ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how mood influences the appraisal of physical symptoms and judgments about health and illness. After describing some recent experiments demonstrating the systematic effects of mood on the experience of physical symptoms and health beliefs, it describes mechanisms that might explain the associations between mood and health-related judgments. The chapter provides a discussion of the implications of this work for discovering biases in health survey data and understanding hypochondriasis. The random assignment of subjects to mood inductions allows for a direct test of the hypothesis that mood shifts have consequences for health-related cognitions. The chapter argues that the mood effects might be explained by three (not mutually exclusive) mechanisms, mood-congruent recall, mood-induced shifts in attentional focus, and actual changes in the functioning of the immune system brought on by mood shifts.
