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ORIGINAL PAPER
Mood effects on emotion recognition
Petra Claudia Schmid •Marianne Schmid Mast
Published online: 4 June 2010
ÓSpringer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract Mood affects memory and social judgments.
However, findings are inconsistent with regard to how
mood affects emotion recognition: For sad moods, general
performance decrements in emotion recognition have been
reported, as well as an emotion specific bias, such as better
recognition of sad facial expressions compared to happy
expressions (negative bias). Far less research has been
conducted on the influence of happy moods on emotion
recognition. We primed 93 participants with happy, sad, or
neutral moods and had them perform an emotion recogni-
tion task. Results showed a negative bias for participants in
sad moods and a positive bias for participants in happy
moods. Sad and happy moods hampered the recognition of
mood-incongruent expressions; the recognition of mood-
congruent expressions was not affected by moods.
Keywords Mood Emotion recognition
Positive and negative biases
Introduction
The present study focuses on how sad or happy moods
influence the ability to recognize other people’s emotions.
So far, research on emotion recognition has mostly focused
on depressed patients (whose symptoms, amongst others,
include deficient positive and excessive negative affect,
DSM-IV; APA 2000). The study of normal variation of
mood on emotion recognition in healthy individuals is
scarce.
Beck’s cognitive theory of depression (Beck 1976) and
other theories focusing on healthy individuals, such as
mood-congruity theories (Bower 1981; Schwarz 1990)
state that a person’s mood exerts a congruity effect on
memory and social judgments. Being in a negative mood or
being depressive promotes recall of negative stimuli and
makes an individual prone to judge others in a negative
way (negative bias). Mood-congruity theories also predict
that positive moods facilitate recall of positive stimuli and
making positive judgments about others (positive bias).
Applied to emotion recognition, these theories would pre-
dict that sad moods and depression lead to better emotion
recognition of sad versus happy faces, whereas happy
moods would promote better recognition of happy versus
sad faces.
Because depression and mood theories postulate the
same mood biases, one might assume that individuals in
sad moods and depressed patients process emotionally
toned stimuli in a comparable way. However, Asthana
et al. (1998) argue that clinically depressed individuals
might have additional cognitive impairments (e.g., prob-
lems with visuospatial tasks) that can affect emotion rec-
ognition. Depressed patients might show a generalized
decrease in the ability to recognize all kind of emotions
(positive and negative ones) instead of an emotion-specific,
negative bias. Also, Rottenberg et al. (2005) posit that
depressed patients show emotion context insensitivity
(ECI)—a reduced response to all emotion cues, regardless
of valence. Empirical studies including depressed popula-
tions revealed both emotion-specific negative biases (e.g.,
Gur et al. 1992; Hale 1998) and general decreased emotion
recognition performance (e.g., Surguladze et al. 2004;
Zuroff and Colussy 1986). Asthana et al. (1998) argue that
P. C. Schmid (&)M. Schmid Mast
Institut de Psychology du Travail et des Organisations,
Universite
´de Neucha
ˆtel, Rue de la Maladie
`re, 23,
2000 Neucha
ˆtel, Switzerland
e-mail: petra.schmid@unine.ch
123
Motiv Emot (2010) 34:288–292
DOI 10.1007/s11031-010-9170-0
the additional cognitive impairments of depressed patients
are the reason for the inconsistent findings and that nega-
tive mood per se promotes a negative bias and not a general
performance decrement. This suggests that healthy indi-
viduals in sad moods would show a negative bias and not
an overall performance decrement.
There is indeed some evidence for mood-congruity
effects in healthy participants. Bouhuys et al. (1995)
primed healthy participants with happy or sad moods and
exposed them to schematic facial expressions (line draw-
ings). Participants in sad moods perceived more sadness
and less happiness in the schematic faces compared to the
happy participants. Niedenthal et al. (2000) primed par-
ticipants with happy or sad moods and exposed them to
happy and sad expressions that morphed into a neutral
expression. Participants moved a sliding bar to morph the
face frame by frame, and were asked to drag the bar to the
frame at which they no longer perceived the initial emo-
tional expression (sadness or happiness). Participants
primed with happiness showed a hysteresis effect in that
they chose the offset of the happy emotion at a later frame
than for the sad emotional expression. The opposite pattern
was found for participants primed with sadness. Although
the Bouhuys et al. (1995) and Niedenthal et al. (2000)
studies provide evidence for mood-specific biases, both
studies focused on the degree to which a certain emotion is
perceived in facial expressions and not on the accuracy of
those assessments. Accuracy is the focus of the present
study.
Contrary to what mood-congruity theory would predict,
Chepenik et al. (2007) showed a general performance dec-
rement in emotion recognition for healthy individuals in sad
moods compared to a control group in a neutral mood.
