Search

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of emotion on the process and content of health behavior self-efficacy judgments. This study proposes to build on existing social cognitive and health behavior theories and examine how positively or negatively-valenced emotions with self or other appraisal dimensions of control influence health behavior self-efficacy judgments. Specifically, this study will explore whether 1) emotions with different valence and control appraisal dimensions differentially influence perceived health behavior self-efficacy (informational effects); 2) more in-depth processing will occur during the judgment when the participant feels less in control as compared to more in control and more negative as compared to more positive (processing effects); 3) the influence of the emotion on the judgments is mediated by the depth of processing while making judgments; and 4) the typical or unusual and novel or previously attempted nature of the target behavior influences the depth of processing and use of the emotion information during the judgment. In addition to testing previously identified models in a new context to contribute to social cognitive theories, this study will provide greater insight into the emotional determinants of health behavior in a realistic scenario. Determining whether there are informational and processing effects specific to the control dimension of emotion during judgments of self-efficacy will contribute to existing health behavior models and provide one more avenue of influencing real-world health behavior choices.

PurposeBuilding on authoritative studies on inspiration in the field of psychology (e.g. Thrash and Elliot, 2013, 2014), this study aims to clarify how entrepreneurial inspiration – an emotional state of personal attraction toward entrepreneurship – is created and how it affects entrepreneurial intentions. First, receptiveness to inspiration is introduced as a potential entrepreneurial feeling trait that constitutes a universal enabler of entrepreneurial inspiration alongside typically idiosyncratic inspirational triggers. Second, this study proposes to reinforce the theoretical base of the relation between entrepreneurial inspiration and entrepreneurial intentions by applying the affect infusion model (AIM) and empirically testing its explanatory power.Design/methodology/approachHypotheses are tested through independent and dependent samplet-tests and hierarchical regression analyses with an interaction effect. Data originate from a pre-post course survey among 342 entrepreneurship students from various countries and institutions.FindingsThe results confirm a positive relation between receptiveness to inspiration and entrepreneurial inspiration. Receptiveness to inspiration precedes and increases with entrepreneurial experience, suggesting that it can be both inborn and cultivated. In line with the AIM, entrepreneurial inspiration stimulates only the entrepreneurial aspirations of participants without entrepreneurial experience. Experienced individuals, on the other hand, derived more entrepreneurial inspiration from their courses, but this was not translated to higher entrepreneurial intentions. Instead, they could benefit from this inspiration in other ways proposed in the literature, such as enhanced opportunity recognition.Originality/valueThis study provides much needed, theory-informed, insight into the formation of entrepreneurial inspiration. Furthermore, it is the first research to propose and test a specific theoretical underpinning of the relation between entrepreneurial inspiration and entrepreneurial intentions, which also accounts for the moderating role of entrepreneurial experience. Finally, the rare multi-country, multi-institution nature of the sample reinforces the external validity of the findings.

PurposeThis study is a pioneer in the academic literature to investigate the relationship between Valentine’s Day and stock market returns of major economies around the world.Design/methodology/approachSpecific control variables for Valentine's Day are introduced to eliminate the potential influence of other effects.FindingsThe findings indicate that stock returns are higher on the days when Valentine's Day is approaching than on other days for most cases, showing “the Valentine Effect” in the stock market.Originality/valueUnlike other holiday effects in the previous literature, the Valentine's Day effect cannot be explained by many conventional theories, such as tax-loss selling and the inventory adjustment hypothesis.

Research on consumer technology adoption has predominantly focused on technology acceptance models; the role of consumers' affective states and individual characteristics has largely remained underexplored. Drawing on the Mood-Behavior Model and the Affect Infusion Model, this research suggests that consumers' mood is an important factor that influences their decision to adopt in-store m-payment services. More importantly, the nature of this impact differs depending on two individual characteristics: consumers' decision-making style (maximizer/satisficer) and need for gratification. A scenario-based experiment (n = 322) provides empirical evidence for the significance of consumers' affective states in their judgements and decisions. When experiencing positive mood, those satisficers who have a higher need for gratification are more likely to use m-payment services. In contrast, in a negative mood state, maximizers with a higher need for gratification are more inclined to use m-payment. The findings contribute to the literature by demonstrating that mood is an important determinant of technology adoption and that consumers' individual characteristics define how positive and negative mood can influence their adoption decisions in different ways. The results also inform managers on an interesting consumer segmentation approach based on consumers’ decision-making style and need for gratification when promoting in-store m-payment services.

