ABSTRACT
Recent research on affect and cognition has shifted away from the theoretical clarification of basic issues towards applications in social and clinical psychology. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence for the “classical” mood effects on memory, person judgment and social interaction is not that unequivocal. An attempt to figure out the crucial moderator variables in the mood and cognition literature may well end in confusion. For instance, failures to demonstrate mood-congruent memory may reflect too weak a mood manipulation, suggesting mood intensity as a central moderator. If mood influences would function on the conservation stage, this would roughly correspond to the filter metaphor of mood influences. At the empirical level, this basic theoretical assumption can be translated into a generic working hypothesis giving rise to many testable predictions.