However, their results might be due to the stimuli set used,
comprised of photographs of people displaying either a
neutral expression, a positive emotion (happiness), or one of
three negative emotions (sadness, anger, or fear). Thus,
emotions were not only judged on valence, but also had to be
classified into discrete emotion categories. This is different
from studies in which mood-congruity effects emerged; in
the latter, participants had to perform simple valence judg-
ments. Note also that Chepenik et al. did not examine how
happy mood affects emotion recognition accuracy.
The present study aims at understanding how healthy
individuals’ mood (happy, sad, or neutral) affects their
ability to recognize happy and sad emotions. We predict a
positive bias for participants in happy moods (better rec-
ognition of happy faces compared to sad faces) and a
negative bias for participants in sad moods (better recog-
nition of sad compared to happy faces). We further
examine whether happy and sad moods boost or hinder the
recognition of mood-congruent and mood-incongruent
faces compared to neutral moods.
Method
Participants
Participants were 93 students, 51 women, 42 men (Mage =
23 years). Participants had the possibility to win one of four
iPod Shuffles.
Procedure
Participants were randomly assigned to one of three mood
priming conditions: happy, sad, or neutral. Mood priming
was performed by short film scenes. Participants indicated
right after having watched the movie scenes how they felt
using a 7-point Likert scale (1 =extremely sad, 7 =
extremely happy, 4 =neutral). Participants then performed
an emotion recognition task while listening to (induced)
mood-congruent music.
Material
Mood priming
We used a 2 min 46 s film scene from ‘‘When Harry Met
Sally’’ to prime happiness, a 2 min 46 s scene from ‘‘The
Champ’’ for sadness, and a 3 min 26 s screen-saver ani-
mation to prime a neutral mood (Rottenberg et al. 2007).
During the emotion recognition task, emotionally toned
music (of the same valence as in the film priming) was
audible for participants via headset. Based on previous
research (Gerrards-Hesse et al. 1994) we chose
‘‘Mazurka’’, ‘‘Divertimento in D Major #136’’ and ‘‘Eine
kleine Nachtmusik’’ for the positive mood condition,
‘‘Adagio in G Minor’’ ‘‘Adagio for Strings’’ and ‘‘Pre-
ludes’’ (Opus 28#6) for the negative mood condition, and
‘‘Common Tones in Simple Time’’, ‘‘Neptune—The
Mystic’’ and ‘‘Aerial Boundaries’’ for the neutral mood
condition.
Emotion recognition task
We used 60 different stimuli from the Facial Expressions
of Emotion: Stimuli and Tests (FEEST: Young et al. 2002).
Stimuli contained 30 happy and 30 sad facial expressions
of different intensities. The intensity of the emotions was
manipulated by morphing the sad and happy expressions
into a neutral expression. The morphed faces expressed 25,
50, or 75% of happiness resp. sadness (Fig. 1). Stimuli
were presented for 2,000 ms (according to Surguladze
et al. 2004). Participants could answer as soon as the
stimuli disappeared with no fixed time frame for the
answers.
Motiv Emot (2010) 34:288–292 289
123
We included stimuli of different intensities so the task
would not be too easy, as participants only had to distin-
guish between happy and sad emotions. Other studies
showed that effects only emerged when using emotional
expressions with reduced intensity (e.g., Kohler et al. 2003;
Surguladze et al. 2004).
Manipulation check
An ANOVA with mood priming as the independent vari-
able and participants’ reported mood as the dependent
variable was conducted to check if mood priming worked.
The mood priming main effect was significant, F(2,
90) =10.53, p\.001. Contrast analyses showed that
participants felt significantly happier after happy mood
priming (M=5.44) than after neutral mood priming
(M=4.90), Fcontrast =4.88, p=.029, and participants
felt significantly less happy after sad mood priming
(M=4.34) than after neutral mood priming, Fcon-
trast =5.24, p=.026.
Results
A mixed model ANOVA was calculated to examine mood
effects on emotion recognition. The within-subjects factors
were the facial expressions (happy vs. sad) and the inten-
sity of the facial expressions (25, 50, or 75%). The
between-subjects factors were mood priming (happy, sad,
or neutral), and gender. It is well-documented that women
outperform men in emotion recognition (McClure 2000, for
a meta-analysis) so we included gender as a factor to
control for potential gender effects in our main results.
Results showed a significant gender main effect (women
outperformed men, F(1, 87) =10.93, p=.001), and a
main effect of intensity, such that high intensity facial
emotions were easier to correctly assess than low intensity
facial emotions, F(2, 174) =244.18, p\.001 (Huynh–
Feldt epsilon =.82). Neither the facial emotion expression
nor the mood priming main effects were significant (all
F’s \2.57, all p’s [.082).
Results showed the predicted mood-congruity effect
represented by the interaction of facial expression by mood
priming, F(2, 87) =4.41, p=.015 (Fig. 2). The facial
expressions by intensity interaction was also significant,
F(2, 174) =20.80, p\.001 (Huynh–Feldt epsilon =.63).
Because the focus of the present paper was the mood-
congruity effect, we do not discuss this finding in more
detail. There were no other significant interaction effects
(all Fs\1.63, all p’s [.179).