This chapter reviews an emotion-network theory and associated research showing several domains in which social judgments and choices are influenced in a mood-congruous direction. In recent years, a relatively large research literature has accumulated investigating the impact of emotional states on social judgments and choices. In reviewing the literature on mood-congruity biases in social judgments, author have been struck by the parallel or similarity between the theory and data in favor of the mood-congruity hypothesis and those in favor of the cognitive consistency or dissonance theory of attitude maintenance. According to cognitive consistency theory, having a strongly held attitude on a personally significant topic should predispose one to an interrelated set of biases. The loss of interest in social activities is a familiar hallmark of the depressed person.

The role of emotions in interpersonal judgements about health and illness and in social decisions receive particular attention in this book. The book is organised in three sections: conceptual approaches to the connection between emotion, mood and judgements; extension of the basic theory behind how feelings affect social judgements; and theoretical models and their application in research.

Faces are important in both human communication and computer-mediated communication. In this study, I analyze the influence of emotional expressions in faces on knowledge-sharing decisions in a computer-mediated environment. I suggest that faces can be used for affect infusion and affect detection, which increases the effectiveness of knowledge-management systems. Using the affect infusion model, I discuss why emotions can be expected to influence knowledge-sharing decisions. Using the two-step primitive emotional contagion framework, I found that emotional facial expression attached to a knowledge-sharing request influenced knowledge-sharing decisions. This influence was mediated by the decision maker’s emotional valence in the facial expression tracked by Face Reader technology and held for females but not males. I discuss implications for designers of emotionally intelligent information systems and research.

Conflict adaptation is a cognitive mechanism denoting increased cognitive control upon detection of conflict. This mechanism can be measured by the congruency sequence effect, indicating the reduction of congruency effects after incongruent trials (where response conflict occurs) relative to congruent trials (without response conflict). Several studies have reported increased conflict adaptation under negative, as compared to positive, mood. In these studies, sustained mood states were induced by film clips or music combined with imagination techniques; these kinds of mood manipulations are highly obvious, possibly distorting the actual mood states experienced by the participants. Here, we report two experiments where mood states were induced in a less obvious way, and with higher ecological validity. Participants received success or failure feedback on their performance in a bogus intelligence test, and this mood manipulation proved highly effective. We largely replicated previous findings of larger conflict adaptation under negative mood than under positive mood, both with a Flanker interference paradigm (Experiment 1) and a Stroop-like interference paradigm (Experiment 2). Results are discussed with respect to current theories on affective influences on cognitive control.

This study examines the influence of employee responsiveness and organizational reassurance towards customer citizenship behaviour (CCB) on building guest satisfaction, loyalty, and perceived value. The study considers insights from concepts in psychology including attachment theory, self-congruity theory, affect infusion model, and social exchange theory which are relevant to the problematics of CCB. The scenario-based experimental design used in this study focuses on one aspect of CCB identified in extant literature: the policing of other customers. In a hospitality context, guests voluntarily participate in safeguarding an organization's quality when they identify areas that may be impacted by opportunistic behaviours of fellow guests. This context is highly relevant in hospitality and tourism settings where the behaviour of one individual may directly impact the experience of another given the co-creation of experience in a shared environment. Both employee responsiveness and organizational reassurance were found to significantly moderate guest satisfaction, loyalty and perceived value.

Evolutionary theories suggest that all affective states have a function. The fascinating review “Can Sadness Be Good for You? On the Cognitive, Motivational and Interpersonal Benefits of Mild Negative Affect” by Joseph Forgas is a welcome reminder that happiness is not the be all and end all—sadness can also be beneficial. In this commentary, I summarise the studies conducted by Forgas et al. that demonstrate the benefit of mild negative affect for memory, judgement, motivation, and interpersonal behaviour (and those that do not), link them to current theories and models, and discuss avenues for future research.

