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Abstract
Happy people often fail to elaborate on persuasive arguments, while people in sad moods tend to scrutinise messages in greater detail. According to some motivational accounts, however, happy people will elaborate a message if they believe it might maintain their positive mood. The present research extends this reasoning by demonstrating that happy people will elaborate arguments from message presenters that convey positive hedonic attributes (i.e., source likeability). In a pilot study, we show that happy people believe persuasive messages from a likeable source will be mood maintaining. The results of Study 1 demonstrate that these expectancies have important message-processing implications. In Study 1, sad participants elaborated arguments from both likeable and dislikeable sources, while happy participants only elaborated arguments from a likeable source. Consistent with motivational explanation of these effects, in Study 2, happy participants elaborated arguments from a likeable source when not distracted, but used likeability as a heuristic when distracted with a cognitive-load manipulation. Implications of these results for understanding the effects of mood on processing strategy, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.
Acknowledgements
The research was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant to RCS.
Norman Brown, Curt Hoffman, Arie Kruglanski, Diane Mackie, Lenny Martin, Rich Petty, and several anonymous reviewers are thanked for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript. We also thank all of the students enrolled in the Individual Studies Research course for their assistance in data collection and coding. Study 2 was conducted as a first year research project for partial fulfilment of the second author's PhD under the direction of the first author.
Notes
2Alternatively, one might predict that sad people would engage in greater elaboration for the likeable source because sad people might anticipate that messages from a likeable source could repair their moods. This alternative seems unlikely given previous results (e.g., Bless et al., Citation1990; Sinclair et al., Citation1994a).
3All participants were graduating after the date mentioned, and thus were at a level of involvement where argument strength may affect persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, Citation1984, Citation1986; Petty, Cacioppo, & Goldman, Citation1981).