ABSTRACT
Positive or negative mood forms an affective background state that does not necessarily originate from the appraisal of a specific situation or event and, thus, has to be distinguished from concrete emotions like love, joy, fear or anger (Schwarz & Clore, 1996). Positive and negative mood states can exert effects on information processing and social judgment in different ways (see Fiedler, 2001; Forgas, 1992, 1995, 2001). On the one hand, mood facilitates the accessibility of information that was encoded in a similar affective state or whose valence is congruent to the mood state at the time of retrieval. As a consequence, mood can affect social judgments that rely on the retrieval and integration of information from memory. On the other hand, mood states influence the kind of cognitive processing that is engaged to form a social judgment in the first place. That is, mood determines whether a social judgment is derived by a substantive search for relevant information in memory, by the use of heuristic cues like stereotype labels, or by a motivated search for positive or negative information that serves self-enhancement or mood-repair purposes. The different ways in which mood states affect memory, information processing and social judgment in general are elaborated in the first section of this chapter.
