After the Movies

Abstract

The effects of transient moods on a variety of social judgments were studied in an unobtrusive field study. Subjects were interviewed immediately after leaving film performances classified as predominantly happy, sad, or aggressive in affective tone. Questions covered four topic areas: political judgments, expectations about the future, judgments of responsibility and guilt, and quality-of-life judgments. Judgments on all four question categories were significantly influenced by the affective quality of the films. Judgments were more positive, lenient or optimistic after viewing a happy film than after a sad or an aggressive film. These mood biases were universal irrespective of the demographic background of subjects, suggesting the robustness of the phenomenon. The results were interpreted in terms of recent models of emotional influences on social cognition, and the practical implications of the findings were considered.

Does mood state change risk taking tendency in older adults?

“…Previous studies have shown that movies or story procedures are the most effective means for inducing both elated and sad moods (Gerrards-Hesse, Spies, & Hesse, 1994; Westermann, Spies, Stahl, & Hesse, 1996). In this study, movie clips were used because they provided a direct and effective way to induce a certain mood (Forgas & Moylan, 1987), and this method has been used successfully in the local context (Yuen & Lee, 2003). A pretest was used to select movie clips that were most likely to induce elated, neutral, and sad moods.…”

Relating emotional abilities to social functioning: A comparison of self-report and performance measures of emotional intelligence.

“…The first pertains to how emotions and thinking interact (e.g., Bower, 1981;Clark & Fiske, 1982;Isen, Shalker, Clark, & Karp, 1978;Zajonc, 1980). Whereas intelligence and emotion often were considered in opposition (De Sousa, 1987), accumulating research in the 1980s documented how cognition and affect were integrated processes; affect influences many aspects of cognitive functioning, including memory, attention, and decision making (e.g., Damasio, 1994;Forgas & Moylan, 1987;Mayer & Bremer, 1985;Salovey & Birnbaum, 1989;Singer & Salovey, 1988). Accordingly, the theory of EI postulates that the information value of emotions can make thinking more intelligent.…”

Emotion concepts and emotional states in social judgment and categorization.

“…There is now a large literature that claims to provide evidence of effects of emotional states and moods on cognitive processes that span the perception-cognition continuum (for recent volumes, see Eich, Kihlstrom, Bower, Forgas, & Niedenthal, 2000; Fiedler & Forgas, 1988; Forgas, 1991, 2000; Mackie & Hamilton, 1993; Niedenthal & Kitayama, 1994). Emotions have been held to prime emotion-congruent material and to therefore facilitate speed of encoding, the ease and likelihood of retrieval of emotional memories, judgments of the probability of emotional events, and the emotional quality of social impressions (e.g., Bower, 1981; Forgas & Moylan, 1987; Isen, 1984; Johnson & Tversky, 1983; Laird, Wagener, Halal, & Szegda, 1982; Niedenthal & Cantor, 1986; Niedenthal & Setterlund, 1994). Moods have been held to be used as input into judgment and decision-making processes under certain conditions (e.g., Hirt, Levine, McDonald, & Melton, 1997; Hirt, McDonald, & Melton, 1996; Martin, Abend, Sedikides, & Green, 1997; Martin, Ward, Achee, & Wyer, 1993; Schwarz & Clore, 1983).…”