ABSTRACT
People’s feelings affect their judgments in multiple ways. Not only do feelings impact judgments directly, but they also influence how information is processed to achieve those judgments (see Forgas, 1994; Mackie & Worth, 1989; Schwarz, 1990). The substantial literature on the impact of mood on information processing provides many confirmations of such influence. Studies in the persuasion field show that individuals in positive moods elaborate persuasive messages less and rely on heuristic processing more (see Mackie, Asuncion, & Rosselli, 1992; Schwarz, Bless, & Bohner, 1991, for reviews). Studies of priming effects (e.g., Bless & Fielder, 1995; Fiedler, Asbeck & Nickel, 1991) of the impact of stereotypes on judgments (e.g., Bodenhousen, 1993; Bodenhausen, Kramer, & Susser, 1994; Stroessner & Mackie, 1992) and of the activation of scripts (Bless, Clore, Schwarz, Golisano, Rabe, & Wolk, 1996) all suggest that happy individuals are more influenced by knowledge structures activated in memory than are others. In the decision-making and problem-solving literature, studies suggest that those who feel good tend to simplify decisions and solve problems quickly (Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987), use more heuristic strategies (Forgas, 1989), and take more time to solve analytical tasks (Melton, 1995; Palfai & Salovey, 1993). Many of these studies also suggest that, in contrast, individuals who are not happy engage in more careful, analytic processing and rely less on the product of mere memory activation processes. 1 We will refer to the association of positive mood with nonanalytic, top-down processing, and the association of nonpositive mood states with analytic, bottom-up processing, 2 as the mood information processing effect (MIPE).
