1. Extremely High Arousal
Can the Magnitude of Mood Congruent Effects Be Predicted by Personality? Dawn Macaulay & Eric Eich, University of British Columbia
Materials that match current mood in emotional valence tend to receive enhanced processing. Though there is agreement that these mood congruent (MC) effects are robust, little attention has been paid to differences between tasks or individuals. Prior research points to some variability in MC effects across subjects; variability that we suspected might be accounted for by personality differences.
One hundred participants completed personality questionnaires and performed a battery of four tasks designed to elicit MC effects. Subjects performed the tasks on two occasions a few days apart after experiencing mood manipulations to produce pleasant or unpleasant moods.
Within subject comparisons revealed significant MC effects for each task, but little correlation across tasks. Regression analyses showed different factors aided prediction of the MC effect for each task. Discussion centers on the importance of these results for understanding mood and memory relations and suggestions for future research.
Abstract
Participants:
100 individuals (66 women and 34 men, average age 23.3 years) participated.
Personality Questionnaires:
Subjects completed a battery of personality questionnaires in an individual session. These questionnaires included the NEO-FFI (Costa & Macrae, 1988) as a general description of basic personality structure. The remaining scales were related to some aspect of emotional reactivity [e.g., self-esteem (Rosenberg, 1965), private and public self-consciousness (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975), self-concept confusion (Campbell, Trapnell, Heine, Katz, Lavallee & Lehman, 1996), rumination, reflectiveness, and social anxiety (Trapnell & Campbell, 1996)] and thus were potentially important to mood congruent effects.
Method
Genuineness:
On average, subjects rated both their moods as more than moderately genuine. However, pleasant moods were perceived as somewhat more realistic than unpleasant moods (7.8 vs 7.3, t(98) =2.3, p < .05).
Mood Congruent Effects:
Analyses revealed significant mood congruent processing for each task as shown in Table 1. Subjects tended to recount more pleasant events, evaluate others more favorably, interpret ambiguous scenes more positively, and see positive outcomes as more likely when they experienced the pleasant mood and to do just the opposite under an unpleasant mood. Although there was clear evidence of mood congruence across tasks, there was little evidence that MC on one task was related to the effect on any other. That is, the MC indices were uncorrelated (see Table 2).
Table 3. Principal Component Analysis of Personality Questionnaires
Mood Manipulations:
Every subject was introduced to the matrix in Figure 1, an adaptation of the Affect Grid (Russell, Weiss, & Mendelsohn, 1989). After reporting baseline mood, the subject then listened to appropriate selections of classical music and contemplated a real or imagined personal experience which he or she had selected to help evoke the desired mood state. Every 5 minutes the experimenter came into the room and the subject marked a new affect grid. Once a grid was marked, the experimenter used it to determine readiness to continue with the rest of the experiment. The tasks were started when a pleasant mood subject marked any of the squares in the two right-most columns of the mood matrix, when an unpleasant mood subject checked any of the squares in the two left-most columns, or when any subject had attempted the mood induction for 40 minutes.
Subjects reported their current mood on the affect grid immediately prior to and following performance of each task in both sessions.
Upon completion of the last task every subject was completely debriefed both orally and in writing. As part of this debriefing, they were asked to provide ratings of the genuineness of both moods, with responses ranging from 0 (extremely artificial) to 5 (moderately genuine) to 10 (extremely genuine).
Background
Table 1. Task Performance
Interest in the interplay between emotion and cognition had its experimental awakenings in the early 1980s (Bower, 1980). Since that time, there have been a multitude of articles demonstrating that materials which match one’s current mood in valence receive enhanced processing. The mood congruent effects may range from enhanced memory for items to over-reliance on mood matching materials in judgment and decision making tasks (Forgas & Bower, 2000).
Although mood congruence is generally reliable, certain circumstances, such as use of recognition memory tests, will decrease the likelihood of its occurrence. Current research has focused on specifying these boundary conditions. One approach has been to examine the role of personality. Typically, researchers sample a limited range of personality variables and examine those variables effects in between-subjects designs.
Rusting (1999) and others have demonstrated that personality factors like neuroticism may interact with mood to influence cognition. Specifically, researchers have shown that the cognitive performance of those high on a particular dimension (like neuroticism) seem especially sensitive to one mood (like sadness) but relatively unmoved by another (like happiness). Given that mood and personality factors do interact, is there a group whose cognitive performance is especially influenced by current mood, regardless of its hedonic value?
