How mood turns on language

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Abstract

Four studies examined the hypothesis that positive mood induces a global processing style and gives rise to the use of more abstract linguistic expressions in the description of social events. In contrast, negative mood induces a detail-oriented analytic processing style, resulting in more concrete descriptions. This hypothesis received support in the case of describing autobiographical events (Studies 1 and 2) and a film scene (Studies 3 and 4), whereby mood was induced either by film clips, or a self-induced mood technique (Study 3). Moreover, Study 4 showed that these systematic differences in linguistic expression disappear when the source of mood is made salient to participants, in line with the affect-as-information (Schwarz & Clore, 1983) and mood-and-general-knowledge approach (Bless, 2000). Implications for interpersonal communication are discussed.

Section snippets

Mood and cognitive processing

The interplay between affect and cognition has been the subject of a broad range of research that has, in general terms, addressed the ways in which affect influences the content and the style of information processing (Schwarz & Clore, 1996). Content refers for instance to research that has addressed whether information that is retrieved from memory is affectively congruent with the current affective state of the person (e.g., Bower, 1981, Forgas, 1995, Mayer et al., 1992, Sedikides, 1994,

Mood and language

How do the processing differences that emerge as a function of positive and negative mood states translate into language use? What are the types of linguistic differences one might expect to emerge when describing a social event? The functional approach would suggest that negative mood states lead to systematic, analytic processing, with attentional focus on the detail rather than the ‘whole’ of a situation. In contrast, a person in a positive mood is expected to be in a global focus and

Study 1

In the first study, we asked the participants to describe an event they had experienced in the past. If type of mood (positive vs. negative) influences processing style and this is manifested in systematic differences in terms of general features of language use (differences in predicate types), then one should be able to detect differences in types of predicates across descriptions of idiosyncratic autobiographical events. In this study, each participant was asked to describe a unique event.

Study 2

It is possible to argue that retrieving events after mood induction introduces systematic and concealed biases that may contribute to differences in language use although we controlled for a range of likely confounds. For that reason, we conducted a second study where event retrieval preceded the mood manipulation. Such a sequence cancels out potentially undetected confounds that may have been present in Study 1. Additionally, this provided an opportunity to examine the stability of the mood

Study 3

In the first two studies, each participant described a unique event. In our view, this underlines the strength of the findings, because it demonstrates that the observed phenomenon is arguably not an artifact of the type of event that is described. Nevertheless, to eliminate any doubt that the idiosyncratic nature of the autobiographical events in studies 1 and 2 may somehow have contributed to the systematic effects we have found, we designed a further experiment wherein the social event that

Study 4

The general hypothesis examined in the three preceding studies relied on the affect-as-information (Schwarz and Clore, 1983, Schwarz and Clore, 1988, Schwarz and Clore, 1996) and the mood-and-general-knowledge (Bless, 2000) accounts of the effects of mood upon cognitive processing. We were able to translate the mood–cognitive process interface suggested by this functional approach into predictions concerning systematic differences in language use. This translation relied on the general notion

General discussion

What are the broader implications of our findings? The first implication of this research is that it extends what has been known in terms of the intra-personal dynamics of the mood–cognition interface (see Martin & Clore, 2001) to a manifest linguistic level. The affect-as-information, and related accounts (Bless, 2000, Bless, 2001, Bless et al., 1996, Clore et al., 2001, Clore and Wyer et al., 2001, Fiedler, 2000, Fiedler, 2001, Schwarz and Skurnik, 2003) argue that people rely on their mood

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      This finding is in line with both attentional bias and the egocentricity accounts. The attentional bias account implies that disgust in specific (Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010), and negative emotions in general (Beukeboom and Semin, 2006) lead to a narrower scope of attention, which in turn might have led the disgusted individuals to focus more on the words of their conversation partner, and hence potentially align more. On the other hand, amused individuals tend to have a broadened attentional scope (Fredrickson and Branigan, 2005), as positive emotions low on goal-achieving motivation, as amusement, tend to evoke (Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2008), which might have resulted the amused individuals to focus less on their conversation partner.

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    The research in this article was supported by a Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) grant (575-31-009) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ISK/4583/PAH both to Gün Semin. We would like to thank Daniël Fockenberg and Clemens Wenneker for assistance in coding the data and Johan Karremans for constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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