INFLUENCES OF HAPPY, SAD AND ANGRY MOODS ON THE PROCESSING OF PERSUASIVE COMMUNICATION

Research on mood influences in persuasion has shown that people in a bad mood tend toward effortful, analytic processing strategies, whereas individuals in a good mood prefer simplifying, heuristic strategies. In various studies, subjects in a good mood did not (or insufficiently) take the quality of the presented arguments into account when forming an attitude judgment; subjects in a bad mood, however, were clearly more persuaded by strong than by weak arguments. The question whether more specific emotional states lead to differences in processing style has not been addressed empirically yet, although competing hypotheses may be derived from different theoretical approaches. In a first experiment addressing this issue, 64 subjects were put in a happy, sad, or angry mood, and subsequently exposed to strong or weak arguments advocating the fluoridation of drinking water. These arguments were simultaneously displayed in a diagram. Central dependent variables were subjects' attitudes, cognitive responses, and self-reported processing strategy. Angry subjects' attitudes were most strongly influenced by argument quality, happy subjects' attitudes least strongly, with the effect for sad subjects falling in between. The analysis of subjects' cognitive responses and processing strategies suggests different mediating processes under angry (as compared to sad) mood. One possible explanation for this finding may lie in diverging impact of anger on the process stages of encoding and judgment. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.