Mood congruent effects imply that some aspect of processing is changed by an alteration in mood, yet within-subject comparisons are almost non-existent.
By sampling a wider range of personality factors related to emotional responsiveness and by use of within-subject comparisons, we set out to determine whether such a mood sensitive group could be identified and, more generally, to determine whether personality could predict mood congruent effects.
Table 4. Regression Equations
Table 2. Correlations among Mood Congruence Indices
Discussion
Tasks:
Event Generation task (EG): Subjects recounted specific personal past events that were related to each of 12 common concrete neutral nouns such as CITY and KEY. After generating the 12 events in the final session, subjects rated the original emotionality of all 24 events on a scale from -4 (extremely negative) to +4 (extremely positive).
Person Perception task (PP): Subjects read 10 sentence descriptions of 4 fictional characters with the instructions to form an overall impression of each character. Subjects rated the characters on 8-point bipolar scales on dimensions such as shy--self-confident, and dislikable—likable.
Thematic Apperception Task (TAT): Subjects viewed four cards from the TAT and provided a verbal description of each depicted event.
Subjective Probabilities task (SP): Subjects made personal judgments of the future likelihood of positive and negative events by providing an approximate percentage from 0 to 100 (e.g. The chances that a person will win a substantial amount of money in a lottery are about ______).
Within-subject comparisons revealed significant mood effects on all four tasks. However, the degree that mood influenced performance on one task was nearly independent of the effect on any other.
Regression analyses examining personality factors, mood intensity and genuineness, gender and age produced significant prediction equations for only the Event Generation task.
Mood congruent memory effects in Event Generation were larger for subjects who reported highly genuine mood experiences, who were women and who scored low on social self-consciousness. People who reported that they were less concerned about the way others evaluate them were likely to show the largest difference in their performance between the pleasant and unpleasant moods. If we consider that subjects described events aloud to an experimenter, it becomes clear that the Event Generation task does involve a social element in its performance. Furthermore, this pattern runs counter what we would expect if demand characteristics are responsible for producing these differences.
In contrast, larger mood differences in the interpretation of TAT cards was most strongly associated with higher social self-consciousness. This suggests that these apparent mood congruent effects may actually be response to experimental demand.
Younger subjects tended to show mood congruent effects when estimating the likelihood of negative items on the Subjective Probabilities task whereas older subjects viewed negative events as unlikely regardless of mood.
Our research suggests that, though mood congruent effects have been consistently demonstrated across tasks, the underlying phenomenon may vary widely. Future research into personality, mood, and cognition will need to focus more directly on task variables, which should allow greater specification of the mechanisms producing mood congruent effects.
Regression Analyses:
The personality measures were reduced to four factors via principal components analysis with varimax rotation. The four factor solution is reported in Table 3.
As performance on the mood congruence tasks was uncorrelated, we undertook separate regression analyses for each task. We combined an index of mood, average genuineness ratings, gender, age and the four personality factors to predict the MC index for each task (see Table 4).
Stronger mood effects on the generation of both positive and negative events (EG) were predicted by being low in social self-consciousness, by high ratings of mood genuineness, and by being female.
Mood effects on providing the subjective probability of negative events (SP) were marginally predicted by age. Younger subjects interpreted these events as more likely when they experienced unpleasant than pleasant feelings while older subjects saw these events as unlikely regardless of their mood.
Large mood differences in the interpretation of TAT cards was most strongly associated with higher social self-consciousness. Persons who report that they are concerned about the way others perceive them were likely to show larger mood effects on the TAT.
Subjects completed a battery of personality questionnaires.
Subjects completed four tasks sensitive to mood in two separate sessions, once after exposure to a pleasant mood manipulation and once after an unpleasant mood manipulation.
Mood congruent effects were calculated within-subjects.
Multiple regression was used to predict the degree of mood congruence from variables such as personality, gender, age and mood.
Design Summary
Results
Mood Ratings:
The average of pre- and post-task Affect Grid ratings are presented in Figure 2. Subject ratings of current mood differ significantly and substantially between the pleasant and unpleasant occasions. On average, the moods instilled by the manipulation techniques were sustained for each of the four tasks.
Figure 1: The Mood Grid
Extremely High Arousal
Extremely Low Arousal
Extremely Pleasant
Extremely Unpleasant
Figure 2: Pleasure and Arousal Ratings