through a combination of ideas,images, and music (Eich et al., 1994, Experiments 1 and 3)as well as in three separate studies in which the sub-jects’ affective states were altered by changing their phys-ical surroundings (Eich, 1995b). Moreover, similar resultswere obtained in an investigation of bipolar patients whocycled rapidly and spontaneously between states of maniaor hypomania and depression (Eich, Macaulay, & Lam,1997). Thus, it seems that the combination of autobio-graphical event generation and recall constitutes a use-ful tool for exploring mood-dependent effects under bothlaboratory and clinical conditions, and that these effectsemerge in conjunction with either experimentally inducedor naturally occurring shifts in affective state.

Mood Factors

Though certain combinations of memory materials andtasks work better than others in demonstrating MDM,none can conceivably work in the absence of an effectivemanipulation of mood. So, what makes a mood manipu-lation effective?

One consideration is mood strength or intensity. Bydefinition, MDM demands a statistically significant loss ofmemory when target events are encoded in one mood andretrieved in another. It seems doubtful whether anythingless than a substantial shift in mood could produce suchimpairment. Indeed, a meta-analysis by Ucros (1989) indi-cated that the greater the difference in moods—depressionversus elation, for example, as opposed to depressionversus a neutral affect—the greater the mood-dependenteffect. In a related vein, Bower (1992) has proposed that


MDM reflects a failure of information acquired in onestate to generalize to the other, and that generalization ismore apt to fail the more dissimilar the two moods are.

No less important than the strength of the moods is theirstability over time and across tasks. In terms of demon-strating MDM, it does no good to engender a mood thatevaporates as soon as the subject is given something to do,like memorize a list of words or generate a series of auto-biographical events. It is possible that some studies failedto find mood dependence simply because they relied onmoods that were potent initially but paled rapidly (Eich &Metcalfe, 1989).

A third element of an effective mood is its authenticityor emotional realism. Using the autobiographical eventgeneration and recall tasks described earlier, Eich andMacaulay (2000) saw no sign of MDM when undergrad-uates simulated feeling happy or sad, when, in fact, theirmood had remained neutral throughout testing. Moreover,in several studies involving the intentional induction ofspecific moods, students have been asked to candidlyassess (postexperimentally) how authentic or real thesemoods felt. Those who claim to have been most genuinely“moved” tend to show the strongest mood-dependenteffects (Eich, 1995a).

Thus, it appears that the prospects of demonstratingMDM are improved by instilling affective states that havethree important properties: strength, stability, and sincer-ity. In principle, such states could be induced in a numberof different ways; for instance, students might (a) read andinternalize a series of self-referential statements (e.g., I’mfeeling on top of the world versus Lately I’ve been reallydown), (b) obtain false feedback on an ostensibly unre-lated task, (c) receive a posthypnotic suggestion to experi-ence a specified mood, or, as noted earlier, (d) contemplatepleasant or unpleasant thoughts while listening to livelyor languorous music (Martin, 1990). In practice, however,it may be that some methods are better suited than oth-ers for inducing strong, stable, and sincere moods. Thispossibility remains to be tracked down through close, com-parative analysis of the virtues and liabilities of variousmood-induction techniques (Eich, Ng, Macaulay, Percy, &Grebneva, 2007).

Concluding Comments on Mood-Dependent Memory

The preceding sections reviewed recent research aimed atidentifying factors that play pivotal roles in the occurrenceof mood dependence. What conclusions can be drawnfrom this line of work?

The broadest and most basic conclusion is that theproblem of unreliability that has long beset research on

MDM is not as serious or stubborn as most investigatorsonce believed it to be. More to the point, it now appearsthat robust and reliable evidence of mood dependencecan be realized under conditions in which subjects (a)experience strong, stable, and sincere moods, (b) takeresponsibility for generating the target events themselves,and (c) also assume responsibility for generating the cuesrequired to retrieve these events.