How do the words we use to talk about politics influence political attitudes and evaluations? I focus specifically on negative affective language—words which individuals have preexisting negative reactions toward. Considering the Affect Infusion Model (AIM), processing style influences how individuals use affect when making decisions. The impact of affective language depends upon the complexity of the decision. In simpler processing tasks, individuals will use affect as a heuristic. This causes a misattribution of generalized negative affect onto a political target, leading to harsher evaluations. When a decision is complex, affective language influences how new information is stored in memory, along with improving information recall and abstract thinking. For those who are exposed to negative affective language, negative evaluations of politicians persist more strongly in memory, while these evaluations fade away when affect is used as a heuristic.

Affective analysis plays an important role in understanding human characteristics, predicting human behavior and diagnosing mental health problems. Although a large number of affective computing model have been published, understood of mood mechanism is still a challenge because of complexity of correlations between mood, human factors and environmental influence. We therefore aim at developing a computational model of dynamic mood considering mutual influence of mood, human physical status and appraisal. In this paper, we emphasize presenting the model and simulate model according to artificial scenarios.

Social psychology researchers have, traditionally, focused on the construct of thinking rather than on feeling. Since the beginning of the 21st century, social science researchers have, however, increasingly explored the effects of affect. Their work has repeatedly recognized that affects play a crucial role in determining people's behavior. In this short paper, we argue that software engineering studies on affect would benefit from using more of the knowledge that social science researchers have acquired. Without accounting for their findings, we risk re-inventing the wheel. Also, without a profound understanding of the complex interplay between social context and affect, we risk creating overly simplistic solutions that might have considerable long-term adverse effects for software engineers.

Positive mood contributes to mental and physical wellbeing. The broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 2001) proposed that the beneficial effects of positive mood on life quality result from attentional broadening. In this article, we systematically review (following PRISMA guidelines; Moher et al., 2009), a host of studies investigating the nature and extent of attentional changes triggered by the experience of positive mood, with a focus on vision. While several studies reported a broadening of attention, others found that positive mood led to a more diffuse information processing style. Positive mood appears to lessen attention selectivity in a way that is context-specific and bound to limitations. We propose a new framework in which we postulate that positive mood impacts the balance between internally and externally directed attention, through modulations of cognitive control processes, instead of broadening attention per se. This novel model is able to accommodate discrepant findings, seeks to translate the phenomenon of the so-called broadening of attention with positive mood into functional terms, and provides plausible neurobiological mechanisms underlying this effect, suggesting a crucial role of the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex in this interaction.

Empirical studies on the relationship between affect and creativity often produce conflicting results. This inconsistency has led us to believe that the relationship between affect and creativity may be better understood by looking at potential moderators. Our study looked specifically at trait affect and self-perceived creativity. Using the Affect Infusion Model (AIM) theory with problem clarity as the potential moderator, we hypothesized that when individuals are faced with problems that lack clarity, trait affect has greater sway over their self-perceived creativity. Our results provided evidence that problem clarity moderated the relationship between positive trait affect and self-perceived creativity; the positive relationship between positive trait affect and self-perceived creativity is stronger when problem clarity is low and weaker when problem clarity is high. No moderating effect was found in the relationship between negative trait affect and self-perceived creativity.

The authors propose a conceptual framework that highlights the process firms pursue in response to externally imposed changes in the regulatory environment. The study adapts three theories to better understand this phenomenon: sensemaking, the affect infusion model, and cognitive appraisal theory. Using the context of bans on the production and sale of foie gras, the authors present a series of propositions that delineate the process through which firms innovate in response to changes in their regulatory environment. The authors suggest that cognitive processes utilized to make sense of restrictive regulation represent strategic responses, resulting in innovations that expand an existing market, or create a new one. Alternatively, affectively infused reactions result in less innovative responses, or even non-compliance. The authors present examples of firms' innovations as support for the conceptual model. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Managers often have limited available time to make high-quality strategic decisions that are both original and feasible. This joint objective is important but difficult to achieve because under time constraints, managers must combine different cognitive processes that are often influenced by emotional states. However, research investigating how time constraints and emotions interact and impact the quality of strategic decisions is scarce. Building upon the affect infusion model and information processing perspective, our experimental study involving 174 managers shows that the impact of time constraints and emotions varies across the two decision-making tasks of strategic idea generation and strategic choice. In particular, compared to the managers in a neutral emotional state under low time constraints, the happy managers under high time constraints seemed to generate fewer original and fewer feasible strategic ideas and appeared to make worse original strategic choices, while compared to the managers in a neutral emotional state under low time constraints, the sad managers under high time constraints made better original strategic choices. Our study contributes novel insight into behavioral strategy research by showing how time constraints and emotions causally and jointly influence different quality dimensions in various tasks involving strategic decision-making.

