Do you have to pay attention to your feeling to be influenced by them?

Two experiments investigated how individual differences in attention to emo tion influence the rob of affect in judgments of risk. In Experiment 1, moo d influenced the judgments of individuals high, but not low, in attention t o emotion. When an attribution manipulation made a cause of their feelings salient, individuals high in emotional attention no longer perceived their feelings as relevant and were not influenced by them; whereas those low in emotional attention now paid attention to them and were influenced by them. This manipulation had these effects when it was presented prior to, but no t in the middle of a series of judgments. In Experiment 2, differences in r esponse to the attribution manipulation disappeared when participants' perc eptions of the relevance of their feelings were governed Iri instructions t o use either feelings or facts as a basis for judgment. The results suggest that feelings influence judgment when they seem relevant.