The Role of Positive Affect in Syllogism Performance

Previous research has found that people in positive moods perform better than others on creativity and divergent thinking tasks but perform more poorly and/or process the available information less thoroughly on many other cognitive tasks. The present experiment examined various hypotheses concerning the process mediating the latter effect. Positive mood subjects performed significantly worse on a set of syllogisms than control subjects, even though they had ample timefor the task. Positive mood subjects were also significantly more likely than controls to select an unqualified conclusion, tended to take less time on the task, tended to diagram the relationships depicted by the premises less frequently, and tended to give more answers consistent with the atmosphere heuristic. Together; these findings argue against distraction accounts of the influence of positive affect. The results are most consistent with accounts arguing that people in positive moods expend less effort.