This article provides a conceptual framework for studying the influence of mood on managerial ethical decision making. We draw on mood-congruency theory and the affect infusion model to propose that mood influences managerial ethical decision making through deliberate and conscious assessments of the moral intensity of an ethical issue. By accounting for proscriptive and prescriptive morality—i.e., harmful and prosocial behavior, respectively—we demonstrate that positive and negative mood may have asymmetrical and paradoxical effects on ethical decision making. Specifically, our analysis suggests that individuals in a positive mood will be more likely to engage in prosocial behavior but less likely to refrain from activities that have harmful consequences for others, whereas individuals in a negative mood will be more likely to avoid activities that put others at risk or harm but at the same time less prone to engaging in activities that have positive consequences for others. Importantly, we account for the context within which managers make their decisions by examining how situational strength may moderate the influence of mood on managerial ethical decision making. Finally, we discuss how organizations can leverage the double-edged sword effect of mood on ethical decision making and prevent, control and manage the risk of unethical decision making on the part of managers.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine leader-member exchange (LMX) and perceived organizational support (POS) as moderators of the relationship between psychological contract violation and workplace incivility. Design/methodology/approach – An online survey was administered to employed adults. Findings – The association between violation and incivility was more pronounced when levels of LMX and POS were higher. Research limitations/implications – The correlation design limits the ability to draw causal inferences. Affect models, including but not limited to affect infusion model (AIM), offer a useful framework for enhancing understanding of incivility and other forms of counterproductive work behaviors. Practical implications – The study has contributed to knowledge about contract violation’s implications for work behaviors, such as incivility. Managers sensitive to the dynamics of contract breach may prevent feelings of violation by communicating clearly and often about expectations, resources, and procedures. Social implications – Organizational and societal leaders may be well served by knowledge about preventing people’s intense responses to perceived violation by appropriately responding to perceived breach. Originality/value – The study draws upon AIM as a novel approach to understanding conditions under which negative emotions are most likely to relate to workplace incivility. Moreover, the roles of social exchange variables LMX and POS have heretofore been unexplored as moderators of the violation-incivility relationship.

The importance of positive mood for health and well-being is a truism. However, we still lack clear understanding of the nature and range of modulatory effects created by positive mood on cognition in humans. Here, we briefly review two recent research lines that have attempted to address this question systematically. Specifically, research on attention has explored the boundaries of the so-called broadening of attention with positive mood. Likewise, effects of positive mood on error monitoring have been scrutinized lately. The new empirical findings gathered in these two separate research domains concur on the assumption that positive mood is not merely adding noise to cognition. Instead, this mood state seems to provide the organism with meaningful (internal) information, which allows for timely and flexible exploration of new opportunities in the (external) environment and alters the motivational significance of negative events, such as response errors, in a rather flexible way. As such, these new findings provide information about the existence of complex interaction effects between positive mood and cognition and may help, in turn, to better appraise the actual role and function of this protective mood state for health and cognition.

Recent research has provided evidence that mood can spread over social networks via social contagion, but that, in seeming contradiction to this, depression does not. Here, we investigate whether there is evidence for the individual components of mood (such as appetite, tiredness and sleep) spreading through US adolescent friendship networks while adjusting for confounding by modelling the transition probabilities of changing mood state over time. We find that having more friends with worse mood is associated with a higher probability of an adolescent worsening in mood and a lower probability of improving, and vice versa for friends with better mood, for the overwhelming majority of mood components. We also show, however, that this effect is not strong enough in the negative direction to lead to a significant increase in depression incidence, helping to resolve the seeming contradictory nature of existing research. Our conclusions, therefore, link in to current policy discussions on the importance of subthreshold levels of depressive symptoms and could help inform interventions against depression in high schools.

