COLOR AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL PROCESSING CUE - EXTERNAL AFFECTIVE CUES CAN DIRECTLY AFFECT PROCESSING STRATEGY WITHOUT AFFECTING MOOD

We argue that environmental cues provide affective information that di rectly influences processing strategy, with positively valenced (i.e., happy) cues leading to nonsystematic processing and negatively valenc ed (i.e., sad) cues leading to systematic processing. Two studies addr essed this issue. In Study 1, participants were exposed to a set of pr oblem solving tasks printed on either red, white, or blue paper and un der the condition of either low or high motivation la process. The res ults showed that in the low motivation condition the blue and while pa per participants outperformed the red paper participants, while in the high motivation condition there were no effects. Further, there were no differences in mood among the groups, although results from a pilot study indicated that the red paper was perceived as communicating hap piness relative to the blue paper. These results suggest that an envir onmental cue, such as color, can directly affect processing strategy i n low motivation participants. In Study 2, participants completed both simple and complex problem solving tasks on either red or blue paper. The results of Study 1 were conceptually replicated. For complex task s, blue paper led to better performance than did red paper; however, n o difference was apparent for simple tasks. In Study 3, participants c ompleted a set of simple problems on either red, white, or blue paper and evaluated either their affective state or the affect conveyed by t he paper. As expected. there were no effects on accuracy on these simp le tasks or on affective state. However, the red paper was perceived a s conveying more positive affect then either the white or blue paper. The results are discussed in the context of an extension of the cognit ive tuning hypothesis to the area of environmental cues. Stop rule and restricted capacity explanations, as well as implications, are discus sed.