On Managing Moods: Evidence for the Role of Homeostatic Cognitive Strategies in Affect Regulation

What are the cognitive strategies that allow people to manage and maintain their daily mood fluctuations within reasonable limits? Despite intense recent interest in affective phenomena, spontaneous changes over time in mood effects have rarely been studied. Three experiments evaluated the temporal sequence of positivity and negativity in social responses by people who received an initial positive and negative mood induction. Following different mood manipulations, participants performed three kinds of serial social tasks: They generated person descriptions (Experiment 1), completed trait words (Experiment 2), or produced a series of self-descriptions (Experiment 3). Results were consistent with the operation of a spontaneous, homeostatic mood management mechanism. The authors found that initially mood-congruent responses were spontaneously reversed and replaced by mood-incongruent reactions over time. The implications of these results for recent affect-cognition theorizing, and for our understanding of people’s everyday mood management strategies, are discussed.