Happiness versus sadness as a determinant of thought confidence in persuasion: a self-validation analysis.
The present research introduces a new mechanism by which emotion can affect evaluation. On the basis of the self-validation hypothesis (R. E. Petty, P. Briñol, & Z. L. Tormala), the authors predicted and found that emotion can influence evaluative judgments by affecting the confidence people have in their thoughts to a persuasive message. In each study, participants first read a strong or weak persuasive communication. After listing their thoughts about the message, participants were induced to feel happy or sad. Relative to sad participants, those put in a happy state reported more thought confidence. As a consequence, the effect of argument quality on attitudes was greater for happy than for sad participants. These self-validation effects generalized across different emotion inductions, different persuasion topics, and different measures of thought confidence. In one study, happy and sad conditions each differed from a neutral affect control. Most important, these metacognitive effects of emotion only occurred under high elaboration conditions. In contrast, individuals with relatively low motivation to think showed a main effect of emotion on attitudes, regardless of argument quality.
Briñol
Pablo
P
Department of Social Psychology and Methodology, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Petty
Richard E
RE
Barden
Jamie
J
D001290:Attitude; D003071:Cognition; D004644:Emotions; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D009820:Ohio; D010565:Persuasive Communication; D012649:Self Concept; D013030:Spain; D014584:User-Computer Interface