THE ROLE OF POSITIVE AFFECT IN SYLLOGISM PERFORMANCE

Previous research has found that people in positive moods perform bett er than others on creativity and divergent thinking tasks but perform more poorly and/or process the available information less thoroughly o n many other cognitive tasks. The present experiment examined various hypotheses concerning the process mediating the latter effect. Positiv e mood subjects performed significantly worse on a set of syllogisms t han control subjects, even though they had ample time for the task. Po sitive mood subjects were also significantly more likely than. control s to select an unqualified conclusion, tended to take less time on the task tended to diagram the relationships depicted by the premises les s frequently, and tended to give more answers consistent with the atmo sphere heuristic Together, these findings argue against distraction ac counts of the influence of positive affect. The results are most consi stent with accounts arguing that people in positive moods expend less effort.