Mood and context-dependence: Positive mood increases and negative mood decreases the effects of context on perception.
Five studies show that mood affects context-dependence, such that negative mood promotes attention to a salient target, whereas positive mood enhances attention to both target and context. Judgments of temperature (Study 1), weight (Study 2), and size (Studies 3 and 4) were more strongly affected by the context in a positive than in a negative mood. Moreover, these effects extend to the social domain: When perceiving a target person's emotions, happy people were more influenced by the context than were sad people (Study 5). Thus, positive mood enhanced, and negative mood reduced, the magnitude of perceptual context effects. The results suggest that this pattern is not easily explained in terms of effort or depth of processing differences.
Avramova
Yana R
YR
Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research (TIBER), Social Psychology Department, Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands. y.r.avramova@uvt.nl
Stapel
Diederik A
DA
Lerouge
Davy
D
D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D012858:Size Perception / Q000502:physiology; D012938:Social Perception; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D013696:Temperature; D014892:Weight Perception / Q000502:physiology