It was hypothesized that moods have few, if any, motivational or processing implications, but are input to other processes that determine their motivational implications. In Experiment 1, Ss read a series of behaviors in forming an impression. When told to read the behaviors until they felt they had enough information, those in positive moods (PMs) stopped sooner than did those in negative moods (NMs). When told to stop when they no longer enjoyed reading the behaviors, NMs stopped sooner than PMs. In Experiment 2, Ss generated a list of birds from memory. When told to stop when either they thought it was a good time to stop or they simply felt like stopping, PMs stopped sooner than NMs. When told to stop when they no longer enjoyed the task, NMs stopped sooner than PMs. The findings extend work by others (e.g.,

Social prediction was used to examine the causal role of physiological arousal in selfevaluation maintenance ( S E M ) processes. Subjects' level of arousal was manipulated by having half of the subjects engage in physical exercise and half of the subjects relax prior to receiving performance feedback on high and low relevance tasks. On each task, subjects were given an opportunity to predict the performance of a friend or a stranger. The SEM modelpredicts that the more relevant the task the less charitable one's perception of another S performance, particularly a close other. Subjects in the hrgh arousal condition showed a pattern of behavrour which was significantly closer to that predicted by the SEM model than subjects in the low arousal condition. Thus. arousal appears to play a causal role in the unfolding of SEM behavrours.

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