ABSTRACT
G roup researchers have long acknowledged the importance of a group's emotional life to its performance, development, and health. Until recent-ly, however, relatively little research has directly examined the role of affect in group performance. During this same time, individual-level researchers investigating social phenomena have acknowledged that moods and emotions have profound influences on many areas of cognitive functioning. For example, mood has been found to affect judgments, persuasion, and person perception, and it appears to do so through influencing the processes of memory, attention, and type of information processing (see, for example, Forgas, 1992, 2002; see also Clore & Storbeck, this volume; Bless & Fiedler, this volume; and Forgas, this volume). Recent group-level models suggest that group affect might also have similarly important influences on group performance through its impact on information and emotion sharing processes of groups (Kelly, 2001; Kelly & Barsade, 2001).