Taken together, these observations make a start towarddemystifying MDM—but only a start. To date, only afew factors have been examined for their role in mooddependence; odds are that other factors of equal or greatersignificance exist, awaiting discovery. For instance, it isconceivable that mood-dependent effects become stronger,not weaker, as the interval separating encoding and re-trieval grows longer (Eich, 1995a). Also, given thatindividual differences in personality have already beenshown to play an important part in mood-congruentmemory (Bower & Forgas, 2000; Smith & Petty, 1995),subject factors may figure prominently in mood-dependentmemory as well. It is also possible that the state-dependenteffects of drugs and environments may be mediated bytheir impact on mood: That is, how well information trans-fers from one pharmacological state to another (e.g., fromalcohol intoxication to sobriety), or from one physicalenvironment to another (e.g., a bright, sunny courtyardto a drab, windowless office), depends on the similaritybetween the affective states or moods that are experiencedat information acquisition and retention testing (Eich,2007, 2008). And although the literature is replete withclinical conjectures about the role of MDM in variousforms of memory pathology, it is lacking in hard clinicaldata. To date, few studies have sought to demonstrate mooddependence in individuals who experience significant,sometimes extreme, alterations in mood as a consequenceof a psychiatric condition, such as unipolar mania (Wein-gartner, Miller, & Murphy, 1977), bipolar illness (Eich,Macaulay, & Lam, 1997), or dissociative identity disorder(Nissen, Ross, Willingham, MacKenzie, & Schacter,1988). As we have seen, recent research involving in-duced moods in normal subjects has helped establish thereliability of MDM. By exploring MDM within the con-text of the marked mood swings shown by select clinicalsamples, it may be possible to establish the phenomenon’sgenerality.

A different way of achieving this aim relates to the find-ing, alluded to earlier, that free recall is a more sensitivemeasure of mood dependence than are either cued recallor recognition memory. This is why free recall has beenthe test of choice in most studies of MDM undertaken in


the past 20 years (e.g., Eich & Metcalfe, 1989; Schramke& Bauer, 1997).

Though free recall, cued recall, and recognition mem-ory seem to differ in their sensitivity to mood-dependenteffects, all represent explicit as opposed to implicit mea-sures of retention. As defined by Roediger (1990, p. 1043),explicit measures “reflect conscious recollection of thepast,” whereas implicit tests “measure transfer (or priming)from past experience on tasks that do not require consciousrecollection for their performance.” Given that prior MDMresearch has relied almost exclusively on explicit measures(for exceptions see Macaulay, Ryan, & Eich, 1993; Tobias,Kihlstrom, & Schacter, 1992), the question arises: Is it pos-sible to demonstrate mood dependence using implicit testsof memory?

Novelty aside, the question is interesting inasmuchas it appears to admit two totally different answers. Onthe one hand, there are two good reasons for thinkingthat implicit measures should not show MDM. First, incases of functional amnesia, it is common to find abnor-mally poor performance in explicit tests, such as recallor recognition, coupled with normal levels of priming inimplicit tests, such as word-fragment completion or per-ceptual identification (Schacter & Kihlstrom, 1989). Asan example, most individuals diagnosed with dissociativeidentity disorder (DID) manifest interpersonality amnesia,in that events encoded by a particular personality state oridentity are retrievable by that same identity but not bya different one. From one DID patient to the next, theseidentities can vary tremendously in number, complexity,periodicity, and other fundamental features including age,gender, handedness, emotional complexion, allergic reac-tions, and pain tolerance. In general, however, they can beviewed as “highly discrete states of consciousness orga-nized around a prevailing affect, sense of self (includingbody image), with a limited repertoire of behaviors and aset of state-dependent memories” (Putnam, 1989, p. 103).It is for this reason that interpersonality amnesia has beeninterpreted as an extreme example of mood dependence(Bower, 1994; Nissen et al., 1988). Given this interpreta-tion, it is significant—vis-a-vis the prospects of demon-strating implicit mood dependence—that performance onat least some implicit tests is spared in cases of DID, evenwhen the interpersonality amnesia profoundly impairs per-formance under explicit test conditions (Eich, Macaulay,Loewenstein, & Dihle, 1997; Nissen et al., 1988).

The second reason for doubting the possibility ofimplicit MDM relates to the point, made earlier, thatMDM is more apt to occur when explicit recollectionis tested in the absence than in the presence of overt

reminders (such as the stimulus cues provided in a testof paired-associates recall, or the copy cues presented ina test of recognition memory). This point is pertinent tothe present discussion because, even though implicit mea-sures, by definition, do not demand conscious recollectionof past events, they do require that subjects respond toovert cues in the form of specific, tangible test stimuli.Thus, for example, implicit memory for a previouslystudied item such as apple might be assessed by askingsubjects to (a) name the first word they think of that beginswith app, (b) unscramble the anagram eplap to form ameaningful word, or (c) identify what they saw on a screenfollowing the fleeting appearance of apple. Given theirovertly cued nature, implicit tests such as stem completion,anagram solution, or perceptual identification would seemill-suited to showing MDM.

On the other hand, there are two good reasons for think-ing that implicit tests should show mood dependence.First, prior research has revealed that changes in con-textual information—such as presentation modality, typefont, and orientation, and even environmental setting—from study to test attenuates priming on a variety ofimplicit tasks (Roediger & McDermott, 1993). If moodis construed as a kind of internal contextual cue, thenpriming in at least some implicit tests may be susceptibleto shifts in mood state.

