One person's enjoyment is another person's boredom: Mood effects on responsiveness to framing

This study examined the effects of induced mood on susceptibility to questi on-framing effects. Participants were placed in either a happy, sad, or neu tral mood and performed an impression-formation task under different phrasi ngs of Martin, Ward, Achee, and Wyer's (1993) stop rule instructions. Fm th e enjoy rule, participants were told to stop reading behaviors either when. they no longer enjoyed the task: or when they became bored with the task. Fm the performance-based rule, participants were told to stop either when t hey had enough information to form an impression of the target or when they did not need to collect additional information. Results indicated that neu tral mood participants were strongly influenced by the framing of the stop rule. Participants in valenced moods, however, were unaffected by framing, suggesting that they based their decisions about when to stop solely on the informational value of their moods. The implications of these results are discussed.