Sometimes Happy People Focus on the Trees and Sad People Focus on the Forest

Abstract

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods should maintain and unhappy moods should inhibit situationally dominant thinking styles. Participants completed an impression formation task that included categorical and behavioral information. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, no fixed relation between mood and processing emerged. Whether happy moods led to judgments reflecting category-level or behavior-level information depended on whether participants were led to focus on the their immediate psychological state (i.e., current affective experience; Studies 1 and 2) or physical environment (i.e., an unexpected odor; Study 3). Consistent with research on socially situated cognition, these results demonstrate that the same affective state can trigger entirely different thinking styles depending on the context.

Selecting decision strategies: The differential role of affect

“…In our task, most participants also preferred compensatory strategies over non-compensatory strategies. Thus, to the degree that the use of compensatory strategies-and a broad attentional scope-was the dominant response, the results are also in line with the malleable mood effects hypothesis predicting that positive mood should increase and negative mood should decrease the reliance on currently dominant courses of action (Huntsinger, 2013a;Hunsinger et al, 2012).…”

“…As an alternative hypothesis, researchers have argued that people in a positive mood are more likely to rely on the information that is currently dominant or accessible whereas negative mood inhibits the reliance on dominant situational responses, a prediction that is also referred to as the malleable mood effect (Clore & Huntsinger, 2009;Hunsinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2012). The malleable mood effect hypothesis provides an alternative explanation of why people rely on "superficial" information such as stereotypes in a positive mood.…”

“…For one, reformulations of the original work by Schwarz (1990), such as the malleable mood effect hypothesis, have suggested that the link between mood and depth of processing is highly context-dependent. Accordingly, positive mood should only lead to more superficial or heuristic processing if the heuristic is the most accessible or default strategy (Clore & Huntsinger, 2009;Hunsinger et al, 2012). In addition, the relative ease and difficulty of compensatory and non-compensatory strategies have been doubted (Bröder & Newell, 2008).…”

“…High levels of negative arousal have been found to reduce cognitive capacity which in turn has been associated with less analytical processing of information, narrowing of attention, more selective information search and reliance on simple cues (e.g., DeSteno, Dasgupta, Bartlett, & Cajdric, 2004), which would predict that anger yields a higher use of non-compensatory strategies as compared to sadness. On the other hand, it has been suggested that anger fosters the reliance on dominant responses (Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994;Huntsinger, 2013b), whereas sadness inhibits dominant responses (Hunsinger et al, 2012). This would suggest that angry participants should rely more on compensatory strategies.…”

The Effect of Observers’ Mood on the Local Processing of Emotional Faces: Evidence from Short-Lived and Prolonged Mood States

“…This "affective adaptation" (Västfjäll, 2002, p.193) The default perceptual strategy and its effect on the relation of mood and cognition should also be attended by future research. Recent studies suggest that the impact of mood on perception is "malleable" and depends on the default perceptual strategy (Hunsinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2012;Huntsinger, 2013;Huntsinger, Clore, & Bar-Anan, 2010). This hypothesis implies that happy mood promotes any adopted perceptual strategy, while sad mood inhibits it.…”