How to heat up from the cold: examining the preconditions for (unconscious) mood effects.

Full Abstract

What are the necessary preconditions to make people feel good or bad? In this research, the authors aimed to uncover the bare essentials of mood induction. Several induction techniques exist, and most of these techniques demand a relatively high amount of cognitive capacity. Moreover, to be effective, most techniques require conscious awareness. The authors proposed that the common and defining element in all effective mood induction techniques is the dominating salience of evaluative tone over descriptive meaning. This evaluative-tone hypothesis was tested in two paradigms in which the evaluative meaning of the "primed" concept was more salient than its descriptive meaning (i.e., when subliminal stimulus exposure was so short that mainly the evaluative meaning was activated [see D. A. Stapel, W. Koomen, & K. I. Ruys, 2002] and when the primed concepts were sufficiently extreme such that evaluative meaning always dominated descriptive meaning). Explicit and implicit mood measures showed that the activation of a dominating evaluative tone affected people's mood states. Implications of these findings for theories on unconscious mood induction are discussed.(c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved

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Author information

Author/s: Ruys, Kirsten I (KI); Stapel, Diederik A (DA);

Affiliation: Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research (TIBER), Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, the Netherlands. k.i.ruys@uvt.nl

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Randomized Controlled Trial; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of personality and social psychology (J Pers Soc Psychol), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-May; vol 94 (issue 5) : pp 777-91

Dates: Created 2008/04/30; Completed 2008/08/11;

PMID: 18444738, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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