The second source of support for the idea of implicitMDM stems from the work of Tobias and her associates(Tobias, 1992; Tobias et al., 1992), who suggest that mood-dependent effects emerge when the cues afforded by theretention test are “impoverished” (as in free recall), butnot when they are “rich” (as in cued recall or recogni-tion memory). On this view, implicit tests entail the mostimpoverished cues of all—indeed, they do not even spec-ify that the subject should try to retrieve a specific memory(Kihlstrom, Eich, Sandbrand, & Tobias, 2000)—whichimplies that implicit tests should be especially sensitive tomood-dependent effects.

Tobias (1992) investigated this implication in herdoctoral dissertation, the results of which are reviewed inTobias et al. (1992). Her first study, comparing explicitstem-cued recall to implicit word-stem completion,revealed no evidence of MDM on either measure. How-ever, her second study evinced a small but significantmood-dependent effect in a novel, ostensibly implicit testof free association, but—curiously—no effect at all in anexplicit test of free recall. Twenty years on, the reliabilityand generality of Tobias’ results remain to be determined,but they seem to support the notion that mood dependencemay affect performance even on tasks that do not demand


deliberate, conscious recollection of the past. This mattercontinues to merit more attention, as does the related ideathat, by impairing intentional but not automatic uses ofmemory, shifts in affective state may reduce recollectionwithout appreciably affecting familiarity (Jacoby, 1998;Kelley & Jacoby, 2000).

Yet another promising avenue for research concernsthe concept of affect infusion , the process by which affectinfluences and then becomes a part of one’s judgmentabout an event. In his eponymous model, Forgas (1995,pp. 39–40) argued that affect infusion is most likely tooccur in the course of constructive processing that involvesthe substantial transformation rather than the mere repro-duction of existing cognitive representations; such pro-cessing requires a relatively open information searchstrategy and a significant degree of generative elaborationof the available stimulus details. This definition seemsbroadly consistent with the weight of recent evidence sug-gesting that affect “will influence cognitive processes tothe extent that the cognitive task involves the active gen-eration of new information as opposed to the passive con-servation of information given” (Fiedler, 1990, pp. 2–3).

Though the AIM is chiefly concerned with mood-congruent effects in impression formation, person percep-tion, and allied aspects of social cognition (see Forgas,1995), it is relevant to mood-dependent memory as well.Compared to the rote memorization of unrelated words,the task of recollecting and recounting real-life eventswould seem to place a greater premium on active, sub-stantive processing, and thereby promote a higher degreeof affect infusion. Thus, the AIM agrees with the fact thatlist-learning experiments often fail to find mood depen-dence, whereas studies involving autobiographical mem-ory usually succeed. Moreover, the AIM accommodatesan important qualification, alluded to earlier, that mooddependence is more apt to occur when retention is testedin the absence than in the presence of specific, observ-able reminders or cues. Thus, according to the AIM, freerecall is a more sensitive measure of MDM than is recog-nition memory because the latter entails “direct accessthinking”—Forgas’s (1995) term for cognitive process-ing that is simpler, more automatic, and less affectivelyinfused than that required for free recall.

In short, and in general, it may be that the higher thelevel of affect infusion achieved both at encoding and atretrieval, the better the odds of demonstrating mood depen-dence. This idea fits well with what is now known aboutmood dependence and, more important, it has testableimplications. Suppose, for instance, that happy and sadsubjects read about and form impressions of fictional

characters, some of whom appear quite ordinary and someof whom seem rather odd. The AIM predicts that atypical,unusual, or complex targets should selectively recruitlonger and more substantive processing strategies, andcorrespondingly greater affect infusion effects. Accord-ingly, odd characters should be evaluated more positivelyby happy than by sad subjects, whereas ordinary charactersshould be perceived similarly—a deduction that has beenverified in several studies (Bower & Forgas, 2000; Forgas,2002). Now suppose that the subjects are later asked tofreely recall as much as they can about the target individ-uals, and that testing takes place either in the same moodthat had been experienced earlier or in the alternativeaffect. The prediction is that, relative to their mismatchedmood peers, subjects tested under matched mood condi-tions will recall more details about the odd people but anequivalent amount about the ordinary individuals. Moregenerally, it is conceivable that mood dependence, likemood congruence, is enhanced by the encoding and re-trieval of atypical, unusual, or complex targets, for thereasons given by the AIM. Similarly, it may be thatjudgments about the self, in contrast to others, are moreconducive to demonstrating MDM, as people tend toprocess self-relevant information in a more extensive andelaborate manner (see Forgas, 1995; Sedikides, 1995).Possibilities such as these are inviting issues for futureresearch on mood dependence.

