A review of the literature concerning the promotive influence of experimentally generated happiness and sadness on helping suggested that (a) increased helping among saddened subjects is an instrumental response designed to dispel the helper's negative mood state, and (b) increased helping among elated subjects is not an instrumental response to (maintain) the heightened effect but is a concomitant of elevated mood. A derivation from this hypothesis-that enhanced helping is a direct effect of induced sadness but a side effect of induced happiness-was tested in an experiment that placed subjects in a happy, neutral, or sad mood. Through a placebo drug manipulation, half of the subjects in each group were led to believe that their induced moods were temporarily fixed, that is, temporarily resistant to change from normal events. The other subjects believed that their moods were labile and, therefore, manageable. As expected, saddened subjects showed enhanced helping only when they believed their moods to be changeable, whereas elated subjects showed comparable increases in helping whether they believed their moods to be labile or fixed.

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An experiment was conducted to test the proposition that for adults, altruism and self-gratification are functional equivalents. It was predicted on the basis of this proposition that the effects of mood state on altruism would be parallel to the effects of mood on self-gratification. In support of this prediction, three separate findings from the mood-altruism literature were paralleled in the present study's investigation of the effects of mood on self-gratification. Specifically, it was found that (a) self-gratification increased under conditions of happy or sad mood; (b) for subjects in a sad mood, altruistic activity canceled the enhanced tendency for self-gratification; and (c) for subjects in a happy mood, altruistic activity did not cancel the enhanced tendency for self-gratification. Discussion focuses on the convergent evidence from the altruism literature and self-gratification literature that adult altruism functions as self-reward.Cialdini and his associates (Cialdini, Darby, & Vincent, 1973;Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976; Cialdini, Kenrick, & Baumann, in press;Kenrick, Baumann, & Cialdini, 1979) have taken the position that adult altruism is a form of hedonism. In this view, benevolent activity has been conditioned via the socialization process to be self-gratifying; therefore, individuals often behave charitably in order to provide themselves with reward. For these researchers, affect has played a prominent role in documenting the case for altruism as self-gratification. In an initial article, Cialdini et al. (1973) argued for two propositions. First, on the basis of the results of prior studies, they maintained that a U-shaped relationship exists between temporary mood state and adult helping: Experiences likely to produce either happy or sad affective states in adults increase helping. Second, they proposed a negative state relief model to account for the direct relationship between sadness and benevolence: Helping increases under conditions of tern-Requests for reprints should be sent to

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