The article presents information on the reluctance to communicate bad news. Evidence that people are reluctant to communicate news that is bad for the recipient has recently been presented. This demonstrated reluctance was termed by the investigators the MUM effect. The purpose of the present study was to replicate as well as extend the original findings It was considered important to determine whether assignment of responsibility for communicating, the recipient's mood, and the sex of the recipient and/or the communicator interact with news direction in determining the extent to which the news is transmitted fully, partially, or not at all, the possible roles of perceived message importance, desire to communicate and perceived urgency of the message, as mediators bearing on communication, were also considered deserving of investigation. Further, since the role play procedure utilized in this study closely conformed to the procedure utilized in the original experiment, a prime opportunity for validating this type of methodology existed. In the original study, there was no explicit assignment of responsibility for transmitting the message to the recipient. The situation was conducive to making the subject feel partly responsible for transmitting the message and for him to assume that the experimental assistant too was partly responsible.