MOOD EFFECTS ON PROCESSING STRATEGIES

In the previous two sections, we surveyed the availableempirical evidence showing that mood states can influencethe content and valence of memory and cognition, throughmechanisms such as mood congruence and mood depen-dence. In addition to influencing content, that is, whatpeople think, moods may also influence the process ofcognition, that is, how people think, with important con-sequences for attention, memory, judgments, and infer-ences. We shall now turn to reviewing recent evidencedemonstrating the information processing consequencesof affective states.

Theoretical Explanations

There has been some evidence for affectively induceddifferences in information processing styles since theearly 1980s, and in recent years this line of research hasexpanded strongly (Bless & Fiedler, 2006; Clark & Isen,1982). Early studies suggested a rather simple pattern: It


appeared that people experiencing a positive affect seemedto employ more casual, less effortful, and more superficialinformation processing strategies. Happy persons werealso found to reach decisions more quickly; use lessinformation; avoid demanding, systematic thinking; andcuriously, appeared more confident about their decisions.In contrast, negative affect apparently triggered a moreeffortful, systematic, analytic, and vigilant processing style(Clark & Isen, 1982; Isen, 1984; 1987; Schwarz, 1990).Subsequent studies, however, also showed that positiveaffect can also produce distinct processing advantageswhen performing certain tasks. For example, happy peoplewere found to be more likely to adopt more creative,open, and inclusive thinking styles, used broader cate-gories, showed greater mental flexibility, and were ableto perform more effectively on secondary tasks (Bless,2000; Fiedler, 2001; Hertel & Fiedler, 1994; Isen & Daub-man, 1984). What is the reason for these mood-induceddifferences in processing styles?

One early explanation emphasized the motivationalconsequences of positive and negative affect. Accordingto this view (Clark & Isen, 1982; Isen, 1984, 1987), peo-ple experiencing positive mood may subconsciously try tomaintain this pleasant state by refraining from any effort-ful activity—such as elaborate information processing—that might interfere with their mood. In contrast, neg-ative affect should automatically motivate people toengage in vigilant, effortful processing as an adaptiveresponse to improve an aversive state. In contrast with thisaffect maintenance/affect repair hypothesis , others suchas Schwarz (1990) offered a slightly different cognitivetuning account. Schwarz (1990) argued that positive andnegative affect have a fundamental signaling/tuning func-tion, and their role is to automatically inform the personwhether a relaxed, effort minimizing (in positive affect)or a vigilant, effortful (negative affect) processing styleis appropriate in a given situation. These ideas are, ofcourse, rather similar to functionalist/evolutionary ideasabout the adaptive functions of affect (Forgas, Haselton, &von Hippel, 2007).

Another theoretical approach focused on the influenceof affective states on information processing capacity ,arguing that mood states may impact processing becauseaffect takes up scarce processing capacity. Ellis and hiscolleagues suggested that depressed mood and negativeaffect influence attentional resources, and reduce the pro-cessing capacity available to perform cognitive tasks (Ellis& Ashbrook, 1988; Ellis & Moore, 1999). In contrast, Isen(1984) proposed that it is positive rather than negativeaffect that reduces information processing capacity. These

authors found that the superficial processing producedby happy mood is easily reversed if extra processing re-sources, such as time, become available. However, aspositive and negative affect promote qualitatively differentthinking styles, it is unlikely that the similar capacity limitexplanations put forward by Ellis and Ashbrook (1988)and Isen (1984) could both be correct. It remains unclearwhat, if any, role cognitive capacity plays in mediatingaffective influences on information processing.

One shared problem with these explanations is that theyall assume that positive and negative affect increases ordecreases the effort, vigilance, and elaborateness of infor-mation processing. More recently, theorists such as Bless(2000; Bless & Fiedler, 2006) put forward a rather differ-ent view. According to them, the fundamental evolutionarysignificance of positive and negative affective states is notsimply to influence processing effort , but rather, to triggerequally effortful, but fundamentally different informationprocessing styles .

Bless and Fiedler (2006) distinguish between “ . . .

two complementary adaptive functions: assimilation andaccommodation (cf. Piaget, 1954). Assimilation meansto impose internalized structures onto the external world,whereas accommodation means to modify internal struc-tures in accordance with external constraints . . . withrespect to affective influences . . . it will turn out that . . .the role of positive mood is to facilitate assimilationwhereas the role of negative mood is to strengthen accom-modation functions” (p. 66). According to this model,positive affect generally promotes a more assimilative,schema-based, top-down processing style, where preex-isting ideas, attitudes, and representations dominate infor-mation processing. In contrast, negative affect produces amore accommodative, bottom-up, and externally focusedprocessing strategy where attention to situational informa-tion drives thinking (Bless, 2000; Bless & Fiedler, 2006).

