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Four studies investigate the relationship between individuals' mood and their reliance on the ease retrieval heuristic. Happy participants were consistently more likely to rely on the ease of retrieval heuristic, whereas sad participants were more likely to rely on the activated content. Additional analyses indicate that this pattern is not due to a differential recall (Experiment 2) and that happy participants ceased to rely on the ease of retrieval when the diagnosticity of this information was called into question (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 shows that reliance on the ease of retrieval heuristic resulted in faster judgments than reliance on content, with the former but not the latter being a function of the amount of activated information.

Individuals can apply different processing strategies to deal with situations they encounter. One central question in social-cognition research refers to the factors that determine reliance on different processing strategies. Parting from a functional perspective, which holds that processing strategies need to be adjusted to the requirements of the situation, we argue that individuals' mood carries information about the benign versus problematic nature of the situation and thus that mood can regulate cognitive processing. Focusing on mental abstraction, we propose that positive mood contributes to a processing style characterized by reliance on prior knowledge in the form of general knowledge structures, whereas negative mood elicits a processing style characterized by attention to details and consideration of new situation-specific information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research suggests that duration bias—the tendency to overestimate the duration of affective states—is due to individuals' inordinate focus on event-related information. We propose that the impact of focusing on event-related (vs. unrelated) content is moderated by the ease with which the information is brought to mind. In the present experiment, participants thought about a possible future negative event and made affective forecasts after retrieving either few or many aspects in their life that would be affected (or unaffected) by the event. Participants estimated longer duration of affective consequences when they retrieved event-related rather than event-unrelated information. However, this effect was restricted to conditions where the respective information was brought to mind easily. Importantly, results also revealed that individual differences in faith in intuition moderated the effect of manipulated ease of retrieval. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three studies investigated the interplay between processing capacity and reliance on accessibility experiences versus reliance on accessible content. Participants low in processing capacity were more likely to rely on the experience of ease versus difficulty, whereas participants high in processing capacity were more likely to base their judgment on the accessible content information. This result was robust across two different judgmental domains and was further supported by the assessment of processing latencies during judgment formation as an indicator of the underlying processes. In combination, the reported findings suggest that reliance on ease-of-retrieval experiences is particularly likely in situations of low processing capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three studies investigate the impact of effortful constructive processing on framing effects. The results replicated previous findings: Participants avoided the risky option when the scenario was framed in terms of gains, but preferred this option when the scenario was framed in terms of losses. Importantly, framing effects were most pronounced when conditions allowed for an effortful constructive processing style (i.e., substantive processing). This impact of decision frames varied when decision time served as an indicator for the elaboration extent (Study 1), and also when processing motivation (accountability; Study 2) and processing ability (decision time; Study 3) were manipulated. Moreover, effortful processing did not increase framing effects when contextual cues reduced the necessity for constructive thinking (Study 1). We suggest that decision frames may take on very different roles as a function of the ambiguity of the decision problem, and the degree and style of processing. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on studies that tested if a given piece of contextual information is more influential when it is unique to the question asked rather than shared by several questions. Research methods; Result and discussion on the study.

We investigated how individuals in different mood states are influenced by category membership information, by individuating information, and by the relation of the two in an impression formation task. Subjects in different mood slates received positive or negative individuating information and positive or negative category information about a target person. Experiment I indicates that sad subjects were influenced by individuating but not by category membership information. In contrast, happy subjects' judgments reflected the implications of the category information as long as the individuating information was not inconsistent with the category, replicating previous research. This pattern was eliminated, however, when category-inconsistent information was provided, suggesting that happy subjects related the individuating information to the category membership information. Additional experiments show that instructing neutral mood subjects to relate category and individuating information or to focus on the individuating information result in patterns that parallel the judgments of happy and sad subjects, respectively, and that these effects are only obtained when the category information precedes (rather than follows) the individuating information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjects in a positive, neutral, or negative mood were presented with behaviour descriptions exemplifying different categories to investigate mood effects on the organization of person information. Subjects were instructed either to form an impression about the person performing the behaviours (impression set) or to memorize the behaviours (memory set). Neutral mood subjects showed higher recall and more clustering under impression instructions than under memory instructions, replicating previous findings. Regardless of instructions, subjects in both positive and negative mood showed recall as high as that shown by those in a neutral mood under impression set. Subjects in a positive mood showed considerable clustering regardless of instruction set, whereas subjects in a negative mood showed little clustering regardless of instructional set. Thus, recall appeared to he mediated by different processes in the positive and negative mood conditions. Results are consistent with the interpretation that different affective states influence processing styles which in turn mediate recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]