To test for positive and negative biases, we conducted
planned contrasts on the aforementioned facial expressions
by mood priming interaction effect (see Table 1for means
and standard deviations). People primed with sad moods
recognized sad faces better than they recognized happy
faces, Fcontrast =9.03, p=.005, confirming the expec-
ted negative bias for sad moods. However, we did not find
this effect for happy moods: participants primed with
happy moods did not recognize happy faces better than sad
Fig. 1 Happy (upper line) and sad (lower line) emotional expressions
of 25, 50, or 75% intensity
8.2
8.4
8.6
8.8
9
9.2
9.4
sadhappy
Facial Expression
Emotion Recognition
happy mood sad mood neutral mood
Fig. 2 Number of correctly recognized happy and sad facial expres-
sion in happy, neutral, and sad mood
Table 1 Means and SDs (in parenthesis) for the recognition accuracy
of happy and sad faces of participants in happy, sad, and neutral mood
Facial expression Mood priming
Happy Sad Neutral
Happy 8.86 (0.15) 8.50 (0.15) 8.93 (0.16)
Sad 8.57 (0.12) 9.10 (0.12) 9.07 (0.13)
290 Motiv Emot (2010) 34:288–292
123
faces, Fcontrast =2.28, p=.159. Participants primed
with neutral moods showed no significant difference in
recognizing happy compared to sad faces, Fcon-
trast =0.48, p=.491.
To test whether the negative bias was due to sad moods
increasing recognition of mood-congruent sad faces, or to
sad moods decreasing recognition of mood-incongruent,
happy faces, we assessed whether participants in neutral
moods differed from participants in sad moods in the rec-
ognition of sad and happy faces. When judging sad faces,
there was no difference in emotion recognition between the
sad and neutral groups, Fcontrast =0.03, p=.863. How-
ever, when judging happy faces, sad primed individuals were
significantly less accurate in emotion recognition than were
neutral participants, Fcontrast =4.58, p=.040. There-
fore, negative bias in sad moods must have occurred due to an
impaired recognition of mood-incongruent happy faces.
Although we did not find evidence for a positive bias,
we compared the happy participants’ emotion recognition
performance with those of neutral participants. Happy
faces were recognized equally well in the happy mood
condition as they were recognized in the neutral mood
condition, Fcontrast =0.11, p=.742. However, happy
participants recognized mood-incongruent sad faces sig-
nificantly less well than neutral participants, Fcon-
trast =6.12, p=.019. Analogous to sad moods, happy
moods did not facilitate the recognition of mood-congruent
facial expressions, but hindered the recognition of mood-
incongruent facial expressions.
Discussion
The goal of this study was to investigate how different
mood states (happy, sad, and neutral) affect the ability to
correctly recognize other people’s emotions. We hypothe-
sized and found mood-congruity effects. For participants in
sad moods, a negative bias emerged—sad participants
recognized sad facial expressions better than happy ones.
Participants in happy moods did not recognize happy facial
expressions better than sad ones, although means were in
this direction. Nevertheless, we demonstrated that a primed
happy mood as compared to a neutral mood was respon-
sible for a decrease in recognition of sad facial expressions,
indicating that happy moods hamper the recognition of
mood-incongruent, sad emotions. Analogously, sad moods
had a detrimental effect on the recognition of mood-
incongruent, happy emotions: the recognition of happy
facial expressions was reduced in sad moods compared to
neutral moods. No evidence for a general performance
decrement in sad moods emerged.
In sum, we showed that the mood-congruity effects
documented in the literature (a) hold true for emotion
recognition and not just for memory tasks, and (b) the
effect not only occurs in sad but also happy moods.
Moreover, we showed that it was incongruity that drove the
effect. People are not particularly adept at emotion recog-
nition just because their feelings align with a stimulus.
Rather, when the emotion of another person is not in line
with how one feels, people have difficulty recognizing the
emotions of the other person. Whether this is due to paying
less attention to the mood-incongruent stimuli, or impair-
ment in interpreting the other person’s emotional state
remains an open question.
Note that our results contradict Chepenik et al. (2007)
who found general performance decrements for partici-
pants in sad moods but no negative bias. Participants in our
study only had to make a valence judgment (positive vs.
negative), whereas participants in the Chepenik et al. study
had to further differentiate among multiple negative facial
expressions, which might explain why they failed to find a
negative bias for sad participants. Perhaps the mood-con-
gruity effect for emotion recognition is one that only
manifests on the general valence dimension and not for
specific emotions.
One limitation of the present study is that although
primed sad participants reported feeling less happy than
happy participants did, they still reported feeling slightly
happy. Importantly, however, primed sad participants
showed the predicted negative bias, indicating that the
priming procedure successfully activated sadness-related
concepts.
Our study is the first to examine how positive, negative,
and neutral moods influence emotion recognition in terms
of mood-congruity effects, and whether these moods
reduce or boost overall emotion recognition accuracy.
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