Key support for this model is provided by experimentsthat show that positive affect does not necessarily impairprocessing effort. For example, Bless (2000) found thatperformance on simultaneously presented secondary tasksis not impaired by positive affect, as should be the caseif participants were effort minimizing. In other words,positive and negative affect promote qualitatively differ-ent, assimilative versus accommodative processing styles,without also impacting on processing effort.

Several lines of evidence can be readily interpretedin terms of this assimilative/accommodative processingdichotomy. For example, positive affect can promote theuse of broader and more integrative cognitive categories(Isen, 1984), and happy participants sort stimuli into fewer


and more inclusive groupings than do participants in aneutral-mood condition (Isen & Daubman, 1984). Alongthe same lines, Bless, Hamilton, and Mackie (1992) askedhappy, neutral, or sad participants to classify 28 behav-ioral descriptions, and found that happy persons producedhigher-level categories.

The notion that positive affect results in more abstractlevels of representations is also reflected in languagechoices, as happy participants prefer more abstract descrip-tions than do sad participants (Beukeboom, 2003), andare more likely to retrieve a global rather than a specificrepresentation of persuasive messages (Bless, Mackie, &Schwarz, 1992). Corresponding processing effects asso-ciated with mood were also found with nonverbal tasks.When participants were asked to focus on geometricalfigures, happy persons focused more on global featuresand sad people focused more on local features (Gasper &Clore, 2002; see also Sinclair, 1988).

Why exactly should positive affect promote assimila-tive thinking, and negative affect accommodative process-ing? Bless and Fiedler (2006) argue that the processingeffects of mood are consistent with evolutionary theoriesthat emphasize the adaptive, functional consequences ofaffective states in preparing the organism to respond to dif-ferent environmental challenges. Positive affect in essencefunctions as a signal, informing us that the situation is safe,familiar, and existing knowledge can be relied on. Neg-ative affect, in contrast, operates like a mild alarm sig-nal, indicating that the situation is new and unfamiliar anddemands greater attention to new, external information.

Bless and Fiedler’s (2006) theory also has some inter-esting and counterintuitive implications, predicting thatboth positive and negative affect can produce distinctprocessing advantages albeit in different situations. For aculture in which the desirability of positive affect is takenfor granted, and negative affect is frequently construedas not only undesirable but often requiring psychologicalintervention, this is an important message, a point we willreturn to later. First, however, we shall look at some ofthe empirical evidence supporting this model.

Evidence for the Processing Consequences of Affect

The principles of affective influences on information pro-cessing may best be illustrated by an everyday example.Imagine that it is a cold, rainy day as you enter the localnews agency to buy a paper. As you pay, you brieflynotice a few strange objects on the checkout counter—amatchbox car, some plastic toy animals, and a few othertrinkets. After you leave the store, a young woman asksyou to try to remember what you saw in the shop.

This is just the sort of study we completed recently(Forgas, Goldenberg, & Unkelbach, 2009). The questionwe were interested in was this: Are people better at remem-bering everyday details when they are in a bad mood(because of the inclement weather), or do they remembermore of the trinkets on a bright, sunny day, when they arein a good mood?

Surprisingly, it turned out that people in a negativemood actually had better eyewitness memory for whatthey saw in the shop than did happy people questioned ona bright, sunny day (see Figure 3.4). This experiment, andothers like it, suggest that mental processes can be signif-icantly and reliably influenced by a person’s mood state.In particular, and somewhat counterintuitively, severalof the following experiments demonstrate the beneficial,adaptive consequences of negative affect in such areasas judgmental errors, eyewitness accuracy, stereotyping,interpersonal communication, and detection of deception,to mention just a few.

Affective Influences on Eyewitness Memory

As we have seen, there is evidence suggesting that positiveaffect increases, and negative affect decreases, the ten-dency to rely on internal rather than external knowledgein cognitive tasks, resulting in a selective memory biasfor self-generated information (Bless, Bohner, Schwarz, &Strack, 1990; Fiedler, Nickel, Asbeck, & Pagel, 2003). Ifhappy individuals are more likely to rely on top-downheuristics, whereas sad participants pay more detailedattention to external information (Isen, Means, Patrick, &Nowicki, 1982), then negative mood should improve, andpositive mood impair, eyewitness accuracy.

