Mood effects on person-perception judgments.

How does mood affect the way we learn about, judge, and remember characteristics of other people? This study looked at the effects of mood on impression formation and person memory. Realistic person descriptions containing positive and negative details were presented to subjects experiencing a manipulated happy or sad mood. Next, impression-formation judgments were obtained, and subjects' recall and recognition of details of the characters were assessed. Results showed that subjects spent longer learning about mood-consistent details but were faster in making mood-consistent judgments. Overall, happy subjects formed more favorable impressions and made more positive judgments than did sad subjects. Both cued recall and recognition memory were superior for mood-consistent characteristics. Positive mood had a more pronounced effect on judgments and memory than did negative mood. These findings are discussed in terms of recent theories of mood effects on cognition, and the likely implications of the results for everyday person-perception judgments are considered.