Whether you are smart or kind depends on how I feel: The influence of positive and negative mood on agency and communion perception

Abstract

Feelings-as-information theory states that feelings inform us about the nature of our current situation and we rely on them to make our judgments. Beyond that, feelings tune our cognitive processes to meet situational requirements. Positive feelings result in relying on pre-existing knowledge structures and default strategies, whereas negative feelings hamper relying on routines and results in adapting systematic processing. Based on this premise, it was hypothesized that positive mood, elicited either by the perceived target or by the independent source, would lead to relying on accessible agentic or communal content in perceiving strangers, as well as familiar others, whereas negative mood would weaken these tendencies. Specifically, the three studies showed initial evidence that (a) positive mood leads to focusing on agencyrelated qualities in perception of unknown men to a greater extent than negative mood, (b) positive mood leads to focusing on communion-related qualities in perception of unknown women more than negative mood, and(c) positive mood leads to relying on communal content in perception of familiar others comparing to negative mood.