Fairness-related decision making is an important issue in the field of decision making. Traditional theories emphasize the roles of inequity aversion and reciprocity, whereas recent research increasingly shows that emotion plays a critical role in this type of decision making. In this review, we summarize the influences of three types of emotions (i.e., the integral emotion experienced at the time of decision making, the incidental emotion aroused by a task-unrelated dispositional or situational source, and the interaction of emotion and cognition) on fairness-related decision making. Specifically, we first introduce three dominant theories that describe how emotion may influence fairness-related decision making (i.e., the wounded pride/spite model, affect infusion model, and dual-process model). Next, we collect behavioral and neural evidence for and against these theories. Finally, we propose that future research on fairness-related decision making should focus on inducing incidental social emotion, avoiding irrelevant emotion when regulating, exploring the individual differences in emotional dispositions, and strengthening the ecological validity of the paradigm.

Affective tones abound in work teams. Drawing on the affect infusion model and social identity theory, this study proposes that team affective tone is related to team performance indirectly through team identification and team cooperation. Data from 141 hybrid-virtual teams drawn from high-tech companies in Taiwan generally supported our model. Specifically, positive affective tone is positively associated – while negative affective tone is negatively associated – with both team identification and team cooperation, team identification is positively associated with team cooperation, and team cooperation is positively associated with team performance. Managerial implications and limitations are discussed.

This study expanded transactive memory theory by incorporating affective influences on processes that have been primarily examined through a cognitive lens. Drawing on J. P. Forgas' (1995) affect infusion model, the research developed a multilevel model of the role of individual- and group-level state positive affect for individual transactive communication, operationalized as information seeking and sharing. A test of the model using 25 student groups showed that (a) both individual- and group-level positive affect were positively related to individual volume of transactive communication; (b) affective homogeneity among members of a group had a significant relationship to information sharing, but not information seeking; and (c) the interaction between affective homogeneity and group positive affect did not impact either transactive communication process.

We adapt the Affect Infusion Model and propose the Affect-Trust Infusion Model (ATIM), which explains and predicts how and when cognition, through perceived Web site performance (PWP), and positive emotion (PE) each influence Web vendor trust. The ATIM explains the underlying causal mechanisms that determine the degree of affect infusion and the subsequent processing strategy that a user adopts when interacting with a new Web site. Under high affect infusion, PE acts as a mediator between PWP and vendor trust; under low affect infusion, PWP primarily affects trust, and PE is disintermediated. We review two distinct, rigorously validated experiments that empirically support the ATIM. To conclude, we detail several promising research opportunities that can leverage the ATIM and show how the ATIM can help to guide user-centered design (UCD) as an example practical application.

Can negative mood improve language understanding? Two experiments explored mood effects on people's ability to correctly identify sentences that lack clear meaning in the absence of further contextual information (ambiguous anaphora). Based on recent affect – cognition theories, we predicted and found that negative affect, induced by film clips, improved people's ability to detect linguistic ambiguity. An analysis of response latencies (Studies 1 & 2) and recall (Study 2) confirmed that negative mood produced longer and more attentive processing, and a mediational analysis suggested that processing latencies mediated mood effects on detecting linguistic ambiguity. These results are consistent with negative affect selectively promoting a more concrete, vigilant and externally focused accommodative information processing style, involving more detailed attention to the communicative content of a message. The theoretical relevance of these results for recent affect-cognition theories is considered, and the practical implications of the findings for everyday verbal communication and interpersonal behavior are discussed.

