Brief Report

Based on the idea that mood helps to tune cognitive processes to current demands, we hypothesised that mood should influence the abstraction level in which people think about behaviour, and that such mood-induced differences in cognitive attention should be manifested in behaviour descriptions. In this study, participants re-described a number of daily behaviours in their own words after a mood manipulation. As predicted, people in a positive mood were more likely to re-describe behaviours in general why terms, whereas people in a negative mood were relatively more likely to re-describe behaviours in specific how terms. The findings are discussed with respect to the role of mood in processes of behaviour regulation.