In a series of experiments, we predicted that positiveaffect should promote, and negative affect should inhibit,

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Figure 3.4 Mean number of target items recalled as a functionof the mood (happy vs. sad) induced by the weather.

Source: Forgas, Goldenberg, and Unkelbach, 2009.


the well-demonstrated tendency by eyewitnesses to incor-porate false details into their memories (Forgas, Vargas, &Laham, 2005). In one study, participants viewed picturesshowing a car crash scene (negative event) and a wed-ding party scene (positive event). One hour later, theyreceived a mood induction (recalled happy or sad eventsfrom their past) and received questions about the scenesthat either contained, or did not contain misleading infor-mation. After a further 45-minute interval the accuracy oftheir eyewitness memory for the scenes was tested. Asexpected, positive mood increased, and negative mooddecreased the tendency to incorporate misleading infor-mation into their eyewitness memories. In fact, negativemood almost completely eliminated the common “misin-formation effect,” as also confirmed by a signal detectionanalysis.

This pattern was confirmed in a second, more realisticexperiment, where students witnessed a staged 5-minuteaggressive encounter between a lecturer and a femaleintruder (Forgas et al., 2005, Exp. 2). A week later, whilein a happy or sad mood, they received a questionnairethat contained either planted, misleading information orcontrol, non-misleading information. After a further inter-val, eyewitness memory was assessed. Those in a happymood when exposed to misleading information were morelikely subsequently to report false details as true (seeFigure 3.5). In contrast, negative affect eliminated thiscommon source of error in eyewitness memory, as sad-ness improved the ability to discriminate between correctand misleading details.

Can people control such subtle and subconscious moodeffects? In a further study, participants saw videotapesshowing (a) a robbery, and (b) a wedding scene. After

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Figure 3.5 Mean errors of recognition memory (false alarms)as a function of the mood experienced during exposure tomisleading (planted) or non-misleading (control) information.

Source: Forgas, Vargas, and Laham, 2005, Experiment 2.

a 45-minute interval they received an audiovisual moodinduction and then completed a short questionnaire thateither did or did not contain misleading information aboutthe event. Some were also instructed to “disregard andcontrol their affective states.” Exposure to misleadinginformation reduced eyewitness accuracy most when peo-ple were in a happy rather than a sad mood. However,direct instructions to control affect proved ineffective toreduce this mood effect. Conceptually similar results werealso reported by Storbeck and Clore (2005), who alsofound that “individuals in a negative mood were signifi-cantly less likely to show false memory effects than thosein positive moods” (p. 785), who explain their findings interms of an affect-as-information mechanism.

These experiments offer convergent evidence that neg-ative moods, by recruiting more accommodative think-ing, can significantly improve cognitive performance, inthis case, by reducing susceptibility to misleading infor-mation. Paradoxically, happy mood actually reduced accu-racy yet increased confidence, suggesting that people wereunaware of the influence of their mood states.

Affective Influences on Judgmental Errors

Many common judgmental errors in everyday life occurbecause people are imperfect and often inattentive infor-mation processors. Can mood states, through their influ-ence on processing styles, increase or reduce judgmentalerrors? The fundamental attribution error (FAE) or corre-spondence bias refers to a pervasive tendency by peopleto infer intentionality and internal causation and under-estimate the impact of situational forces in their socialjudgments (Gilbert, 1991). This error occurs because peo-ple pay disproportionate attention to salient informationsuch as the actor and neglect information about situationalconstraints (Gilbert, 1991). If negative mood facilitatesaccommodative processing, it should reduce the incidenceof the FAE by directing greater attention to situationalinformation (Forgas, 1998).

To test this prediction, in one experiment, happy or sadparticipants were asked to read and make attributions aboutthe writer of an essay advocating a popular or unpopularposition (for or against nuclear testing), positions whichwere described as either assigned, or freely chosen bythe writer. Results showed that happy persons were morelikely, and sad people were less likely than controls tocommit the FAE and incorrectly infer attitude differencesbased on coerced essays. Similar effects can also occur inreal life. In a field study, participants feeling good or badafter seeing happy or sad movies read and made attribu-tions about the writers of popular and unpopular essays


arguing for or against recycling. Again, positive affectincreased and negative affect decreased the tendency tomistakenly attribute responsibility for coerced essays.

