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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
1996, Vol. 71, No. 2. 245-261Copyright 1996 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0022-3514/96/S3.00
Processing Goals, Task Interest, and the Mood-Performance
Relationship: A Mediational Analysis
Edward R. Hirt
Indiana University BloomingtonR. Jeffrey Melton
Martin University
Hugh
E.
McDonald
Indiana University BloomingtonJudith M. Harackiewicz
University of Wisconsin—Madison
The authors examined the role of intrinsic interest in mediating the relationship among mood,
processing
goals,
and task performance. Participants in induced happy, neutral, or sad moods gen-
erated similarities and differences between TV shows using performance-based, enjoyment-based,
or no stop rule (cf. L. L. Martin, D.
W.
Ward,
J.
W.
Achee,
&
R.
S.
Wyer, 1993). Pretask interest and
both quantitative (time spent, number generated) and qualitative (creativity) performance were
assessed. Happy participants spent more time and generated more items than other participants
when using an enjoyment-based stop rule but spent
less
time and generated fewer items when using
a performance-based stop rule. Happy participants also expressed greater pretask interest and were
more creative than other participants regardless of
stop
rule. Regression-based path analyses indi-
cated that pretask interest partially mediated the effects of mood on quantitative performance but
not on creativity.
The notion that human cognitive processes are colored by
emotional experience has considerable intuitive appeal. Con-
ventional wisdom suggests that people who are in a positive
mood
see
the world through "rose-colored
glasses";
that
is,
peo-
ple interpret their experiences through the
filter
of the emotions
they happen to be feeling at the time, even if those emotions do
not actually result from the experiences they are interpreting.
The validity of this intuition is supported by a large body of
research suggesting that evaluative judgments, problem-solving
strategies, and task performance are all influenced by preexist-
ing affective states (see Clore, Schwarz, & Conway, 1994, for a
review). Findings such as these have fascinated scholars, per-
haps because they illustrate the role of emotion in human judg-
ment. The result of
this
fascination has been an abundance of
research on the relationship between affect and cognitive pro-
cesses in recent years.
Edward R. Hirt and Hugh
E.
McDonald, Department of Psychology,
Indiana University Bloomington; R. Jeffrey Melton, Department of
Psychology, Martin University; Judith M. Harackiewicz, Department
of Psychology, University of Wisconsin—Madison.
Portions of this research were presented at the Goals and Affect Con-
ference sponsored by the University of Georgia and the Institute for
Behavioral Research, Athens, Georgia, January 1994.
We thank the participants of that conference for their feedback. We
also thank Chick Judd for statistical advice and Russ Fazio for his in-
sightful comments on an earlier version of
this
article.
Finally,
we
thank
Beth Goldner, Cindy Hopper, Kevin Leadingham, Michelle Merz, Lisa
Sonderegger, and Mike Stone for their assistance in data collection and
data coding.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ed-
ward R. Hirt, Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomin-
gton, Indiana
47405-1301.
Electronic mail may be sent via the Internet
to ehirt@indiana.edu.
Effects of Induced Mood on Task Performance
In the present article, we focus in particular on the effects
of induced mood on task performance. Intuitively, one might
expect people in positive moods to consistently outperform
those in other
moods;
indeed, many company policies are pred-
icated on the notion that happy employees will be more pro-
ductive. However, it has become increasingly clear that the rela-
tionship between affect and task performance is more complex
than this intuitive notion might suggest. On one hand, the in-
duction of positive affective states has been shown to increase
decision-making efficiency (Isen & Means, 1983) and facilitate
creative problem-solving (Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987;
Isen, Johnson, Mertz,
&
Robinson,
1985;
Mitchell
&
Madigan,
1984;
Murray, Sujan, Hirt, & Sujan, 1990). For instance, Isen
et al. (1987) found that participants in positive moods per-
formed better than control participants on creative problem-
solving tasks such as Duncker's (1945) candle task and Med-
nick, Mednick, and Mednick's (1964) Remote Associates Test.
More recently, Murray et al. (1990) found that happy partici-
pants
generated
a
greater quantity of similarities and differences
between pairs of television
shows
than did neutral mood partic-
ipants; moreover, their responses were more creative (quali-
tatively better), as judged by independent raters.
On the other hand, induced positive affect has been found
to produce performance decrements on such tasks as physics
problems
(Isen,
Means, Patrick,
&
Nowicki,
1982), correlation
estimation (Sinclair & Mark, 1995), performance appraisal
(Sinclair, 1988), and syllogisms (Melton, 1995). In many of
these same studies, inducing a negative mood has been found
to improve task performance (Sinclair,
1988;
Sinclair
&
Mark,
1995).
Moreover, evidence
suggests
that participants in positive
moods do not distinguish between strong and weak messages
when evaluating the merits of persuasive communications, un-
245
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