ABSTRACT
The idea that our transient moods can have a profound impact on our judgments, our behavior, and a variety of cognitive processes is neither new nor very controversial. It seems that when Alice Isen surprised mall shoppers with an unexpected dime in the return slot of a public phone and found that they were subsequently more willing to assist a hapless passerby who had dropped a stack of papers (Isen & Levin, 1972), social cognition researchers were on the verge of discovering the missing link between “hot” affect and “cold” cognition. What has been controversial, however, are the precise reasons why these and other effects of mood come about in the first place. Over the years, a number of models have been advanced to account for the many effects moods have been shown to have. Some of them, especially early ones, have emphasized the importance of mood priming mood-congruent thoughts (e.g., Bower, 1981; Bower, Gilligan, & Monteiro, 1981; Clark & Isen, 1982). According to this view, good (i.e., happy) moods make positive thoughts about helping more accessible, resulting in increased willingness to help. Unfortunately, it soon became evident that negative (i.e., sad) moods carried a similar proclivity to respond with help to an emergency, at least under some conditions (Carlson & Miller, 1987). Research concerned with the effects of moods on social judgments and recall soon ran into rough waters as well. Although many experimental investigations confirmed speculations consistent with the idea that happy moods increased the accessibility of congruent thoughts, the idea that sad moods would yield mirror-image results frequently remained unsupported (cf. Blaney, 1986; Isen, 1984, for reviews).
