Reinterpreting mood induction experiments

ABSTRACT

We discuss issues in interpreting the results from mood induction experiments. In most cases, only small absolute changes in moods were induced, even though the effect sizes that compare the difference from the baseline are quite large. The balance of positive to negative moods was usually positive regardless of the mood manipulation and the measure used, meaning that even in negative mood inductions, people are often in a slightly positive mood, albeit less positive than before. These findings help bring the experimental findings in line with studies of long-term mood, where mild positive moods are sometimes more strongly associated with beneficial outcomes than stronger positive moods. It is possible that some of the benefits attributed to negative moods based on the experimental studies are in fact benefits of lower levels of positive moods. Recommendations are made to strengthen the inferences drawn from mood induction experiments.

KEYWORDS:

• Moods
• affect
• emotion
• mood induction
• positive affect

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/b2d6g/. We would like to acknowledge that most of the data used in this paper were gathered by Dana Joseph (see, Joseph et al., 2020).

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/B2D6G.