In a further study, recall of the essays was also assessedas an index of processing style (Forgas, 1998, Exp. 3).Negative affect again reduced the incidence of the FAE,and recall-memory data showed that those in a negativemood remembered significantly more details than did oth-ers, confirming that they processed the stimulus informa-tion more thoroughly. A mediational analysis also foundthat processing style was a significant mediator of moodeffects on judgmental errors. However, it seems that nega-tive affect may only improve accuracy when detailed stim-ulus information is available. Ambady and Gray (2002)found that in the absence of detailed information, “sadnessimpairs accuracy /precisely/ by promoting a more deliber-ative information processing style” (p. 947).

Affective Influences on Skepticism and the Detectionof Deception

We mostly rely on second-hand, untested information informing our views about the world and other people. Howdo we decide if the information we come across in every-day life is true or false? Accepting invalid information astrue (gullibility) can be just as dangerous as rejecting infor-mation that is valid (excessive skepticism). Several recentexperiments found that moods have a significant influenceon accepting or rejecting information. Some claims (suchas “urban myths”) can potentially be evaluated againstobjective evidence (e.g., power lines cause leukemia; theIsraelis are responsible for 9/11), whereas other messages,such as most interpersonal communications, are, bytheir very nature, ambiguous and not open to objectivevalidation.

By recruiting assimilative or accommodative process-ing, mood states may significantly influence skepticismand gullibility (Forgas & East, 2008a, 2008b). In onestudy, we asked happy or sad participants to judge theprobable truth of a number of urban legends and rumors.Negative mood promoted skepticism, and positive moodpromoted greater gullibility but only for new and unfa-miliar claims, consistent with the hypothesis that negativeaffect triggers a more externally focused and accommoda-tive thinking style.

In another experiment, we tested participants’ mem-ory two weeks after initial exposure for true and falsestatements taken from a trivia game. Only sad partici-pants were able to correctly distinguish between true andfalse claims they had seen previously, whereas happyparticipants were more likely to rate all previously seen

statements as true. This pattern suggests that happy moodenhanced the tendency to rely on the “what is familiaris true” heuristic, but negative mood conferred a memoryadvantage by promoting a more accommodative process-ing style (Fiedler & Bless, 2000).

Moreover, mood may influence people’s tendency toaccept or reject interpersonal communications as genuineor false. When happy and sad participants were asked tojudge the genuineness of positive, neutral, and negativefacial expressions by others, those in a negative moodwere significantly less likely to accept these displays asgenuine (Forgas & East, 2008a).

Mood, through its effect on processing styles, may alsoinfluence people’s ability to detect deception. We askedhappy or sad participants to accept or reject the videotapedstatements of people who were interrogated after a stagedtheft, and were either guilty, or not guilty (Forgas & East,2008b). Those in a positive mood were more likely toaccept denials as truthful. Sad participants made signifi-cantly more guilty judgments, and they were significantlybetter at correctly detecting deceptive (guilty) targets (seeFigure 3.6). In other words, negative affect produced asignificant advantage in accurately distinguishing truthsfrom lies.

These experiments confirm that negative affect in-creases skepticism both about factual, and about interper-sonal messages, and also significantly improves people’sability to detect deception, consistent with negative affectrecruiting a more situationally oriented, accommodativecognitive style.

Affective Influences on Reliance on Stereotypes

Stereotypes are by definition preexisting knowledge struc-tures that may guide impressions and behavior. When

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Figure 3.6 Mean judgments of the guilt of targets accused oftheft as a function of the target’s veracity (truthful vs. deceptive)and the participant’s mood.

Source: Forgas and East, 2008b.


relying on a heuristic, assimilative strategy, the perceiver’sgeneral knowledge and stereotypes should become moreinfluential. Alternatively, when externally focused, ac-commodative processing is used, the importance of pre-existing stereotypes should diminish. In several studies,Bodenhausen (1993; Bodenhausen, Kramer, & Susser,1994) found that happy participants relied more on ethnicstereotypes when evaluating a student accused of miscon-duct, whereas negative mood reduced this tendency. Sadindividuals in general also tend to pay greater attention tospecific, individuating information when forming impres-sions (Bless, Schwarz, & Wieland, 1996; Edwards &Weary, 1993).

We further tested this prediction in one experiment byasking happy or sad people to generate rapid responses totargets that did or did not appear to be Muslims, using the“shooter’s bias” paradigm to assess subliminal aggressivetendencies (Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002). Inthis task, individuals have to shoot at rapidly presentedtargets only when they carry a gun. Results showed thatU.S. participants display a strong implicit bias to shootmore at Black rather than White targets (Correll et al.,2002; Correll, Park, Judd, Wittenbrink, Sadler, & Keesee,2007). Accordingly, we expected that Muslim targets arelikely to elicit a similar bias.

