ABSTRACT
Subjective experiences have always played a central role in work on attitudes and persuasion. Early theorists described the affect experienced in response to an attitude object as an integral part of a person’s attitude (e.g., Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960). Later, researchers studied how incidental affect—mood states that are present independent of the attitude object—influence attitudinal processing (see, e.g., Schwarz, Bless, & Bohner, 1991), and in recent years, nonaffective subjective experiences such as perceptual fluency and ease of processing were shown to impact on attitude judgments (e.g., Reber, Winkielman, & Schwarz, 1998; Wänke, Bless, & Biller, 1996). In this chapter, we discuss the mechanisms by which incidental negative affect can influence the processing of persuasive messages. We present experimental evidence for the view that people who experience negative affect may scrutinize message content either more or less thoroughly, depending on how they interpret their negative affect. In doing so, we mainly draw upon the affect-as-information model (Schwarz, 1990) and its mood-as-input extension (Martin, Ward, Achee, & Wyer, 1993).
