ABSTRACT
Many theories of emotion share the assumption that affective experiences serve a signaling function (see Frijda, 1986, 1988, for reviews). Consistent with this notion, Wyer and Carlston (1979) suggested that mood effects on social judgment may reflect the use of one’s feelings as a source of information. Elaborating on this widely shared premise in various ways, Gerald Clore and I developed an approach to mood effects on judgment that became known as the “mood as information” model (Schwarz & Clore, 1983, 1988). We later extended the model to feelings other than mood, including nonaffective phenomenal experiences such as ease or difficulty of recall or perceptual fluency (for a review, see Schwarz, 1998), and accordingly changed the label to “feelings as information” (Clore, 1992; Schwarz, 1990). In another extension, I suggested that the information provided by onr feelings may trigger different processing strategies (Schwarz, 1990) and explored this hypothesis in collaboration with Herbert Bless and Gerd Bohner (Schwarz & Bless, 1991; Schwarz, Bless, & Bohner, 1991). As the contributions to this volume indicate, these lines of theorizing stimulated considerable research activity and resulted in a number of closely related conceptualizations.
