Independent and interactive effects of personality and mood on the processing of emotional cues.
Rusting, Cheryl Lenorre
1997
Abstract
Some studies examining individual differences in the processing of emotional cues have found mood-congruency or trait-congruency effects, but others have produced no congruency effects or mood-incongruency effects. Researchers have discussed several possible explanations for these inconsistent findings, most of which involve specifying certain task or stimulus characteristics that influence mood-congruency and trait-congruency. One of the most compelling explanations for the inconsistencies in the literature is that studies of emotion-congruency have focused on mood and trait influences separately. Not only is this separation apparent in previous reviews on emotional information processing, but it is also apparent in individual studies examining the effects of these variables on emotional processing. Because moods and traits are highly correlated, the lack of attention to the combined influence of moods and traits could contribute to the inconsistencies obtained in the emotion-congruency literature. What are needed are studies that include measures of both moods and traits, and that assess performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. The present research was undertaken to fill these needs by delineating the independent and interactive influences of moods and traits on the selective processing of emotional cues across several cognitive tasks. In the first study, both mood and personality were measured, and participants completed a series of attention, interpretation/judgment, and recall tasks. As predicted by emotion-congruency theories, extraversion, positive affectivity, and positive mood related to increased interpretation/judgment and recall of positive emotional cues, and neuroticism, negative affectivity, and negative mood related to increased interpretation/judgment and recall of negative emotional cues. Performance on the attention tasks was not related to personality or mood. There was also no evidence for mood x personality interaction effects on the cognitive tasks. In the second study, participants underwent a positive or negative mood manipulation prior to completion of the cognitive tasks. Several of the personality x mood interactions were statistically significant, and suggested that those participants who scored high on traits and moods of the same valence were particularly likely to make judgements and recall material of that valence. Although it is necessary to further investigate the conditions under which such interaction effects occur, the current research demonstrates that it is extremely important to measure both personality and mood variables in studies investigating individual differences in the selective processing of emotional cues.Subjects
Cues Effects Emotional Independent Interactive Mood Personality Processing
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