Social satisfaction in late adulthood originates from competing sources. Older adults tend to be more positive and less negative than younger adults, but social contact and working memory often decrease with age, both of which might limit older adults' social functioning. In the current study of younger and older adults, these socially facilitative vs. socially debilitative changes were found to underlie stasis in social satisfaction. These findings show that the lack of an overall effect for age can mask competing changes in social functioning in late adulthood, as the sources of social satisfaction might change even if the outcome does not.
Can good or bad mood influence how people process verbal information about others? Based on affect-cognition theories, this experiment predicted and found that the way a question is phrased has a greater influence on impressions than actual answers when judges are experiencing a negative rather than a neutral or positive mood. After an audiovisual mood induction, participants witnessed interview questions and responses by two target characters. The same level of extroversion was communicated, either by affirmative responses to questions about extraversion, or by negative responses to questions about introversion. Question format had a significant influence on impressions in negative mood but not in neutral or positive mood. The implications of these results for interpreting linguistic information in everyday social life are considered, and their relevance to contemporary affectcognition theorizing is discussed.
Can mood influence people’s ability to produce humorous verbal messages? Based on recent theories linking affect to social cognition and information-processing strategies, this experiment predicted and found that positive mood increased people’s ability to generate more creative, humorous, and elaborate verbal contents. Participants viewed positive, neutral, or negative videos, then produced verbal captions to fit four different cartoon images. Their messages were rated for creativity, humor, and elaboration by two trained raters, and the processing latency to produce each message was also recorded. Results showed that positive mood resulted in more creative and humorous messages, and that this effect was significantly mediated by mood-induced differences in information-processing strategies. The results are interpreted as supporting recent theories linking affect to cognition, and the theoretical and practical implications of the findings for everyday verbal communication are considered.
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