We used morphing software to create targets whodid or did not appear Muslim (wearing or not wearing aturban or the hijab) and who either held a gun or a similarobject (e.g., a coffee mug; see Figure 3.7). Althoughparticipants did indeed shoot more at Muslims rather thannon-Muslims, the most intriguing finding here is that

negative mood actually reduced this selective tendency.Positive affect in turn triggered a significant selectivebias against Muslims, consistent with a more top-down,assimilative processing style (Bless & Fiedler, 2006; For-gas, 1998, 2007). Thus, in this instance, negative moodreduced and positive mood increased stereotype-basedaggressive responses to Muslims.

Affective Influences on Interpersonal Communication

If negative affect indeed promotes more accommodativeprocessing, it may also influence the way people produceand respond to persuasive messages. Mood effects on per-suasion have first been explored in studies looking at howpeople process persuasive messages. In a number of stud-ies, participants in sad moods showed greater sensitivity tomessage quality, and they were more persuaded by strongrather than weak arguments. In contrast, those in a happymood were less influenced by the message quality andwere equally persuaded by strong and weak arguments(e.g., Bless et al., 1990; Bless et al., 1992; Bohner, Crow,Erb, & Schwarz, 1992; Sinclair, Mark, & Clore, 1994;Wegener & Petty, 1997).

Can mood also influence the production of persuasivemessages? To test this possibility, in one experimentparticipants received an audio-visual mood induction, andthey were then asked to produce persuasive arguments foror against an increase in student fees and for or againstAboriginal land rights (Forgas, 2007). Their argumentswere rated by trained raters for overall quality, persuasive-ness, concreteness, and valence. Participants in a sad moodproduced higher quality and more persuasive arguments

Figure 3.7 Stimulus figures used to assess the effects of mood and wearing or not wearing a turban on subliminal aggressiveresponses. Participants had to make rapid shoot/don’t shoot decisions in response to figures who did or did not hold a gun, and didor did not wear a Muslim headdress (a turban).

Source: Unkelbach, Forgas, and Denson, 2008.


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Figure 3.8 Mean ratings of the quality and concreteness ofpersuasive arguments produced in a happy, neutral, or sad mood.

Source: Forgas, 2007, Experiment 2.

on both issues than did happy participants (seeFigure 3.8), and a mediational analysis showed that itwas mood-induced variations in argument specificity andconcreteness that influenced argument quality, consistentwith the prediction that negative mood promotes a moreaccommodative and concrete processing style (Bless,2001; Bless & Fiedler, 2006; Fiedler, 2001; Forgas,2002).

Similar effects were also found in an experiment wherehappy and sad people directed persuasive arguments ata “partner” to volunteer for a boring experiment usinge-mail exchanges (Forgas, 2007). Once again, negativeaffect produced a distinct processing benefit, resulting inmore concrete and specific, and thus, more effective andsuccessful messages.

Implications

In contrast with the overwhelming emphasis on the bene-fits of positive affect in the recent literature, these resultshighlight the potentially adaptive and beneficial process-ing consequences of negative as well as positive moods.Positive affect is not universally desirable: People in anegative mood are less prone to judgmental errors (For-gas, 1998), are more resistant to eyewitness distortions(Forgas et al., 2005), and are better at producing high-quality and effective persuasive messages (Forgas, 2007).Given the consistency of the results across a number ofdifferent experiments, tasks, and affect inductions, theseeffects appear reliable and are broadly consistent with thenotion that over evolutionary time, affective states becameadaptive, functional triggers to elicit information process-ing patterns that are appropriate in a given situation. Ina broader sense, these results also suggest that the per-sistent contemporary cultural emphasis on positivity and

happiness may be misplaced and inconsistent with theimportant adaptive functions of both positive and negativemood states.

CLOSING COMMENTS

The fascinating relationship between feeling and thinking,affect and cognition, has been one of the enduring puzzlesabout human nature. Psychologists were relatively late inaddressing this issue, but the past 30 years saw significantprogress in experimental research on the role of affect incognition. In this chapter, we reviewed the current sta-tus of this important enterprise, and we argued that moodeffects on cognition can be classified into three distinctkinds of influences: mood congruence, mood dependence,and mood effects on processing strategies. In each of thesefields, we surveyed strong evidence showing that moodstates have a powerful and often subconscious influenceon how people think, behave, and deal with social infor-mation. However, research also shows that these effectsare subject to a variety of boundary conditions and contex-tual influences that we are only just beginning to under-stand. The complex interplay of affect and cognition isone of the most important, yet also most puzzling char-acteristics of our species. A great deal has been achievedin applying scientific methods to exploring this question,but in our view, the enterprise has hardly begun. We hopethat this review will stimulate continuing research on thisfascinating topic.

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