An Experimental Examination of the Effect of Unpleasant Mood on the Impact of Emotion on Reasoning

Previous research indicates that: (a) people reason more accurately when unpleasant facial expressions (i.e., anger and fear) of others are present and are relevant to a reasoning problem; and (b) people reason less accurately when unpleasant facial expressions of others are present and are irrelevant to a reasoning problem. We investigated whether unpleasant mood would moderate the effect of emotional content (i.e., others’ emotional facial expressions) by enhancing either: (a) the benefit of the relevant facial expressions; or (b) the harm of the irrelevant facial expressions. Following an unpleasant or neutral mood induction, undergraduate students ( N = 269) completed the Emotional Faces People Pieces Task, an analogical reasoning task in which the task characters displayed emotional or neutral facial expressions. The emotional faces were relevant or irrelevant to the task. Irrelevant information was either congruent or incongruent with the correct response. Participants in the unpleasant mood condition benefitted more from emotionally relevant faces (relative to neutral faces) than did control participants.