Decisions are made according to a complex cognitive and emotional evaluation of the situation. The aim of the paper is to examine the effect of mood on risky investment decision making by using a mood induction procedure. The paper investigates how happy and sad mood affects risky investment decision making and whether there is a difference between the perception of fix investments and monetary investments. The analysis has been conducted focusing on individual investment decisions. Data for the research comes from a laboratory experiment, where 166 participants in happy, sad and neutral mood, filled out a questionnaire of investment decisions. The results indicate that mood does affect investment decision making, and positive and negative mood might have similar effect on the investment decision.

Decision-makers often struggle to terminate unsuccessful new product development (NPD) projects, so that escalating commitment occurs. Although research shows that rational and intuitive decision-making styles (DMS) as well as a decision-maker’s affective state determines the performance of NPD decisions, little is known about their influences on escalating commitment. By applying the affect infusion model in an experimental study, we investigate how a decision-maker’s affective state influence their escalating commitment by focusing on their use of a rational and an intuitive DMS. Our findings, based on 366 respondents, show that a rational DMS is unable to reduce commitment escalation. Surprisingly, an intuitive DMS is able to reduce a decision-maker’s commitment in the case of a positive affect, whereas a rational DMS increases their commitment in the case of a negative affect. Thus, our interdisciplinary research on affect and decision-making extends and contributes to research into decision-making during the NPD process as well as into escalating commitment.

Attitudes and preferences do not always prove to be good predictors of actual behavior. Following the call for moderating variables to get a better idea of when and for whom attitude–behavior consistency exists, the current paper focuses on mood as a potential situational moderator. Results from three online studies demonstrate that (1) mood significantly affects attitude–behavior consistency, (2) not the decision style that mood activates (i.e., a deliberative style under negative mood versus an intuitive decision style under positive mood), but a fit in decision style respondents use during attitude formation and decision making underlies this mood effect, and (3) this mood effect holds for individuals who tend to experience their emotions intensively (i.e., high affect intensity individuals), but reverses for individuals who experience their emotions less intensively (i.e., low affect intensity individuals).

It is controversial whether mood affects cognition by triggering specific processing strategies or by limiting processing resources. The current event-related potential (ERP) study pursued this issue by examining how mood modulates the processing of task relevant/irrelevant information. In question-answer pairs, a question context marked a critical word in the answer sentence as focus (and thus relevant) or non-focus (thereby irrelevant). At the same time, participants were exposed to either a pleasant or unpleasant odor to elicit different mood states. Overall, we observed larger N400s when the critical words in the answer sentences were semantically incongruent (rather than congruent) with the question context. However, such N400 effect was only found for focused words accompanied by a pleasant odor and for both focused and non-focused words accompanied by an unpleasant odor, but not for non-focused words accompanied by a pleasant odor. These results indicate top-down attentional shift to the focused information in a positive mood state and non-selective attention allocated to the focused and non-focused information in a less positive mood state, lending support to the “processing strategy” hypothesis. By using a novel approach to induce mood states, our study provides fresh insights into the mechanisms underlying mood modulation of language comprehension.

This study advances theories of impression formation by focusing on two factors that generate emotional responses: physical attractiveness and positive word use. Although considerable research on impression formation exists, most studies consider factors in isolation and neglect possible interactions. Our theory introduces competing mechanisms regarding possible interaction effects, and we empirically test them in an online marketplace. Results from the analysis of 729 loan requests from a leading online peer-to-peer lending market suggest that physical attractiveness and positive word use work together to influence the likelihood of acquiring resources and establish an important boundary condition to the general “beauty is good” effect.

In this chapter, we propose a model of managerial intuitive decision making based on problem characteristics, decision characteristics, environmental factors, and individual factors. We propose also that affect moderates the intuitive decision-making process. Based on the affect infusion model (AIM), we suggest three interaction scenarios between the determinants of intuitive decision making and affect: moderate mood, high-intensity emotions, and affective feelings. We theorize that positive mood encourages the use of intuition while negative mood discourages it. We argue further that high-intensity emotions serve as a conduit to intuitive processing, but only if the decision maker focuses on the decision outcome. Conversely, we propose that high-intensity emotions can act as a barrier to intuition if the decision maker focuses on the emotion itself. Lastly, we hypothesize that managers will be more likely to use intuition in subsequent decisions if they receive affective confirmation as a result of their earlier use of intuitive decision making.

