Mood moderates the effect of aesthetic appeal on performance

ABSTRACT

Aesthetically appealing stimuli can improve performance in demanding target localisation tasks compared to unappealing stimuli. Two search-and-localisation experiments were carried out to examine the possible underlying mechanism mediating the effects of appeal on performance. Participants (N = 95) were put in a positive or negative mood prior to carrying out a visual target localisation task with appealing and unappealing targets. In both experiments, positive mood initially led to faster localisation of appealing compared to unappealing stimuli, while an advantage for appealing over unappealing stimuli emerged over time in negative mood participants. The findings are compatible with the idea that appealing stimuli may be inherently rewarding, with aesthetic appeal overcoming the detrimental effects of negative mood on performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetic appeal
• mood
• reward
• counter-regulation
• performance
• icons

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ben Yaxley, Menai Richards and Maria Papastavraki for help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To stay in line with the power calculation for Experiment 2, despite the lack of an observed 4-way interaction, we carried-out a 2 (Mood: positive vs Negative) X 2 (Appeal: appealing vs unappealing) X 3 (Block 1, 2, & 3) mixed ANOVA with repeated-measures on Appeal and Block on RT for trials featuring complex icons only. As in Experiment 1, there was a significant main effect of Appeal, F(1, 43) = 14.98, p<.001, η_partial² =.258, and a significant main effect of Block F(2, 86)=29.72, p<.001, η_partial² =0.409. Although the main effect of Mood was not significant, F(1, 43)=0.752, p=.391, it was nonetheless involved in a significant 3-way interaction, F(2, 86)=4.76, p=.01, η_partial² =0.100. Pairwise comparisons showed that for participants in the positive mood condition, appealing complex icons were localised faster than unappealing complex icons in Block 1, t(21)=3.54, p=.002, but not in Block 2, t(21)=.59, p=.56, or in Block 3, t(21)=.17, p=.86. In contrast, for participants in the negative mood condition, there was no difference in response times between appealing and unappealing complex icons in Block 1, t(22)=.03, p=.97, but appealing complex icons were found significantly faster than their unappealing counterparts both in Block 2, t(22)=2.38, p=.03, and in Block 3, t(22)=3.51, p=.002. No other interactions reached significance. The same analysis on simple icon RT only, revealed only a significant main effect of Block, F (2, 86)=15.50, p<.001, η_partial²=.26, and a marginally significant main effect of Appeal, F (1, 43)=3.54, p=.07. There were no other significant main effects or interactions.

2 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion as an alternative interpretation of the results.

3 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.