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 b ad 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 formin g 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 expe riment addressing this issue, 64 subjects were put in a happy, sad, or angry mood, and subsequently exposed to strong or weak arguments advo cating the fluoridation of drinking water. These arguments were simult aneously displayed in a diagram. Central dependent variables were subj ects' attitudes, cognitive responses, and self-reported processing str ategy. Angry subjects' attitudes were most strongly influenced by argu ment quality, happy subjects' attitudes least strongly, with the effec t for sad subjects falling in between. The analysis of subjects' cogni tive responses and processing strategies suggests different mediating processes under angry (as compared to sad) mood. One possible explanat ion for this finding may lie in diverging impact of anger on the proce ss stages of encoding and judgment. Theoretical and methodological imp lications are discussed.