Purpose Organizational changes are emotionally charged processes, and scholarly research has increasingly emphasized the impact of employee emotions on successful change management. This impact has rarely been considered in light of approaches focussing on employee sensemaking. To address this critical gap, the purpose of this paper is to combine the model of enacted sensemaking with insights from the Affect Infusion Model. Design/methodology/approach To test the model, the authors surveyed 261 employees with a vignette study and performed structural equation modeling on the results. Findings The findings reveal that emotions significantly affect employees’ level of psychological resources, particularly change commitment, efficacy, and expectations. Furthermore, change commitment and efficacy are significant predictors of resistance intention, which confirms (to an extent) the validity of enacted sensemaking, and these factors mediate the relationship between employees’ emotions and their resistance intentions. Research limitations/implications This study focussed on the early stages of a change initiative. Therefore, the authors only considered employee assessment at one point in time. Practical implications This model has managerial utility for explaining how employees’ resistance intention regarding change is influenced by employees’ emotions and their psychological resources. Originality/value The results broaden the horizons because they suggest a model of “emotionally primed” enacted sensemaking for employees during organizational change by offering a new theoretical framework (enacted sensemaking and substantive processing) and a new methodological approach (quantitative vignette study).

The term 'mood' in its scientific usage refers to relatively enduring affective states that arise when negative or positive experience in one context or time period alters the individual's threshold for responding to potentially negative or positive events in subsequent contexts or time periods. The capacity for mood appears to be phylogenetically widespread and the mechanisms underlying it are highly conserved in diverse animals, suggesting it has an important adaptive function. In this review, we discuss how moods can be classified across species, and what the selective advantages of the capacity for mood are. Core moods can be localised within a two-dimensional continuous space, where one axis represents sensitivity to punishment or threat, and the other, sensitivity to reward. Depressed mood and anxious mood represent two different quadrants of this space. The adaptive function of mood is to integrate information about the recent state of the environment and current physical condition of the organism to fine-tune its decisions about the allocation of behavioural effort. Many empirical observations from both humans and non-human animals are consistent with this model. We discuss the implications of this adaptive approach to mood systems for mood disorders in humans.

Researchers have used moods to explain a variety of phenomena, yet the social causes of a mood are unknown. In this article, I present a social model of persistent mood states that argues that interactional characteristics such as the status differences between actors, the perceived responsibility of the other actor, and the reason for an emotional response influence the persistence of an emotional response to a situation. The mechanisms through which these factors cause an emotion to become a mood are the intensity of the emotional reaction and how much the actor reflects on the situation as a result of the interaction. I use data from the 1996 General Social Survey to test this model for anger; the results of the analyses provide support for many aspects of the model. The proposed model is a first step in explaining social factors that cause persistent mood states, and I discuss possible directions for future scholarship.

It is argued that computer game play has great potential to intervene in noxious mood states because it is a more demanding task than consuming other forms of media. From mood management theory, this increased intervention potential should make computer games particularly adept mood repair agents. To test this assertion, a study was conducted that varied levels of task demand (our operationalization of intervention potential) in a computer game to examine mood repair for bored and stressed individuals. Results show that increasing the amount of control an individual has over a mediated environment significantly increases that medium’s intervention potential. This increase in intervention potential results in an enhanced ability to relieve boredom and stress, but too much task demand is detrimental to mood repair.

Two experimental studies demonstrated that feeling as though an object, such as an idea, is “ours” (i.e., experiencing feelings of psychological ownership) propels people to selectively adopt others’ suggestions for change. Whereas feelings of ownership caused individuals to embrace the adoption of suggestions that expanded upon their possessions (additive change), it simultaneously made them shun the adoption of suggestions that shrank them (subtractive change) (Studies 1 and 2). Furthermore, results indicated that both a sense of personal loss and negative affect sequentially mediated this joint effect of psychological ownership and change type on the adoption of others’ suggestions for change (Study 2). Our findings suggest that the nature of change and how it impacts high ownership people’s sense of loss and negative affect is an important determinant of whether feelings of ownership will cause individuals to remain open to or resist others’ suggestions for change.