THE IMPACT OF MOOD ON INFORMATION USE IN JUDGMENTS OF RELATIONSHIP SATISFACTION

The hypothesis in Study 1 was that positive mood leads people to rely on both central and peripheral features of relationship quality when m aking global satisfaction judgments concerning their relationship with a spouse or partner, whereas sadness leads people to focus more exclu sively on central features. For German university students, correlatio nal analyses, within mood condition, of feature ratings with satisfact ion judgments, both obtained following mood induction, revealed result s consistent with the hypothesis. Study 2 again addressed the differen tial breadth of feature processing, by having a different group of Ger man students categorize features of relationship quality after mood in duction. As expected, participants in the positive mood condition used the fewest categories, whereas those in the neutral and sad mood cond itions used the most categories.