Mood and self-focus

One alternative explanation for the informational mood impact on resource mobilization could be found in the mood influences on self-focus. There is ample research on mood and self-focus (e.g., Salovey, 1992; Wood et al.; 1990), however the results are not always consistent (see theoretical section 3.2.2.). Some studies found that negative mood was associated more with self-focus than positive mood (e.g., Wood et al.; 1990). On the other hand, there was also support for the notion that both happy and sad moods promote self-focused attention (Salovey, 1992). A more recent study by Abele et al. (2005), suggests that positive mood increases self-focus in contexts that do not demand effort, and decreases it in contexts that call for effort. Negative affect has been much more investigated due to its clinical implications and a recent meta-analysis confirms that negative affects are strongly associated with self-focus (Mor & Winquist, 2002). This mobilization of attentional resources could interfere with the mobilization of resources for other tasks. Consequently, it could be possible that the influence of mood on effort mobilization would not be due to subjective demand appraisals, but depend on the reduction of available attentional resources (which follows the alternative perspective presented above).

Accordingly, since there would be fewer cognitive resources available, more effort should be invested in

order to compensate this deficit. This idea follows the implications of the resource allocation view and the logic of Wright and Penacerrada’s (2002) work, who have shown that tired people invest more effort to complete a task, as long as the effort is seen as justified.

This alternative hypothesis proposes the implication of different processes in the impact of mood on resource mobilization. Considering that mood influences all types of judgment (see Wyer et al., 1999, for a review), the MBM assumes that moods directly influence the subjective demand appraisals, which will in turn determine effort adjustments. Taking the self-focus explanation into account, mood impact on resource mobilization would not act directly: Its action would be mediated by the cognitive resources used or available according to the mood states, which would also affect the perception of task difficulty (but more as a side effect than as a cause). We consider that the studies presented in this thesis cast no doubts on the replicated effects of an informational mood impact as conceptualized in the MBM. Study 2 provided an especially conclusive test for this process through the manipulation of the diagnostic value of moods under conditions of the availability of other diagnostic information for demand appraisals and resource mobilization (such as task difficulty). Additionally, it is clear from Studies 3 and 4 that a negative mood does not always lead to more effort when there is a task with unfixed difficulty. It was demonstrated that more effort can be invested in a positive mood, depending on the type of judgment considered. We therefore defend that mood influences on self-focus cannot explain the results obtained in our studies.

2.2.3. Mood as priming

The mood-as-priming process, as postulated by Bower (1981, 1991), endorses the concept of mood congruency effect. The main implication of the mood-as-priming view is that moods influence judgments such as demand appraisals by making mood-congruent information highly accessible. It posits that people in a positive mood make more optimistic judgments concerning evaluations/expectations/situations than people in a negative mood, because they activate more positive concepts in memory. However, a critical precondition for this theory is that the informational value of a mood is not in question. It has been demonstrated that mood congruency effects and judgments decrease significantly if people become aware of mood-eliciting events as causes for their actual feeling states (Hirt et al., 1997; Schwarz & Clore, 1983; Sinclair et al., 1994; see also Gasper &

Clore, 1998) or if they have other diagnostic information available (Abele et al., 1998; Abele & Petzold, 1994). Following this evidence, the findings in Study 2 are hardly explainable by the mood-as-priming approach. A mood-as-priming process could only explain our results if a mood decay effect had occurred

due to the cue manipulation. This was not the case, evidenced by the results of the post task mood measure, on which the cue manipulation had no effect.

2.2.4. Mood as information

Based on the mood and information integration perspective (Abele & Petzold, 1994), the MBM posits that mood is one piece of information that is integrated with all other available information into a judgment. This view seems similar to the one proposed by Schwarz (1990; Schwarz & Clore, 1988), but there are some key differences. One of those differences relies on the "all or nothing" principle proposed by Schwarz’s model: According to its “how do I feel about it” heuristic, evaluative judgments are predicted to depend either on misattributed affect or on other information, but not on both.

Conversely, the MBM considers a mood-and-information-integration approach, where mood is always present, being circumstantially more or less informative, and as being pragmatically used when other information is also available. This MBM assumption was well demonstrated in Study 2: The results showed that people used both their mood state and all available information about objective task difficulty to evaluate task demand during task performance. The integration and weighting of all information determined effort mobilization. Participants who were informed about the mood manipulation adjusted more adequately their level of effort.

Another critical distinction between these two models is in their positions on the stable motivational implications of mood. Schwarz, (1990) posits stable mood motivational implications for information-processing strategies. According to his cognitive tuning hypothesis, positive mood is associated with effortless processing strategies (because it informs the person that everything is alright), while negative mood is linked to effortful information processing (because it informs the organism that there are problems). Conversely, the MBM posits that mood states per se do not involve autonomic adjustments. Studies 3 and 4 lend further support to this basic postulate of the MBM. By explicitly manipulating the type of judgment (effort-rule), mood effects on motivational intensity differed. Mood-congruent demand appraisals mediated between mood and effort mobilization when participants were confronted with a mental task. Based on the evidence presented above, the mood-as-information perspective cannot account for the findings in our studies.

2.2.5. Mood as motivation

Besides the mood-as-information approach (Schwarz & Clore, 1988; Schwarz, 1990), there are other researchers who defend the idea of stable motivational implications of moods (e.g., Fiedler, 1988;

Forgas, 1995a; Gaspar & Clore, 2002; Mackie & Worth, 1991). Most of the literature supporting the stability of specific mood effects on behavior assumes that positive affect has in general an energy saving function (e.g., Fredrickson et al., 2000; Morris, 1999; Schwarz, 1990). However, throughout all of our studies there was no “spontaneous” resource mobilization – i.e., during mood inductions there was no effort mobilization; it just occurred in contexts that explicitly called for effort. The most unambiguous proof of this replicated result is Study 1, explicitly conceived to test the “mood as motivation” idea.

Nevertheless, all the other studies support the context-dependency of moods. Study 2 shows that under some circumstances (difficult task, when unaware of mood state) people in a positive mood mobilize more effort than people in a negative mood. This stronger mobilization of resources in a positive mood is also patent in Studies 3 and 4, where the type of effort-related judgment determined different mood effects on resource mobilization. Our findings allow us to affirm that mood effects on resource mobilization are context-dependent, and can not be explainable by stable effects on mental effort mobilization.