The effects of mood on the structure of the self-concept

This experiment explored the influence of mood on the organisation of both the self-concept and information about a known other. Multidimensional scaling techniques were used to model the structure of both representations held by individuals experiencing happy, sad, and neutral moods. The self-concept features of neutral mood participants were primarily organised along achievement- and affiliation-oriented dimensions. In contrast, the self-concepts of happy and sad participants were less complex; self-features were primarily organised with respect to a simple valence dimension. In all three mood conditions, individuals' conceptions of a known other were predominantly organised with respect to a general valence dimension; however, as with the representation of self, the presence of a happy or sad mood accentuated the use of the valence dimension for feature organisation. The implications of this modelling procedure for investigating self-concept structure and the effects of mood on cognitive organisation in general are discussed.